204 - One Ring To Rule Them All, Mate

“The koality of muh-cy is not strined”: I forget who once pondered the impossibility of believing Shakespeare spoken in an Australian accent. Maybe it’s the implied anachronism, for in Shakespeare’s time there wasn’t an Australian accent, owing mainly to Australia not having been discovered yet.

At first glance this map, transposing Tolkien’s fantasy world on Australia, seems equally out of place. The imagined continent of Middle-Earth has always been taken to represent or at least prefigure Europe. The Hobbits, for example, are, says Tolkien, “just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination.” A map, discussed earlier on this blog (#121 – Where On Earth Was Middle-Earth?) takes the parallel between Tolkien’s world and the outline of modern Europe to its extreme – Mordor is in Hungary, for example.

And yet, putting the eurocentric view of fantasy cartography to one side, it’s worth recalling that the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy wasn’t filmed in Hungary, England or anywhere else in Europe, but in New Zealand – Australia’s neighbour. Ironically, about as far away in the world from Tolkien’s rustic English countryfolk as you can get without getting your feet wet.

So if New Zealand can be the (rather spectacular) backdrop to Tolkien’s stories, why not Australia? Disbelief duly suspended, let’s examine the places mentioned in this map:

Many places take an existing Aussie name and tolkienify them, such as Western Australia (‘Westron Australia’), Perth (‘Middle-Perth’), Broome (‘Brun’), Alice Springs (‘Alfalas Springs’), Lake Eyre (‘Lake Corseyre’), Hobart (‘Hobartton’ – a nice reference to Hobbiton), Sydney (‘Sidnarin’), Quenyasland (‘Queensland’), Adelaide (‘Adeleade’), Brisbane (‘Brohan’) and Melbourne (‘Morborn’).

The thinly settled Northern Territory is rebaptised the ‘Northern Waste’, the Great Dividing Range becomes ‘Great Dividing Rangers’. I don’t know how the map-maker feels about the Australian federal government, but the legend covering the federal capital Canberra might give a hint: “Here was of old the witch-realm of Canbrar.”

This map was made and sent in by James Hutchings, not coincidentally an Australian. “A great place for a holiday”, he says about his tolkienified Australia, “but watch out for the kangarorcs.”

203 - Favourite Strange Map Book Covers 2007

The Mighty Barrister alerted me to a post on the blog of the Book Design Review by Joseph Sullivan of Chicago, listing his favourite book covers of 2007. Two of ‘em are map-based (and sufficiently strange to be included here):

Words Without Borders (cover design by Helen Yentus): contains 28 works of literature never before published in English. The international flair of the book is heightened by the map-like cover, with in the legend the names of some of the multinational array of writers, including Ariel Dorfman (Chile), Jonathan Safran Foer (US), Günter Grass (Germany), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria).

The Cigarette Century (cover design by Rodrigo Corral): the book by Allan M. Brandt relates ‘the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America’ and illustrates this nation-defining characteristic by showing the eastern half of the United States made up out of the pernicious little smoke-sticks. It’s probably taking things too far to try to count how many cigarettes constitute each state. Two are quite easily countable, however: Florida, as far as I can see, equals about 12 cigarettes, Michigan (including the Upper Peninsula’s 4 ciggies) equals 10 smokes.