Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [57]
On the flight home from visiting Brandon in Utah, I stare out the window at the Columbia Basin passing slowly beneath me. As the Cascade foothills loom ahead, I see huge trapezoidal holes in the greenery: what looks like virgin forest from the highway is, from the sky, exposed as a patchwork of ugly clear-cuts. I think about what Brandon said about fantasy readers as explorers. Jonathan Swift and Thomas More included maps in their books centuries ago, but fantastic maps didn’t really catch on as fetish objects until Tolkien’s time, less than a century ago, just as the time of global exploration was wrapping up. The Northwest Passage and the South Pole had fallen by the time The Hobbit was released, and Hillary scaled Everest the same year Tolkien drew the maps for The Fellowship of the Ring. There were, effectively, no blank spaces left on the map. Maps of the Arctic tundra or Darkest Africa didn’t cut it for young adventurers anymore; they had to look elsewhere for new blank spaces to dream about. And so they found Middle-earth, Prydain, Cimmeria, Earthsea, Shannara.
If nothing else, talking to mappers of imaginary worlds has taught me that there’s a greater pleasure in maps than mere wayfinding. Austin Tappan Wright never needed to hike his way across Islandia in real life, but that didn’t stop him—or his readers—from developing a fanatical devotion to maps of the place. If you never open a map until you’re lost, you’re missing out on all the fun. As Robert Harbison once wrote, “Nothing seems crasser to a lover of maps than being interested in them only when you travel, like saving poetry for bus rides.”
Five or six hundred years ago, there was no clear distinction between fantasy maps and “real” ones. As I learned at the antique map fair, medieval mappaemundi regularly depicted fantastic places right alongside real ones: the land of Gog and Magog, from the Book of Revelation, was over by the Caspian Sea somewhere, often surrounded by the wall that, according to legend, Alexander the Great had built to imprison them. The Golden Fleece was drawn near the Black Sea, Noah’s ark was in Turkey, and Lot’s wife was shown still standing alongside the Dead Sea (as a pillar of salt, of course—you’d think she would have dissolved by now). Paradise was always off to the east somewhere, just over the horizon, surrounded by a ring of fire but still firmly rooted on solid ground.* These maps were expressions of religious devotion, not navigational aids.
Have things really changed that much today? When I browse through an atlas, I’m seeing page after page of places that I’ve visited exactly as often as I’ve visited Middle-earth or Narnia: never. Peru, Morocco, Tasmania. Even a road map of my hometown will show me streets that I’ve never driven, parks I’ve never visited. I can imagine those places from the map, but that’s all it is: my imagination. All maps are fantasy maps, in a way.
A flight attendant announces our descent into Seattle. As the plane dips through a layer of high clouds and the islands of Puget Sound come into view, I find it the easiest thing in the world to imagine these mountains and trees rendered in Tolkien’s spidery hand on faded parchment. Or as fractal patches of guacamole on an impossibly blue Tupperware sea.
Chapter 7
RECKONING
n.: calculation of one’s geographic position
Look, the world tempts our eye,
And we would know it all!
We map the starry sky,
We mine this earthen ball.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD
Her name is Lilly Gaskin, and she knows where Turkmenigland” will not bestan and Bolivia and Ghana are. She can point out all these countries, as well as 130 others, on her wall map of the world, which probably puts her in the top 99.99th percentile of Americans. But don’t let Lilly’s geographical acumen give you an inferiority complex; there are probably plenty of things you can do that she can’t. Like read