Too much of the same stereotype?... Fantasy or imagination?

[Midgardsormr]

Call me ignorant if you wish, but I never heard of the name Schwarzwald for the Black Forest of Germany until today. Perhaps an example of why a name that actually describes the terrain is so much better than something obscure to a stranger.

I'd never heard the word, either, but I know just enough of the language to understand it, thanks to a German coworker.

A related phenomenon: Many of the words we have for various people groups simply mean "People."

Anyway, having grown up reading an awful lot of fantasy fiction of varying levels of quality, I am very used to seeing foreign words sprinkled across maps. It is sometimes a little shocking to run across an author who writes a culture that apparently speaks English. Places like "King's Landing," "Riverrun" or "Whitebridge" actually tend to sound exotic because I'm far more used to words like "Edoras," "Nabban" and "Sethanon" as place names.

[Chick]

I'd never heard the word, either, but I know just enough of the language to understand it, thanks to a German coworker.

A related phenomenon: Many of the words we have for various people groups simply mean "People."

Anyway, having grown up reading an awful lot of fantasy fiction of varying levels of quality, I am very used to seeing foreign words sprinkled across maps. It is sometimes a little shocking to run across an author who writes a culture that apparently speaks English. Places like "King's Landing," "Riverrun" or "Whitebridge" actually tend to sound exotic because I'm far more used to words like "Edoras," "Nabban" and "Sethanon" as place names.

I think it's important to remember that stories are written in the language of the reader, not of the story characters. A name such as "Whitebridge" is perfectly fine because even if in an elvish town, because the reader will simply assume the bridge is named the equivalent of that in the elven language. Just like the black forest is "Schwarzwald" in German stories and "Black Forest" in the same story translated to English does not change the meaning or make it any more or less imaginative. Either way, it's a descriptive name.

Edoras may be a fantasy name, but The Shire, Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, the Lonely Mountain, the River Running, Laketown, The Grey Havens (and I could go on and on just from Tolkien alone) are conveying a picture to the reader. They don't have to be in Hobbit, Elven, Dwarven, or the Dark Tongue to be part of an excellent fantasy story and map.

[Pixie]

While the thread wasn't on toponimy (I know because I started the thread...) but on geographical features, I think there are also many stereotypes concerning language. The one to which I've already grown some fatigue is the proximity to Lord of the Rings language rules/sounds. Still, that happens more often than not with the newcomer map, and it's something we can easily forgive.

As for the whole issue about which language should the map be labelled in, that is completely dependent on who creates it and for what audience, so there's no end to that discussion, in my view. But, just for the sake of a laugh, here's something:


I've been to Azores recently, on holidays. For those who don't know about it, it's an archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic and more importantly, it was colonized from scratch by portuguese in the 15th/16th centuries. Roughly from 1450 onwards, and by farmers lured out of feudal europe mostly, so the people who explored and named places was getting out of the middle ages and the original names of places are about 500 years old. Here's a list of present cities/towns names, in portuguese:

Ribeira Brava
Ribeira Seca
Noroeste
Ponta Delgada
Povocação
Mosteiros
Sete Cidades
Furnas
Vila Franca do Campo
Lagoa
Lajes
Velas
Angra do Heroísmo
Praia da Vitória
Horta
Vila do Porto
Flamengos

All these places are now cities or at list towns of importance. I wonder about your reaction to the words you've just read... And their names translated to english (also curious about your reactions to these ones):

Wild Creek
Dry Creek
Northwest (I think it was called Northwest Town originally)
Slim [Rocky] End (50,000 people now live in Slim End, or Slim Tip, or Slim Point, the translation can be any of these)
Settlement (Yes, that's the name of the town to this day and it was, well, you guessed it... the original settlement in the island, when everything else was wild woods)
Monasteries
Seven Cities (Interesting name given that it is a tiny village within a volcano crater, my guess is that original settlers originated from 7 different places)
Furnaces (Could also locally be translated by Hot Pits, because, well, there's hot water springs)
Free Town of the Countryside (as a medieval name for a place as it can be!)
Lagoon (There are at least two cities in Portugal called Lagoon and one called Lakes - Lagos, Nigeria capital, is of portuguese origin and the word means "Lakes")
Tiles (Alternatively, it could be translated to "Flat Rocks", which was the original meaning)
Sails (As in the sails of a ship...)
Cove of Heroism (Simply called City of the Cove for centuries, because it was a great natural harbor, the name was "enhanced" to Cove of Heroism after a civil war)
Beach of Victory (Called City of the Beach for centuries, name was also after the same civil war)
Garden (As in vegetable garden- nowadays a well known yachting port in the Atlantic, but called... vegetable garden)
Port Town
Flemmish (Because the original settlers in that town weren't portuguese but from Flanders, the town is now, forever, called, Flemmish)

[Midgardsormr]

Getting back to the original question, I don't do a lot of cartography, but I do make art for hire to other people's specifications.

I'm constantly fighting the battle of wanting to do something cool and new vs. a producer's desire to copy something they saw somewhere else. Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it. Sometimes it pays to throw a little something extra on it to satisfy yourself. And sometimes you just do two versions: One for the client and one for yourself.

Every so often, when I've done a personal version of something, the client comes back with "No, this isn't what I wanted at all." Then I smugly present my preferred version.

They usually turn that one down, too, of course.

[Pixie]

Thank you Midgardsormr.., for answering to some of the original questions in the thread!

[Midgardsormr]

It was the least I could do, since I certainly did my part to derail it!

[waldronate]

People have a recurring request for software that I write: "I want this software to generate a world exactly like Earth, but different. I don't know how all that works, but I know I want it to be familiar, but just MORE, ya know? My world is too big for something just like Earth, so it's gotta be EXTREME!"

In this case, it would be "I want a place just like Europe (cold mountainous wastes full of barbarians in the north, endless steppes in the East, an inland ocean, desert at the south, an exotic Eastern culture, and so on), but I want it to be MORE! Mountains as a barrier? Too small! A thousand foot high sheer cliff. Convenient staging ground for battles? One cleft in the great barrier ought to do it. And we need those high cultures in the past that fell, but still cast their shadow and has ruins - like Egypt, Rome and Greece. But I want it with MAGIC and DRAGONS!"

The hero may have a thousand faces, but it seems that he only has that one homeland...