The First Fantasy Map

I have loved maps of all sorts since my youth. In fact, I'd go so far as to credit my love of maps with my attraction to fantasy and fantasy roleplaying games. I can still remember the first time I beheld Tolkien's map of Middle-earth, which roughly coincided with my discovery of D&D. In my memory, the two events are very closely intertwined, to the point where it's hard to separate them. Since then, maps and fantasy are inseparable concepts and I tend to assume that all works of fantasy will include maps.

As it turns out, that's not true. There are plenty of fantasy settings lacking maps contemporary with their creation (Eddison's Mercury is one example). Thinking about this then led me to ponder the first map created specifically to describe an imaginary world. What was it? Answering this question isn't easy, because its terms need to be defined. For my purposes, I'm interested solely in what are sometimes called "secondary" worlds, which is to say, wholly imaginary settings with no direct connections to the real world. In this way, Plato's Atlantis or More's Utopia don't count, as they're both supposed to be places on Earth rather than some other world. Further, I'm looking for secondary worlds that have maps approved by the creator, if not necessarily drawn by him.

This narrows the range of possibilities quite a bit. Prior to the 20th century, there aren't many serious candidates that fulfill both requirements. The earliest one that comes to mind is Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novella, Flatland, and it only works if one considers its title page to be a map, an interpretation that is apparently controversial.

A map or an illustration?

There are a number of significant secondary worlds created after Flatland, but none of them have contemporary maps, not even Barsoom, which, as I've argued recently, is one of the underappreciated primary inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons and, therefore, all roleplaying games. In 1936, Robert E. Howard sketched out a map of the lands of the Hyborian Age, but, alas, it does not meet both my criteria, as Conan's world is just our own in the prehistoric past.

Sadly not a contender but I like the map anyway

1936 was also the year in which Tolkien's The Hobbit was published and it includes not only a map but one drawn by its author. But does Middle-earth meet my criteria above? Like the Hyborian Age, it, too, is a prehistoric – perhaps a better word is "mythic" – Earth. I'd love to let it pass, but, if I stick to my own rules, I must exclude it and look elsewhere.

Is there a contemporary map of Nehwon? Narnia? At this point, I'm honestly not sure and have begun to wonder if perhaps my criteria are too specific and, therefore, limiting. Still, it's an interesting question. Having only just begun to dig into the matter, it seems as if my long-held association of maps with fantasy might be of more recent vintage than I thought, a development of the 1960s, in the aftermath of the wider dissemination of The Lord of the Rings. If anyone has any additional thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear them.

Weird Maps

I've always been a sucker for maps. Along with non-Roman alphabets, maps occupied an important place in my pre-D&D personal education. My favorites were historical maps and maps of imaginary places. I still recall the first time I laid eyes on the map to L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz, consisting of four triangular countries – Gillikin, Munchkin, Quadling, and Winkie – surrounded by four impassable expanses of sand (Baum later added other realms beyond the deserts but I don't believe I saw maps including them until some time later). The map isn't all that impressive in and of itself, as you can see, but it enthralled me nonetheless and I was forever after a devotee of unusual maps.

I bring this up because, recently, I've been reading old fantasy comics produced by Marvel and DC as part of an effort to look into their origins and influence in the vast cultural stew pot out of which Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs sprang (Ken St. Andre, for example, has long called Tinnels & Trolls as "The Lord of the Rings as it would have been done by Marvel Comics in 1974"). There's a lot of good stuff there and I plan to post about many of them in the weeks to come. One of the most immediately interesting of these comics is Matvel's Weirdworld, which premiered as a one-off in 1976 before returning, first in 1977 and then in 1979 (and a couple more times in the '80s). The map (or "chart") below depicts the landmasses and points of interest of Weirdworld.

Looking at the Weirdworld map, I see a lot more in common with the map of Oz than I do with the map of, say, Middle-earth, which is, along with Howard's map of the Hyborian Age, the locus classicus of fantasy maps. The Weirdworld map is utterly fantastical, with few concessions to reality. The large continent to the right looks like a dragon's head, complete with an eye in the form of the floating island of Klarn, while the Land of the Dead literally looks like a skull. The map makes it clear that this is a realm of pure fantasy rather than naturalism, let alone realism.

