by Jonathan Olfert
in Issue 154, November 2024
It brings me great satisfaction to assert that swords-and-sorcery maps are in vogue.
Examples abound, albeit with room to grow. Howard Andrew Jones’ Hanuvar books come with robust and detailed maps of the Dervan Empire and fallen Volanus. Scott Oden’s monumental The Doom of Odin opens with a map of Nástrond, the hind end of the Norse underworld, paired with an annotated Renaissance-era map of Rome. During its six-year run (and counting), Tales from the Magician’s Skull has been replete with maps from artists like Doug Kovacs and Aaron Kreader. Many of Titan’s Heroic Legends short stories include Francesca Baerald’s majestic new map of the Hyborian Age, which also features in the Conan comics lines. And this year, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly has begun commissioning maps as well, stoking my hopes for additional short-swords-and-sorcery cartographical proliferation.
I won’t pretend to anything like impartiality. All my earliest adventures in fantasy came with maps attached — Redwall, Calormen, and the usual suspects. I collect maps and sometimes, like Robert E. Howard, I find it valuable to scribble maps of my stories. It would make my life slightly but quantifiably better if more editors said to themselves: what if, next time I hunt for illustration, I ask about a map?
I don’t think it’s a controversial assertion that readers like maps to the fantastic lands they read about. Across many fantasy subgenres, maps are downright bounteous. In swords-and-sorcery, maybe not so much (hence my excitement about this new proliferation). I’m going to take some guesses as to why.
Problem number one, I think, is that large dry maps (suitable for the endpapers of a hardcover, say) seem inextricable from large dry epic fantasy. Continents awash with proper nouns don’t really connote dynamic pacing or personal stakes.
One solution lies in the fact that, when the scale of a swords-and-sorcery map trends continental, such as for series characters, the personal still shines through. Baerald’s Hyborian Age map is crammed with tiny illustrations of adventure—Belit’s ship, a pair of frost-giant brothers, and many more touchstones. The map of Nástrond in The Doom of Odin is choked with named threats and jagged mountains: it evokes hardship and constant obstacles, true to the book’s tone. Darian Jones’ map of the Dervan Empire and environs (the endpapers of Lord of a Shattered Land) takes another approach. It explicitly marks Hanuvar’s journey, giving the map’s scale intuitive importance and directionality: this is the scope of the world that must be overcome on the way to an obvious and deeply personal goal.
For both Jones’ and Baerald’s continent-scale work, the aesthetic stays personally grounded too. You could imagine the eponymous ex-general unfurling the endpapers of the Hanuvar books on a table as he plans his missions. The new Hyborian Age map overflows with easter eggs, treasure, sharp objects, and skulls. Swords-and-sorcery maps that I’ve seen tend to hew close to an in-world sensibility that makes their genre appeal clear.
Another way to compensate for the large-dry-epic-fantasy connotation is to keep the cartography at a personal scale, just the places separated by the hours or days that a short story might cover. I’m thinking of the beautiful, grotesque Aaron Kreader map for S.E. Lindberg’s “Orphan Maker,” or the new examples from Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. I ran through the illustrations of every HFQ story since the beginning (did you know they published P. Djèlí Clark and Martha Wells?) and the first maps appeared in 2024, both by longtime HFQ illustrators. Andrea Alemanno did up an island chain for C.D. Crabtree’s “Axandrjo the Silvernosed Vagabond,” reminiscent of the maps in Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Justin Pfeil created a ragged-edged map for “Death Upon the Turquoise Road,” one of Gregory Mele’s Azatlán stories, showing a region of coastal towns and cities. Meanwhile, in Tales from the Magician’s Skull, the map for “Orphan Maker” shows relatively intimate locations like “Injured Mystery Maiden” and “Keep of Looming Cromlechs,” giving me flashbacks to maps from Oz or the Shire or The Phantom Tollbooth. If a given story’s setting is any more complicated than ‘tavern and dungeon,’ I tend to feel it’s a worthy candidate for mapping.
Problem number two is closely related: pretty often, the setting of a swords-and-sorcery story really is ‘tavern and dungeon,’ and there’s just not enough complexity to map. Leiber’s “The Howling Tower” comes to mind: there’s a tower on some plains, and that’s fundamentally it. And that’s fine! It’s the scale the story needed, and many other stories too. But many more could benefit from substantive-yet-personal maps with ease. Think of “Lean Times in Lankhmar.” “Beyond the Black River.” “The Pearls of the Vampire Queen.” “Worms of the Earth.” For that matter, imagine the cross-sections! Imagine “Black God’s Kiss” mapped by Stephen Biesty!
But speaking of benefit, problem number three is this: for a reader, for a publisher, would a map amplify and decorate a story more than another kind of illustration would? There’s an opportunity cost to consider. (Far be it from me to advocate for fewer thews.) And that’s probably why most swords-and-sorcery maps I’ve seen—even relatively simple, affordable ones —are doing double or triple duty. Their aesthetics speak to not just place but mood and character too.
Problem number four, as I understand it: a map can add complexity to the art direction process. An author may already have a mental image—or sketches, or more—for a map of their story, or may want to keep the setting nebulous and flexible for future adventures. And at the artist’s end, whereas illustrating a character might only require knowing a couple of passages, a map could take more familiarity with the story and its setting. (For the map of “Death Upon the Turquoise Road,” Pfeil has illustrated Azatlán stories for years; for the maps of the Hanuvar books, the cartographer is the author’s son.)
Non-negligible barricades, but—for a decent fraction of swords-and-sorcery short fiction—eminently hewable. Again, I can’t pretend to impartiality, but I’d like to think all these recent examples speak for themselves. Maps are in. May it thus ever be.
©November 2024, Jonathan Olfert
Jonathan Olfert‘s paleofiction, SFF, and horror has arguably proliferated farther than it deserves. His sword-and-sorcery tales have appeared in Old Moon Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and previously in Swords & Sorcery, among others. He and his family live in Atlantic Canada.
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