Literary maps to set your imagination ablaze!

Literary maps can be very useful when a story involves a journey, or several lands, and adds some detail to the book.

When a book contains a map it is almost a guarantee that the story will be a great adventure! Harry Potter, Treasure Island, The Hobbit, and so many others include a map of the fictional lands involved in the plot to help the reader feel closer to the action.

In Huw Lewis-Jones’s An Atlas of Imaginary Lands includes the very map that kicked off Treasure Island, a detailed map of Moomin Valley, and The Marauders Map from the Harry Potter series, among many others.

My favourite literary map is Thror’s map from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. It shows the great adventure Gandalf, Bilbo, and the group take to get to Erebor- The Lonely Mountain. There is a wonderful little detail of a spider on a web in the bottom left corner that has always pleased me.

Huw Lewis-Jones has compiled a stunning Atlas of Imaginary Lands (Oct 2018) in which favourites Philip Pullman, Robert Macfarlane, Joanne Harris, Reif Larsen, Daniel Reeve, Miraphora Mina, and David Mitchell, among others, tell us all about their best fictional maps, and favourite literary journeys.

Miraphora Mina was behind the Marauder’s Map in the movie adaptation of Harry Potter. She took the initial idea (first seen in the third book- Prizoner of Azkaban) and made it into the recognisable map we know today:

“I knew immediately I didn’t want it to be an obvious burned-at-the-edges kind of treasure map, but rather something much more complex, multilayered.

As an object I wanted there to be a logic to opening and folding it, while it would be deliberately bewildering at the same time. A map that would confuse unless you had all the skills to decode it, as well as being a map that continued to reveal new things each time it was used.”

The Marauder’s Map

“Maps can transport us, they are filled with wonder, the possibility of real adventure and travels of the mind. This is an atlas of the journeys that writers make, encompassing not only the maps that actually appear in their books, but also the many maps that have inspired them and the sketches that they use in writing. For some, making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping and telling their tale. A writer’s map might mean also the geographies they describe, the worlds inside books that rise from the page, mapped or unmapped, and the realms that authors inhabit as they write.”