Maps In The Worlds of Fantasy

"No one is very happy, which means it's a good compromise." ~ Tyrion Lannister

So ends Game of Thrones (GoT). SO EPIC. It has been a stupendous eight splendid seasons on television. I loved them all. As upsetting as Season 8 is, it could only fall that way. Everything in the past seven seasons led up to that. (I don't enjoy the books. George R.R. Martin has a great vision, but he writes at a glacial pace, and I don't mean finishing the rest of the two promised novels in 'A Song of Ice and Fire'.)

I love poring through old maps, and visualizing those maps in most fantasy series. The biggest reason that drew me to play Dungeons and Dragons were the maps and a chance to fully immerse myself into the worlds, not the gory and the violence (okay, maybe a little). The maps of Middle Earth in J R.R Tolkien's 'Lord of The Rings' are mesmerizing, giving me hours of flight through the imagination. (Again, I dislike the excruciating pace in all four books of 'Lord of the Rings'.)

The scenes that I watched again and again in Game of Thrones, are its opening sequences. The producers gave it some thought and varied it from season to season, lending the sequences meaning and depth. Many scenes in GoT saw characters poring over large-scale battle maps, planning their next moves, strategizing and successfully winning wars with oddly ancient and inefficient methods.

"No one knows what's west of Westeros. That's where all the maps stop. That's where I'm going." ~ Arya Stark

This is an evergreen article written by Adrian Daub and published in August 2017 on Longreads that discussed the maps of Westeros, and in fantasy, 'Here at the End of All Things'. The author is a Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford university and his research "focuses on the long nineteenth century, in particular the intersection of literature, music and philosophy."

The author obviously has read the books (and watched the films), went into the worlds and researched their themes and endings, and made good his analyses. The article made brilliant points, and acknowledges the somewhat racist tones of the past that was their norm then. I enjoyed the discourse, and dug it up again after I finished GoT S8E6.

What lies beyond Westeros to the east is the Bone Mountains and the Great Sand Sea, and finally Essos. I'd really like to know what lies beyond the West and the Sunset Sea. Are the three dragon eggs from those three faraway islands? Will we know what happens to Arya Stark, who has eschewed being a traditional lady and chosen a life of adventure?

Still, it’s hard to detach that middle position from its obvious Eurocentrism. The fantasy genre, cribbing as it does from our imaginary version of medieval Europe, seems wedded to an Atlantic Ocean setting firm limits to human curiosity to the west. There are clear remnants here of a colonialist mental geography. Think of all the maps of fantastic continents you know where the eastern lands are bigger, more savage, more mysterious. On every foldout map of Middle Earth there is a place called Rhûn (which is the word for “east” in Tolkien’s Elvish) on the eastern margin: the circumflex alone already signals that we’re far removed from the familiarity of the Shire. We learn nothing of it, other than that the people who live there are “Easterlings” in league with Sauron. As we get to the right-hand edge of fantasy maps, things get rather hazy, and not a little racist. 

George R. R. Martin’s Westeros is a surprisingly navigable space — Littlefinger, Varys, and Euron Greyjoy pop about at astonishing speed in the show, and Catelyn Stark does likewise in the books. Meanwhile in Essos, Daenerys Targaryen spends five books roaming about in endless steppes, deserts, and seas. Her travels are a trip into something far more mysterious and otherworldly than anything the reader encounters in Westeros. But her travels also represent a trip back in time: with its abandoned cities, shadowbinders, and an upstart queen conquering foreign cities, Martin is riffing on early fantasy literature — above all the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. At least one of the city names in Essos, the Eastern continent Daenerys traverses, has direct antecedents in Howard’s novels. 

The west coast of fantasy continents is differentiated and densely textured. In countless continents invented for D&D, the east usually contained mysterious, massive kingdoms stretching into the unknown. Khanates, hordes, red wizards, warlords, and dragons populated them, and they were off-limits for all but the most advanced player characters. East is where Daenerys Targaryen can play white savior and practice being queen, but her destination lies to the west.