How does mapping help to create a fictional world?

Ruby L, Deputy Head Girl, explores the significance of maps within literature, and how they help imaginatively guide both readers and writers.

Many famous literary works started off as a blank piece of paper and an idea for a fictional world. J.R.R. Tolkien produced three maps [1] and six hundred place names for his ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, which became one of the bestselling series in history with over 150 million copies sold worldwide [2]. He is one of many successful authors to utilise the practice of cartography in the establishment of a fantasy land, along with Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote ‘Treasure Island’ with the inspiration of a hand-drawn map; and C.S. Lewis, who invented Narnia. But why is this technique so popular and why does it make for more developed novels and fruitful book sales?

As Holly Lisle reveals, the process of literary map-making is an extensive and varied one. Authors generally depict a country or full land map instead of a city or street to generate a full view of the world they are creating and its geography. Once borders have been established, the addition of features such as mountain ranges, forests and cities fill the world with purpose and start to create a realistic-looking artefact. Mistakes made can also be of benefit to the plot and narrative. For example, if extra lines are drawn accidentally or a town has been placed far from any others, there is space for artistic license to make these into a story. If there is an abandoned trail it could have been deserted after a guerrilla warfare group used it in an ambush, and the isolated town could be used to excommunicate criminals as punishment in the country’s justice system [3].

But why wouldn’t the author simply write and skip this sketching? The answer is simple: this physical expression of the world inside the author’s head is invaluable when delving deeper into the story’s background. The writer can use their map to discover more about the land they have pictured, which is the main luxury of using cartography to compliment literature. Even a simple structure like the borders of the land probes into why that line was laid in that precise place. Was there dispute or war over territory? How are foreign relations between this country and its neighbour, and how does this impact the everyday lives of the citizens? Does a potential lack of security give rise to a totalitarian state in which inhabitants cannot cross the threshold to leave? Questions like these help the author to contextualise the history of the world that they are creating, which makes for a more three-dimensional setting. It helps us to understand their message in relation to their world’s history and landscape (political and social as well as physical) and in this respect, cartography is undoubtably important for the production of a fantasy world from an author’s perspective.

A hand-drawn ‘Annotated map of Middle-earth’ by British author J. R. R. Tolkien (Photo Daniel Leal-Olivias/AFP/Getty Images)

With the market for novels becoming more competitive, readers gravitate towards stories with an easily visualisable world and deeply considered, nuanced characters. Although there are many techniques which can achieve this, mapping is a simple way to produce ‘evidence’ for the fictional land to exist as they imply the realism of the author’s creation [4]. It adds another layer of credibility to the novel as we want to believe in what has been put in front of us. By human nature we are inclined to wish to read for escapism and suspension of disbelief is a huge part of what draws us into the narrative, so producing artefacts becomes very useful. This fact is what makes book sales soar for fantasy novels as they carry us away from the sometimes mundane real world. The illusion of reliability from a seemingly genuine source encourages us to engage with the text more deeply.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s work is a clear example of how mapmaking benefits both the author and reader in a fictional tale. He wrote in a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchinson in 1954 that: ‘I wisely started with a map and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case, it is weary work to compose a map from a story.’ [1] Tolkien decided to come up with detailed maps depicting what would become ‘middle-earth’ and even chose to invent detailed languages and names before creating a plot. Based on his remarks, we can see that having a map before a narrative is not a defect but a delight, as successful exploration of possible characters and storylines can only come from detailed research and prior thought as to the setting. Not only was Tolkien’s cartography useful for him to devise a plot, it was widely appreciated by readers of his books worldwide. Literary critic Shippey writes that his maps are “extraordinarily useful to fantasy, weighing it down as they do with repeated implicit assurances of the existence of the things they label, and of course of their nature and history too” [1].

It is no wonder that fantasy books containing careful cartography are so popular and successful, then. They are sure to thrive as long as humans continue to need exploration and escapism.

Bibliography

[1] Tolkien’s maps. (2020, October 21). Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien’s_maps

[2] The Lord of the Rings. (2020, November 05). Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings

[3] Maps Workshop – Developing the Fictional World through Mapping. (2019, April 16). Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://hollylisle.com/maps-workshop-developing-the-fictional-world-through-mapping/

[4] Grossman, L. (2019, October 02). Why We Feel So Compelled to Make Maps of Fictional Worlds. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://lithub.com/why-we-feel-so-compelled-to-make-maps-of-fictional-worlds/

Why read?

Book

Mr James Courtenay Clack, English teacher at WHS, argues for a long summer holiday spent reading.

One of the less-heralded benefits of this sorry excuse for a year has been the absence of the daily commute. I only live a short train ride from Wimbledon, but the time that I have saved – which would normally be spent jammed up against other angst-ridden riders of the Tooting-Wimbledon bullet train, listening to Prince through tinny headphones – has been spent pondering the big questions. Mostly. Well, sometimes. Questions such as why study English? Why teach English? Why teach at all?

Photo by Leah Kelley from Pexels

Moving away from the obvious one, I found that my answer to these three questions all linked back to the answer to my first question: why read? There are all sorts of reasons for both studying and teaching English as a subject, but I realised that I teach, idealistic fool that I am, because I believe in the innate good that comes from reading.

For the purpose of this article, I am going to distinguish between studying English Literature as an academic discipline and reading in general, regardless of how easily this distinction crumbles once submitted to further questioning. This is not going to be an essay in defence of the timetabled subject English (for a start, the school mandates that every student study both English and English Literature up to Y11, so there), but one in defence of reading, broadened to include anyone – student, staff member, parent – who might read this article.

