Cartographica Helvetica

Summary

Jost Schmid and Helen Sunderland (eds)

Fantastic Maps of Legendary Stories

For centuries, maps have been a powerful tool for modeling the Earth's surface, visualizing sacred spatial concepts, legitimizing power, spreading moral and philosophical ideas, and ultimately also for telling stories. Long before the advent of modern fantasy literature, maps already combined geography, myth, religion, and imagination – for example, in medieval world views, the mappae mundi.

In the early 16th century, when publishing technology became more efficient and affordable, various writers began creating fictional worlds that could be represented cartographically. Works like Thomas Morus Utopia (1516), Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) emerged under the influence of the rediscovery of ancient texts, European voyages of discovery and colonialism. The topographies in the works were so carefully constructed that they could be represented cartographically.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the adventure novel genre increasingly emancipated itself from the aforementioned writings, which were structured as social criticism. Books such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and the works by Jules Verne (1828–1905) emerged, which connected adventure not only with voyages of discovery as before, but also with technology. In the growing variety of adventure literature and children's stories, fictional geography gained increasing influence. On attached and sometimes separately published maps, it was meant to be possible to explore imaginary landscapes.

William Morris's map in The Sundering Flood (1897) was one of the first steps in the direction of what we today call fantasy cartography: the literary world was not just told but also organized spatially on a map, where the journeys of the characters along rivers, across borders or mountains, and through towns could be tracked.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was heavily influenced by Morris and brought fantasy cartography to a level that later authors in the genre would follow. For Tolkien, the map was not just an illustrative byproduct of a fantasy story but an essential foundation for writing it: 'I wisely started with a map and adapted the story to it [generally with careful consideration of distances]. The reverse way leads to confusion and impossibilities, and anyway it’s tedious to make a map out of a story.' Examples of Tolkien's cartography are at the heart of 'Fantastic Maps', as integral tools of worldbuilding and as guidance for the readers.

With the progress of computer technology and the accompanying development of programming and graphics, game developers have taken the possibilities of storytelling, world-building, and cartography in fantasy worlds to a new level. Today, video games are among the most popular forms of media in the world, ranging from simple single-player adventures to gigantic mega-games played by thousands of people worldwide at the same time. This illustrates how stories, imagination, and adventure in general, and fantastic maps in particular, tap into a deeply rooted human passion and look toward a fascinating future.

Switzerland represents a landmark moment in the history of fantasy literature, namely with J.R.R. Tolkien's mountain tours in the Bernese and Valais Alps in the summer 1911 – an inspiring journey with a profound impact on the birth of Tolkien's Middle-earth and the fictional worldbuilding of subsequent authors. The corresponding effects of the Swiss landscape on fantasy literature and, in particular, the cartographic-historical aspects associated with it have so far only been considered in scattered instances in research literature. Therefore, this publication is not only a vade mecum for the exhibition 'Fantastic Maps of Legendary Stories', created in collaboration between the private collection Ex Carta and the host Zentralbibliothek Zürich, but is also conceived as an independent piece of secondary literature.

Translations by Laura Glöckler, Thomas Honegger, Marie Christin Kümmerling, Helen Sunderland, Lisa Weigelt

CHF 23.– (Switzerland), CHF 35.– (Europe and Overseas) (place order here).