Westeros and Essos, but with proto-languages, languages, and dialects

[cacarlos]

This is a geek project I was up to in 2017, after the last season of GoT, which I managed to update only recently; enough to publish it, at least.

I think it is interesting to conceive fantasy worlds in terms of evolving populations and languages, just like in the real world. The lack of detailed information about such an evolution in ASoIaF is one of the reasons why this huge world feels kind of small sometimes. Especially Westeros, after so many generations, it's just weird how homogeneous peoples and their languages and writing systems can feel. I started this project with the idea of deepening the linguistic setting of ASoIaF for a potential translation into Indo-European, and it was especially fitting to work with its toponymy, as you can see from the example below.

9-seven-kingdoms-free-cities-cut.jpg

8-westeros-essos-languages.jpg

8-westeros-essos-languages-equivalence.jpg

Anyway, I don't want to bore anyone to death with the many details I tried to "re-imagine" (I know, sacrilege for hardcore fans of George R. R. Martin's world), so all information - including resources I used to draw the map - are in the PDF A Dance with Old Tongues, which accompanies the drawings. As you can see, I never managed to include the whole toponymy, it was too much work for me alone, and I'm not updating this project anymore.

I tried to attach the PSD file to this post, but couldn't. You can download it here (ZIP file, 50 MB), or maybe an admin can upload it here. This is my first fantasy map (and it's not even original), so any criticism or remakes of the map are welcome. It's under a CC-by license (if anything can be copyrighted), so do with it as you please.

The different images I exported from the PSD file can be seen at this page: Languages and Peoples of Westeros and Essos.

I know a lot of cartographers here feel this is a bad example of a fantasy map, but I hope someone finds this material useful.