So, I ask again, why read? Well firstly, because the things we find in books are as crucial to our survival as food, drink and government-mandated, socially-distanced exercise. The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote that ‘it is difficult to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there’. There are two ways of looking at this. Primarily, Williams is right, in my experience at least, that books are there to shine a light on what it means to be a human being. This oft-used phrase may sound trite, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is essentially true. Whether it is in Borges’ mythical Library of Babel (containing every book ever written and ever to be written) or just in Foyles on the Charing Cross Road, there is guaranteed to be a book on the shelves in which the feelings, tensions, crises or traumas that you currently are experiencing are explored, questioned and perhaps even resolved.

For example: I wouldn’t say that we live in a political climate ruled over by a sometimes charming, always loquacious demagogue, driven to insanity by a long-held grudge and sense of emasculation and who has enlisted the populace to follow him to a shared destruction, but when I read Ishmael’s mix of horror and fascination as Captain Ahab exhorts his crew to pursue Moby-Dick to the ends of the earth and to the ends of their lives, I can’t say that I don’t feel a slight tingle of grim recognition.

Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels

On a less epic scale, I have taken great comfort during the lockdown from reading books published in the early 1920s, in the aftermath of the devastation of the Spanish Flu. I recognise myself, scratching at the front door of my flat like a demented Cairn terrier desperate for a walk, in Clarissa Dalloway’s sheer delight at going out to buy flowers after being struck down by influenza. Do I not too feel ‘what a lark! What a plunge!’ as I leave the house and queue up outside Sainsbury’s? How wonderful to find that moment of recognition, no matter how epic or how mundane, in a book that was published nearly a hundred years ago? How reassuring to realise that for all of our differences (sadly Clarissa and I don’t also have a large Westminster townhouse in common), there is something fundamental to human experience?

These moments of recognition – the realisation that somebody else has felt or thought or experienced what we do now – can sustain us. These moments in reading, where we recognise our own feelings – whether they be of hope or anxiety, love or heartbreak, friendship or loneliness – in others, allow us to see something fundamental about ourselves. The American educator Mark Edmundson, who has written a number of amazing books defending the ideals of a liberal education, writes ‘the reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated or more articulate… The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself’.

There has been much debate recently about writers telling stories that are not part of their own lived experiences. This debate is far too nuanced to unpack here, but one thing I find unsettling is the idea of staying in your lane when it comes to literature. I think the second, and perhaps most important, answer to my original question is that reading allows us not only to see our own lives reflected back to us, but also to see what life is like for people whose experiences are almost completely alien to our own. Here, the importance of reading comes not just from the content of a book (Moby-Dick, say) but from the act of reading itself. I have no real understanding of what life would be like on a 19th Century whaling voyage and, like most people, am horrified by the idea of killing whales and yet Moby-Dick is my favourite book. By reading the book, I must leave my own life behind and spend time in another one. To go back to Edmundson again, we read ‘because, as rich as the one life we have may be, one life is not enough.’

To pick another example, in my Caribbean Literature elective with Y11 and Y13, I have asked my class to put themselves in the shoes of indentured Indian labourers in Trinidad, a Saint Lucian fisherman who works in the same waters into which the bodies of his ancestors were thrown during the Middle Passage and an apparently mad woman who is locked in the attic by her uncaring husband. All of these things are so beyond our own lived experiences that reading becomes an exercise in extending empathy.

It is no secret that we experience the world in different ways and that at this moment, the world seems particularly divided. No matter what the cause of these divides – whether it be how we experience race, gender, sexuality, or class; our views on Brexit or Trump or globalisation – there is always something to be gained from looking at the world through somebody else’s eyes. You might also just find that a person born to a different time, race, gender or political disposition has felt or thought something that you thought only you had.

So, that is why we read. Lucky then, that the government has just reopened the book shops in time for the summer holidays.


References

· Why Read – Mark Edmundson, Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (1 Sept. 2005)

· Why Teach? – Mark Edmundson, Bloomsbury USA (24 Oct. 2013)

· ‘Through the smudged pane’ – Elizabeth Winkler, TLS https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/pandemic-consciousness-mrs-dalloway-essay-elizabeth-winkler/

The importance of reading and the library – 12/10/18

Isabelle, Year 8, argues how critical reading is as a pastime whilst also discussing how libraries provide a great space to read and a wonderful source of information.

“Reading is a window to the world.”

Whilst the word ‘power’ has for a long time been associated with muscular strength, the word ‘knowledge’ has always been connected with the mind. The two words do not seem to have any connection whatsoever. However, today the world power has undergone a tremendous transformation. Today it is commonly recognised that the pen is mightier than the sword.

We are now living in a time where there are many information sources, such as the Internet leading to some older information sources now becoming increasingly extinct. However, books will always be alive; nothing can beat how you are able to immerse yourself into the story, nothing can replace the comfortable feeling of books. As J.K Rowling said: “I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book”.

Reading is a useful pastime because people can learn a lot. We can learn many important and useful facts and improve our understanding of English language too. We can cultivate the habit by reading small books at first and after that we can read bigger and more advanced books. In addition to books we can also read newspapers. Books are a way that we can easily communicate our ideas and keep them safe. If people read, they will also get new ideas and then they can use these to develop the world.

I remember receiving my first library card: the power granted – the exhilaration as the red light of the checkout scanner christened the book – my book. It is great that we have a student library as I, like many others, think libraries are essential. One reason is because they offer educational resources to everyone. Anyone can use libraries to succeed and have the answers to curious minds. Secondly, they preserve history and truth and the preservation of truth is important, now more than ever. Libraries, which house centuries of learning, information and history are important while we fight against fake news.

Imagine a place where all of us feel welcome and encouraged to grow and learn. That space is the school library. School libraries provide more than just books, computers and other technology, databases of accurate information, e-books, plus fun and educational activities. School libraries provide a safe haven for all of us to think, create, share, and grow. School libraries can be the hub of learning and the favourite spot for many students.