Mapping the Imagination

Yesterday evening found me hobbling along (on a strangely gammy right knee) to the British Library - an architectural disaster of a building even by the standards of modern architecture that falls haphazardly somewhere between the two stools of old-fashioned brutalism on the one hand and the neo-post-postmodernism of Norman Foster and his disciples on the other. (It's as if Frank Hampson's dreamy youngest son inherited a leftover project from the Festival of Britain and didn't quite have the guts and gumption to go full-on Dan Dare in the execution, leaving us with the sort of pointless, shapeless monstrosity that would give most Daleks a headache, complete with its own Paolozzi in its central "piazza". And yes, things have come to a pretty pass when the most aesthetically pleasing thing about your country's national depositary of its literary heritage is one of Sir Eduardo's effing space robot monsters, especially if your country happens to be that of Shakespeare and the Lindisfarne Gospels.)

Well, I googled myself there and wended my way to the auditorium - which, like much of the rest of the mise en scène, was very à la LOS. 'Auditorium nostrum in nomine Domini', I thought to no one in particular, and plonked myself down to listen to three speakers talking about maps - specifically literary maps, some of which are currently on display at the BL's new exhibition on maps in the twentieth century. They were "literary" maps in that they were all maps of non-existent, imaginary places - literally of utopias, starting chronologically, as it happens, with Utopia itself, the first book about a wholly imaginary place to be published complete with an imaginary map. (Its influence on the fantasy genre is unparalleled.)

The first speaker, who set the scene and produced the lion's share of both spoken verbiage and visuual aides, was Brian Sibley. He actually started with Robert Louis Stevenson, then moved back to Utopia itself, before moving on to Pilgrim's Progress, which never had its own map though other's have supplied them, and Dante's Divina Comedia, which similarly ended up with "maps" in the sense of diagrammatic illustrations by that little known pulp-hack Botticelli.

Various books with stories set on imaginary islands also did not originally have maps of their own, including Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, Jules Verne's Mysterious Island and, indeed, The Lord of the Flies. Lilliput and Brobdingnag did just about appear on map of each other, but it's really only with Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines (written as an homage to Stevenson and to win a bet) and The Lost World that maps came into their own - literally in the sense that they are treasure maps that are essential to the stories that their creators were trying to tell.

And then of course there are plenty of places that almost exist in real life: Barsetshire (which to be fair is a little more exciting than Wintoncester and environs, especially since it was at least a shared world where M R James was happy to drop in from time to time), the Island of Sodor (where the trains talk and have adventures), and the slightly, perverse version of Oxford that can be reached by Zeppelin. Then there are places that really do exist in real life: the River Thames at Pangbourne (just upstream from Toad Hall), Kensington Gardens (next to the Serpentine, with the island of Neverland in the middle of it), the Lakeland (of Beatrix Potter's talking animals, which was only finally mapped in 2012), Ashdown Forest (of Christopher Robin's walking, talking toys), and of course the Norfolk broads (of the Swallows and Amazons) - not to mention Watership Down. Leave it up to the Americans then to imagine whole lands and kingdoms that really don't exist, such as Oz and the land that lies beyond the Phantom Tolbooth.*

Following Sibley we had David Brawn, who showed us a few slides of Professor T's early drafts of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings maps. And then finally we had Jonathan Roberts, who made the big "official" maps of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. According to Brawn, Tolkien included maps in his early books because at the time everyone was doing it. According to Roberts, Braavos is going to be very important in The Winds of Winter.

The only real disappointment of the evening (apart from missing maps of Zimiamvia and Alderley Edge and probably several other places) was Brawn's attitude. For him, Tolkien's maps were only there so that he could tell his story. I found that hard to stomach, for the simple reason that for Tolkien the maps were his story - at least, that is, in The Lord of the Rings, in which it's the maps that connect the characters in the story to the languages that were Tolkien's chief interest because they do so via the different peoples of Middle-earth who live in the various lands that the maps depict.† What makes Tolkien's maps different, in other words, is that they don't just help to tell the story by illustrating it: they are essential to the story, in a way that maps in other storybooks never had been before, and arguably ever have been since.

*Sibley did ponder the sheeer number of children's fantasys that came out 1902. My own feeling is simply that new centuries have that effect on people, and hence the Potter and Rings films of the early 2000s. But that's just me.
†Their equivalent in The Silmarillion are the family trees, in that they're the reference diagrams at the back of the book that the reader must keep referring to in order to keep up with the story, but also in that it's those diagrams that connect the story of the Silmarils to the philology - the history, which was what Tolkien really wanted to write, of the different Elvish languages and how they had grown unlike each other: by contrast, there's no real need to know were Hithlum or Taur-nu-fuin "are", even in relation to each other, the most important place in the story is Angband, which doesn't appear on the map at all, and other places, such as Gondolin and Menegroth, are hidden fairy kingdoms that do appear on the map but arguably shouldn't.