A note on maps

The maps for Ironwood Staff and Retribution are based on the same map, scribbled down by me several years ago now, when I first started seriously writing down my story. As is tradition, North is at the top, and I thought there was enough new and strange in my book without changing that as well!

Mountains are shown as if drawn from life, which would have been the case in pre-modern times. The mountains around Greystone are drawn to resemble the Magaliesberg, which inspired the story in the first place:

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One of the first issues I encountered was that of distance - I couldn't use modern units, because it would (badly) violate suspension of disbelief; but I couldn't really use Imperial ones either, since I couldn't guess as to the progress of the caravan through the Drylands (for example) and translate that into map distance. So, I made the map assuming distances in metric, then translated that into miles, and hence into leagues. I didn't want to use miles either, so I thought, 'What does "Mile" mean?' It comes from 'unum mile passsum', a thousand paces in Latin. So I use units of 'Thousand Paces' on my map.

I thought that for future reference, I should remember this literal translation for any other measurement. For example, there would be twelve thumbs (inches) to a foot, three feet to a measure (translation of metre), a hundred measures to a furrow, etc.

I thought of this in connection with the legacy of Christopher Tolkien, son of The Professor, and his epic work in rendering the maps of Middle Earth. He set the standard for fantasy maps, with many imitators or followers adopting the "East=Evil" convention, which lasted for a time. That convention even cropped up in the Game of Thrones world, where West=Home. The crucial action all takes place on the continent of Westeros.

Of course, there's some understandable chauvinism involved here. English-speaking cultures and their literature assume that West=Home because their starting point was at the western edge of the Old World. It's burned deep into our genetic memory.

(My own personal beef with Westeros is how the whole continent seems to be in a temperate latitude, pretty much regardless of its size. Again, it's a problem of perspective. Where I grew up, you could drive from one major population centre to another, and cross at least one biome boundary in the process. Of course, none of that affects the maps as such anyway.)

The World of The Ironwood Staff - note scale bar and South Arrow at top!