I finished rereading Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow by Tad Williams, which has been (like many other fantasy novels such as The Sword of Shannara and The Wheel of Time series) compared much to The Lord of the Rings. While there exists much older literature that could considered fantasy (for example, The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser written in the 16th century), I believe that it was Tolkien that allowed booksellers to actually have an entire marketing category devoted to such stuff.

If you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, of course I would recommend it to you, but I have a feeling that if you didn’t read it in your childhood, it may not really appeal to you. Of course, you can always watch the movies, which were actually mostly faithful to the story (and in fact introduced something that I found superior to the story: the intercutting of scenes with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli with scenes with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. I had always found it anticlimactic to get to the Battle of Minas Tirith then have to go back in time chronologically to figure out what’s been happening to the Ringbearer. But, as usual, I digress.) Still, I realize that there are lots of people who really aren’t into fantasy at all (and you’ll probably want to just skip the rest of this blog post.)

Anyway, the point being, there may be spoilers that follow, so if you haven’t read either trilogy (Lord of the Rings or Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow) and actually really intend to read them some day, I would go somewhere else.

For better or for worse, The Lord of the Rings was basically my inspiration for trying to write. I’ve waxed about this before about how it makes me think of all the Septembers of the past, and the sense of melancholy I’ve always attached to it. I suppose thematically The Lord of the Rings fits—September is all about the end of Summer while the book is about the end of an entire epoch and how loss is one of the few things we can count on in this world.

After reading LotR for the first time, I became obsessed with drawing fantasy maps. I suppose I have always been obsessed with maps, drawing fantasy cities and freeways practically since I could pick up a pencil, but this was the first time I started thinking about creating an entirely imaginary world.

Of course, I was also greatly influenced by the various role-playing games I played as a child on my Commodore 64 and then on the Nintendo. The Bard’s Tale is, I think, the first cRPG I ever played. For some reason, I never really did get into the Ultima series. I also played the very first Dungeons & Dragons cRPGs (such as Pools of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds) Then on the NES, there was The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior (neé Dragon Quest), and, naturally, Final Fantasy but there was also Wizards & Warriors and Faxanadu. The first map I created was very transparent about where I got geography and city names from. I suppose that is when I first started thinking about copyright law.

I remember that first piece of paper I used for my map (let’s call this Map 1 or perhaps the Darunaig or Arlandia map): it came from a frame and was, I think 16” x 20” or something like that, and one side was blank. Remarkably, this wasn’t enough for the lands I eventually ended up mapping out, and I started taping on extra sheets to the sides. Of course, with a strategy like this, I never ended up filling the entire thing, nor mapping out every continent I had drawn. Maybe an entire world is too much—even Tolkien contented himself to simply the Northwest corner of a continent. After much revising and re-revising, I even started inking in the core parts of the map with marker.

Actually, now that I think about it, the core of the map actually came from a short story that I wrote in 5th grade (likely based entirely on cRPGs, since I hadn’t read LotR yet), which then became the basis of a choose-your-own-adventure-type game I was writing for my computer class (in Logo, of all languages.) Anyway.

But eventually, I stopped working on it and even accidentally partially destroyed it at one point (I’ve only been able to find part of it remaining.)

This is where my disturbing obsession with Disney movies kicked in. It was, to be fair, their renaissance era, coming out with classics such as “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast.” I started on a completely different map. Frankly, I ended up creating a world (let’s call this map #2 or maybe the Maedhrain map or maybe Western Miriador)that was based on Tolkien’s Middle Earth (in terms of Middle Earth) and extrapolations on what happened after Ariel married the prince (in terms of potential story line.) This also happened to be the time when I started learning Latin (freshman year in high school) so that creeped into the thing too. And then I almost immediately lost this map, not to be found for at least a few years after.

Inspired by Anne McCaffrey’s series of dragon books and her world of Pern (the manifestation of this inspiration is indeed tangential), I ended up creating yet another map (let’s call this map #3 or the Cournor map) about kingdoms that clung to the Eastern Coast of a poisoned continent. Trying to go beyond the westernmost mountain pass would end you up in a land where it rained corrosive acid and where the air was unbreathable. And yet the sea was hostile too—it was also filled with corrosive acid, and no one dared take a boat out into it. I never figured out how and why the coast was habitable, and eventually abandoned the whole thing, except for maybe some place names, and of course, the morphology of the place.

Sometime in high school I merged map #2 (using my memories of the original map that I had lost) and map #3 (so Cournor became Eastern Miriador). At this point, my maps were being obviously influenced by Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow.