This is one of the reasons why I find the 1970s such a fascinating time when it comes to the development of fantasy as an artistic genre. At this point, fantasy had not yet been fully solidified (or brandified) into a consistent set of elements immediately understood by everyone who viewed them. Each fantasy setting was unique, springing from the imagination of its creator(s) rather than drawing on stock components. At this point, The Lord of the Rings, though popular, was still just one example of a fantasy, rather than being the template all subsequent fantasies would imitate (or react against). Looking at "A Chart of Weirdworld" thus opens a window on this wild, chaotic time.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

You know me; I love to stretch definitions to the breaking point. In this case, though, I won't even attempt to argue that L. Frank Baum's 1900 tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is a pulp fantasy book, because even I'm not addled enough to make that claim. That said, I do think this children's novel is an important one for our hobby, for reasons I'll now elucidate.

I often say that one of the reasons Dungeons & Dragons has been misunderstood by many gamers (and designers) is because they misunderstand its cultural roots. In the late 60s and early 70s, fantasy and science fiction weren't as diverse as they are today. Fans of those genres -- which were generally considered the same genre rather than distinct ones -- all read the same books and authors, creating the common literary culture out of which D&D arose. That's not to say that there wasn't a lot of variation from fan to fan and from place to place, but the underlying foundations for those fandoms showed a high degree of commonality. Thus, allusions to certain characters, situations, and authors were all broadly
understood rather than being opaque or outright impenetrable. The death of that common culture has, in my opinion, led to the distancing of D&D from its roots to the point of unrecognizability.

The story of Baum's novel is another example of a common culture. I suspect most people in the English-speaking world -- certainly in the United States at any rate -- know the story and characters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. When I was a child, in the benighted days before VCRs and cable television, watching the 1939 Victor Fleming movie was an annual ritual, broadcast each year as a network TV special. People could and still do reference this story with the expectation that just about everyone knows what they mean when they do so. That's what many fantasy and SF stories were like at the dawn of this hobby and it was that kind of ready familiarity that allowed the ideas contained in those three little brown books to catch fire and spread so easily.

There's a catch, of course. When I say that everyone "knows" the story and characters of Baum's novel, that's not entirely truthful. The reality is that the 1939 film changes many elements of the original, just as earlier dramatic productions of the story did, often with Baum's blessing, who regularly wrought his own changes through sequels to the initial book. In Oz fandom -- yes, such a thing does exist -- there are discussions and debates every bit as vociferous as those in this hobby regarding the merits of such changes, not to mention continuations and re-interpretations by later authors. The Oz books are all in the public domain and have been for some time, allowing the original ideas to be picked up and developed further by any author who wishes to do so, leading to a wide variety of non-Baum Oz tales, some of which stray very far from the original intent -- not unlike D&D itself.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is, if nothing else, a powerful example of fantasy world building. The Land of Oz and its inhabitants have no doubt exercised a powerful influence over the imaginations of many a participant in this hobby, including some of its earliest writers. Oz is a "pure" fantasy world -- a dreamland (though not literally so in the novels, where it's clearly a real place) that obeys its own laws and confounds expectations. It's thus about as far from a naturalistic world as you can get and yet it's drawn so colorfully that one forgets its inherent unreality and simply accepts it for what it is. This approach to fantasy was much more common in the hobby's early days, as anyone who reads the 'zines of the period will know. That's probably why you can find lots of references to Oz-inspired adventures, items, and monsters in their pages. A full treatment of the Land of Oz as a D&D campaign setting was, in fact, promised in the pages of Dragon for many years but never saw print so far as I am aware.

I don't think there's any hiding the fact that I miss the days when the hobby had a stronger common culture -- when one could allude to "The Tower of the Elephant" or "Ill Met in Lankhmar" and not be met with blank stares, when we could cite Manly Wade Wellman or Henry Kuttner and people would not only know to whom you referred but had actually read their fiction. To the extent that such a common culture exists anymore, it comes from the ouroboros of D&D itself, a substitute for the books and authors that once formed the Common Tongue by which gamers conversed. I'm not sure such days can ever return -- the hobby is simply too diverse now -- but I long for it just the same.