Imaginary Worlds in Literature: An Ancient Map of Fairyland

In 1918, Bernard Sleigh produced a map entitled An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland: Newly Discovered and Set Forth. Adopting a catoptic (mirror-like) perspective, it offers a wide panorama of the fairy world, which it contains within an island which is like the ancestor of the “shared universes”. An ingenious combination of more than fifty nursery rhymes, stories and mythological tales, it takes us from Avalon to Peter Pan's Never Never Land, via the tower of Rapunzel or the palace of Auberon. A red line traces the path that leads “From the world” to “The land that never existed and never will exist.”