So we will talk about the book a little. Interestingly, the morphology of Osten Ard (the world of MTS) is very similar to Middle Earth. The Northern parts extend farther west than the Southern parts (so that, for example, the Grey Havens are very far to the west of, oh, say, Pelargir, despite both being ports and the same geography holds for Rimmersgard’s Skipphaven, which is well west of the Hayholt) There is a major north-south mountain range as well (the Misty Mountains versus the Wealdhelm) and on the eastern side of these mountains lies a vast forest (Mirkwood versus Aldheorte) The seat of greatest (human) power lies on that bay I described (Gondor versus Erkynland) Another ancient seat of former human power lies on the southern edge of this bay (the city of Umbar and old Harad of the Numenoreans versus the remnants of the Empire of Nabban) What is missing from Osten Ard, though, are blasted lands that would be Mordor, and a great north-south river that would be the Anduin. Still, Naglimund is kind of where Rivendell is (both which are the first destinations of their respective protagonists) up against the western slopes of the north-south mountains and in front of mountain pass into the forest (the High Pass versus the Stile) Elvritshalla, the capital of Rimmersgard, is kind of where Annúminas or maybe Fornost Erain would be. Hernysadharc, the capital of Hernystir, is kind of where Edoras is (although there are no east-west mountains like the White Mountains)

Since we’re on the topic of map similarity, the world of The Wheel of Time kind of has this geography as well, with the obvious parallel between the Mountains of the Mist and the Misty Mountains, although I must say that the rest of the parallels are more stretched. Tear would perhaps correspond to Gondor (or maybe Illian would), the Dragonmount is where the Lonely Mountain is, and the River Manetheren is north-south like the Anduin would be.

And since we’re on this topic, for even more bizarre map similarity, there is the State of California [morphology][place names], although the east-west dimension is extraordinarily compressed compared to Middle Earth, and the north-south dimension is tilted somewhat counterclockwise. The Coastal Ranges correspond to the Blue Mountains. The Transverse Ranges (including the Santa Ynez, the San Gabriel, and the San Bernardino mountains) correspond to the White Mountains. The Sierra Nevada are the Misty Mountains. The San Francisco Bay corresponds to the Gulf of Lune. Lake Tahoe would then roughly be where Rivendell is. Donner Pass is the High Pass. Yosemite would then be Eregion (and Tioga Pass becomes the Redhorn Pass.) The Los Angeles Basin is then Gondor, and maybe Orange County or San Diego would be Umbar. And while there are no mountain fences around the Low Desert, this would correspond to Mordor and the deserts beyond, with the Salton Sea corresponding to the Sea of Nûrn. Sacramento would be Annuminas or maybe Fornost Erain. Point Concepcion corresponds to Andrast. OK, I am definitely stretching it.

Someday I will scan the maps I drew and post them. Someday.

Anyway, when I got to college, like many minority students, I found myself searching for my identity, particularly my cultural identity. While I did submerge myself in Pilipino Cultural Night, and wrote for a Filipino American literary magazine, I think I also ended up trying to fulfill the same task that J.R.R. Tolkien had set on himself. In the way that his work was an attempt to create a mythology for (relatively) modern-day England, I overlayed Map #1 (Darunaig or Arlandia) with my own attempt to create a fantasy mythology for the modern-day Philippines from the perspective of a child of the diaspora. I changed place names on Map #1 to less resemble Germanic or Romance constructions and more resemble Austronesian place names. And, inspired by Tad Williams, I tried to make parallels from the multiple colonizations of my world to that of Southeast Asia. (There is much written about how in MST, Tad Williams cribs from European History and plugs it into Osten Ard, adding more complexity to his world.

Eventually, however, the initial morphology of Map #1 started to make less sense to me. You could tell very much that I had cribbed a lot of material from disparate sources. There were multiple lands connected by thin isthmuses. It looked very unnatural. And given the scale of the world I was trying to create, I was starting to run into problems with projection—how do you represent a spherical world on a flat piece of paper? In time I ended up merging Map #1 with the hybrid Map #2/#3. While much of the core actually remained the same, some lands disappeared entirely, many connections cut. This is the world I’ve been working on now, and I can’t help but ponder how I’ve spent about 17-18 years on it. Scary. And I can’t help feel that I’m really never going to get anywhere with it. Sad that my aspiration is to simply write a Tolkien clone.

But, back to MST: I first read it when it came out in 1990. I remember reading The Stone of Farewell (the second book in the trilogy) while I was on a family vacation in the Canadian Rockies. What was kind of neat was that part of the story was about how it was snowing in the middle of summer, and in the Canadian Rockies, despite it being August, I found myself walking across snowfields and trying to row a boat in ice cold waters. When I reread The Stone of Farewell the other day, I marveled at how the first time I read it was almost 16 years ago, and the pages were definitely now yellow.

Now that it’s over, I feel like I need to start reading another similar adventure. I thought about re-reading LotR since I actually haven’t read it again since 2001 and sort of had my fill after watching the movies but the timing is all wrong, and I’d want to wait until September.