Great Themes: Maps

Very early on, many fantasy stories were complemented by maps, sometimes several. These maps are a perfect tool to immerse the readers even more deeply in the magical realism of the novel. This process is facilitated by the fact that the maps generally imitate the aesthetics of early cartography from a pre-industrial world assimilated to magic. In this way, J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous Thror map, to which the author has added numerous runes imitating those of the Middle Ages, thus seems to be taken from an ancient manuscript. The map of Narnia imagined by Pauline Baynes refers more to a 16th-century globe.