Maps, Mystery, and Adventure—decorating with story

I have a pair of porcelain mugs decorated with antique map designs, and an out-of-date globe. What is it about maps, both real and fictional, that makes them so appealing as decoration?

Decorative maps (globe used to be current)

Some maps are intended to be almost purely functional—the paper road maps in my car (still!) are like that. I have seen even these maps used for decoration, especially if they depict a familiar area (e.g. get a mug with a partial map of your hometown on it), but generally maps tend to be less functional as they get more decorative.

But why decorate something with a map rather than, say, flowers or cars or an abstract design?

Maps show us worlds. Worlds that are, worlds that used to be, and worlds that never were, except in imagination. The right kind of map suggests travel, stories, and adventures. Antique maps, with their limitations and inaccuracies, recall a time when the world was a mysterious place and explorers really didn’t know what they would find. There might be sea serpents, golden cities—even buried treasure, where x marks the spot. In fantasy novels, maps show a world that may really have all those things. Maps are sufficiently popular in fantasy that someone even designed a spoof of fantasy novel maps.

Westeros, from Game of Thrones (rather than using Middle Earth as an example)

Maps in mystery novels have a quasi-functional use. A house plan can help the reader track who was where and when--and how a secret passage might have allowed someone to be where they supposedly weren’t. In her mind’s eye, she can see different possible scenarios suggested by the layout of the mystery’s setting.

Tupelo Landing, from Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage

Maps of the world we know don’t have to be purely functional, or even functional at all. Consider the maps that are sometimes designed as souvenirs of a town, where streets aren’t to scale and landmarks are amusingly caricatured. They're fun, decorative, and sometimes sentimental, but hardly something that will help you navigate, if you should find yourself without GPS and Googlemaps.

Stolen Magic by Gail Carson Levine--fantasy and mystery both

In A Great Reckoning, by Louise Penny, an old orienteering map features heavily. But it isn’t a straightforwardly practical map—its maker clearly intended it to refer to landmarks in someone’s personal history. The map isn’t shown in the book, but it is described at various points.

“At first glance, it didn’t look like a map at all. While worn and torn a little, it was beautifully and intricately illustrated, with bears and deer and geese placed around the mountains and forests. In a riot of seasonal confusion, there were spring lilac and plump peony beside maple trees in full autumn color. In the upper-right corner, a snowman wearing a tuque and a habitant sash, a ceinture fléchée, around his plump middle held up a hockey stick in triumph.” (p. 35)

“Yes, it took a while to see beyond all that, to what it really was, at its heart.

A map.

Complete with contour lines and landmarks. Three small pines, like playful children, were clearly meant to be their village. There were walking paths and stone walls and even Larsen’s Rock, so named because Sven Larsen’s cow got stuck on it before being rescued.

Gamache bent closer. And yes, there was the cow.” (p. 36)

Finally, there is something intriguing about the names on a map, not just the images. Some place names are more interesting than others, and just giving an area a name somehow makes it special. Years ago, my daughter and I were at Great Wolf Lodge, a kind of hotel/amusement/water park. The hotel was set up so that the halls could be part of a game in which kids roamed around with electronic “wands”, which when waved at various items, caused them to do something or display something. In keeping with the magical theme, the halls and public areas of the hotel had names.  I should have written some of them down, but I think they were along the lines of “The Enchanted Forest” and such. I commented to my daughter that we should name the areas of our home something more interesting than “Hall Bathroom” and “Mom’s Study.”

(I did in fact name one area of our yard “The Fairy Garden”, and another area that happened to get planted in rosemary, lavender, chives, catmint, and butterfly bush, “The Purple Garden”.)

Having said all this, it is a curious truth that I have not had much luck making maps for the stories that I write. I have some general diagrams to help me keep straight left and right, north and south—but that’s about as far as it goes. And yet, I would love to have some pretty maps to illustrate them with. Maybe I’ll give it another try someday, allowing myself to emphasize beauty  and mystery rather than detail.

Here there be dragons.

Till next post.