Maps, Imaginary Worlds, and Why The Alps Are Really Cool

Response to April 22, "History & Geography, History & Myth"

Everybody knows what the map of the world looks like. It’s a blue rectangular plane, filled with green or yellow shapes. The two American continents snake their way down its left side; naturally the United States of America is leftmost and uppermost (Canada is merely a margin), occupying the distinguished spot where readers begin their journeys in the venerable Western tradition. Traveling to the right, across the sea, we find a vaguely gun-shaped continent named Africa, conjoined to a massive landmass that’s either two continents, Europe and Asia, or just one continent, Eurasia. The argument doesn’t really matter though, because it turns out if you point to a random spot anywhere in Europe/Asia/Eurasia, there’s a 70% chance of it being in Russia—we can just refer to the whole thing as “Greater Russia.” Continuing further right, we eventually reach the end of the world, where there’s an incomprehensible sprinkling of tiny islands and an equally incomprehensible large island called Australia (why is it all the way down there?). This concludes our tour of the well-known visible universe.

The World we inhabit. Or, "The Great Rectangle."

It turns out people haven’t always conceived of the world in this way. For example, before Google existed, people actually printed, or worse, drew, maps out on paper to plot their travel routes and world conquests, instead of just pulling one up on their computer and asking Larry Page for the quickest path. (Thus why Frodo and gang didn’t run Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm—which can solve the age-old problem of navigation in a measly O(E + VlogV) runtime—instead of trying to figure it out by hand and ending up lost without gas in the absolute worst neighborhood in Middle Earth, the Mines of Moria).

As we saw in class, not just the mediums we use to view maps, but maps themselves have changed through the years. The familiar arrangement of the world-as-we-know-it didn’t reach its most modern, canonical form until after space travel and satellite imagery started in the 1960s. In multiple ways, space travel reshaped popular self-perception in directions alien to those who lived before—whether monks like Bede at Wearmouth-Jarrow Abbey during the Dark Ages (I’m allowed to call it that, because I’m a Medieval Studies major) or intellectuals over coffee at an Oxford pub in the 1940s. I’m calling out Tolkien, who in The Notion Papers Club envisions a character in the distant future of 1986 to say “I don’t think spaceships do [exist], or could.” (HME 9, 163). Not J.R.R’s most prophetic moment.

I’m not trying to be snarky or call Tolkien naïf for not having the power to predict that spaceships would exist by the 1980s. I’m just trying to distance ourselves from both our own understandings of the world and Tolkien’s, in order to enhance our approach to the Middle Ages and Tolkien’s work. Tolkien is so close in time to us relative to the Middle Ages, but he’s also a historical figure at this point. His ideas are filtered through the lens of his historical moment, and in subtle ways can feel “anachronistic” to our sensibilities, particularly when he projects them onto other eras. But, though we can’t totally understand the historical moment we’re in, we too are historical figures. It’s important not to have a sense of superiority when approaching either the near or distant past, and to be aware of differences in worldview that are cultural rather than objective fact. The common world map is so second nature to us that it’s easy to forget it’s a convention of representation and not the physical reality of the world; in fact, it becomes really strange and tells you a lot about 20^th-21^st century culture when viewed from a detached viewpoint.

Vive La France, avec Alsace

Geography is so powerful because it’s connected to cultural conventions. In modern times, the shape of a country’s borders is an emblem that can be plastered on T-shirts and hats (why not a graph of average monthly temperatures? why not a list of the top 10 exports?). That’s despite the fact none of us, even astronauts, have actually seen the borders of France, the US, or Moldova  in real life. They represent real boundaries of political authority, but for most of us they are symbols of identity and received history. The squiggles that make up the borders of France entail a thousand years of change, growth, and conflict—the expansion of the Frankish kingdom to its height under Charlemagne and subsequent fragmentation; the development of Capetian royal power in Paris, slowly extending its political influence over all speakers of romance dialects west of the Rhine and north of the Pyrenees; the explosion of Napoleon on the scene for a brief moment followed by a century of charged, nationalist competition over territories like Alsace-Lorraine and Corsica; not to mention two world wars. If you wear a T-shirt that has France on it, you’re not necessarily thinking about all of that, but it’s all there, buried in the symbol of France’s borders, infinitely zoomable like an image made in a vector-based drawing software. Many landscapes like the Alps, the Nile delta, the Welsh marches, or the infamous Danubian basin can have the same symbolic depth, since they’re also embroiled in so many layers of history; none of these symbols can really be separated from each other either, since their histories are all intertwined and wouldn’t make sense without one another.

Your next T-shirt

This long stream of thought brings us to consider what Tolkien is doing when he builds the geography of his fictional worlds. Fantasy authors all copy Tolkien now and include a world map in their front matter, but his maps of Middle Earth for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were innovative. Their detail, particularly that of LotR’s map, is far more intricate and extensive than necessary for the purpose of the plot, contributing to the deliberate impression that the novel is just a glimpse into a world with an existence and history of its own. Like our world, Tolkien’s Middle Earth has random towns at the side of the road that you’ve never heard of, and distant lands where people have strange accents.

Creating geography that simulates thousands of years of history is a massive undertaking, but Tolkien mostly pulls it off. So why does Tolkien insist that his world is actually not a separate world? In a sense, he’s inevitably right, because at a fine-grained level the symbolism of any created world is inseparable from the symbolism of the real world—mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers. Even if you could, stripping a world of all geographic features known to humankind would make it boring and incomprehensible to human readers. Instead of fighting similarity, Tolkien is embracing it, because he understands that creations always resemble their creators and that those connections allow for deeper cultural associations than an author could ever create independently. The Shire is the idyllic soul of England, Gondor is the noble image of Western glory, and Mordor is a possibly problematic portrait of the Specter in the East (the Danubian basin, of course). Middle Earth is the real world, reshaped along the lines of the psychological portrait of a medieval philologist, J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s a bizarre and delightful place. 

-Daniel Steinberg