Tolkien's Sandbox

If your humble critic sometimes seem to overpraise J.R.R. Tolkien, it's not because I think his books are beyond criticism. I can acknowledge the flaws. There is indeed something troubling about orcs, a sentient but irredeemably evil species with central Asian racial tinges, though I don't think this is a central concern of the books. What I find remarkable is, rather, the scale of Tolkien's achievement, the degree to which his particular vision of myth, history, and morality has proved itself globally resonant and endlessly inspiring. Although I am not a habitual manga reader, a recommendation piqued my interest in one called "Delicious in Dungeon," where a party of explorers in a D&D-like world figures out how to survive in the dungeon by making gourmet meals out of the monsters they slay. Tolkien's ideas about dwarves and elves have travelled to the other end of Eurasia: the adventuring party at the center of this story includes a human, a half-elf, a dwarf, and a halfling.

The inventors of Dungeons and Dragons liked to claim that sword and sorcery authors like Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard were bigger influences on their game than Tolkien.was. Possibly this claim had a touch of legal defensiveness in it, but it's clear that they had sword and sorcery in mind. Their customers, however, were surely overwhelmingly in pursuit of the Toklienian. The lithe elves and stocky dwarves and lucky halflings have stuck around. To get away from Tolkien's framework, you must either excise his fantasy races or make an equally drastic change to the setting—or make a work of explicit critique. Glorantha, for example, comments on Tolkien by adopting a very different view of mythology and religion, and reimagining the dwarves and elves in light of that.

I recently had the opportunity to stroll through a shopping mall, and in that mall was a bookstore called Books-a-Million. I looked at the two bookcases devoted to roleplaying games. In my quick perusal, it seemed to be eighty or ninety percent Tolkien-inspired: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Daggerheart, and a few others: all have the family resemblance, and took up most of the shelf space. The remainder was divided between Lovecraft (Call of Cthulhu), George Lucas (Starfinder), and the whole band of creators behind the Warhammer 40K experience. And I think this does represent something about the mainstream of the role-playing hobby: as much as I enjoy the strange individual visions of eccentrics' imagined worlds, most people really want to play in Tolkien's sandbox.

Fantasy Maps as Possibility Structures

To begin with, let us propose a definition of a map. Let us say that it's a two-dimensional arrangement of symbols, where the spatial relationships between the symbols spatial relationships between the things symbolized. Importantly for our purposes, the things symbolized may be real or imagined. This definition is good enough for a simple drawn map, though it probably doesn't suffice for things like color gradients or borders. But we'll get to that.

A single symbol is not a map. Arrange two symbols, however, and you have the beginning of something. Put a mountain near the top-left corner of the page, and a castle in the middle. Questions arise. How close is the castle to the mountains? Can the people in the castle see the mountain? Do they travel to it? What's in the empty, in-between space? Add a road, a river, and other symbols, and soon you have a web of possible journeys. For a certain sort of mind it is impossible not to plot routes, imagine vistas, and consider obstacles.

The symbols may be arbitrarily dimensional: the dot labeled "Los Angeles" on a map of the United States stands for a dazzlingly complex city and landscape, while a different map's labeled dot may indicate a village that hasn't been imagined yet. The idea of the discrete symbol breaks down here: a color gradient could indicate temperature, or elevation, or any number of continuous things, while a boundary line may symbolize no particular or recognizable feature in a physical location, yet political division of territory is one of the things we want maps to show us.

At this stage, we have something like a map as a spatial symbolic field.

The maps that came with Tolkien's books entranced your humble critic when he was a boy. They were of course helpful in understanding the events described in the books, but it was the places the characters never thought to go that really caught my attention. In The Hobbit's map, what were the Grey Mountains like? And the Withered Heath? And the Iron Hills? Could the group have climbed the Mountains of Mirkwood to get their bearings, or would they have found worse monsters up there? And in The Lord of the Rings, there was that mysterious word on the right side of the map, Rhûn...

It is often said that the map is not the territory, but I do not believe that this necessarily holds for fantasy maps.

A territorial map is the first form of possibility structure, implying as it does any number of traversals. A second form of possibility structure extends in time, elaborating or suggesting a branching sequence of events. And the forms may of course be combined. I think of Hamann's assertion that painting was the first writing, while music was "the original bodily image of all temporal measures and intervals"; in other words, music belongs to time and painting to space. One wonders if the full spatiotemporal possibility structure analogizes to Wagner's total work of art, but one wonders this only briefly, before remembering what it is we're talking about: to wit, RPG sourcebooks.