the deep moans round with many voices

December 22: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

This world happened because of a high school writing assignment. No, seriously! I wrote a really terrible story about a woman and her lover fleeing into the western wilderness, and a confrontation they had with corrupt local law enforcement which ended when it turned out the woman was a witch and magically clobbered the asshole who had been threatening to rape her and kill her lover. Then I couldn't stop thinking about the world I'd implied around the edges of the narrative, and it got a little out of hand.

World-building has a tendency to do that around me. *wry*

The basic idea here is a world with two main continents; the northwestern one is creatively named Nowe, and the southeastern one is named, with equal creativity, Soea. (Shut up, they sound fantasy-ish, what more do you want.) Also there are two groups of oceanic islands at about the same distance from Nowe as, say, Iceland is from France.

To make a long story short, sometime in the past a group of people later known as the Tarranny sailed eastward from Nowe and settled both archipelagos. Some centuries later, a different group -- who are known either as the Shanish or the Ammunites -- sailed eastward and largely drove the Tarranny out of the larger and more fertile southern archipelago. After another century or two, they conquered the northern archipelago as well, but their settlement program ran into much greater resistance since this time there wasn't anywhere for the Tarranny to retreat to.

A while after that, there was trouble in Soea. An expanding empire from the continent's center pushed west and displaced a semi-nomadic people known as the Danna. They split into various factions, one of which decided (for various and sundry reasons) to acquire a bunch of ships from a coastal city and sail westward into the unknown. (I am not entirely clear how people got from Soea to Nowe in the first place. I suspect there is a sort of island bridge between northeastern Soea and southwestern Nowe, which may have been more readily crossed in colder periods of history. But eastern Nowe and western Soea had no idea that the other continent existed.) Eventually they hit the Shanish Isles.

Some of the Danna were sick of sailing and and agreed to swear fealty to the Shanish king in return for land grants in the Tarranny Isles. Others continued to mainland Nowe, where they carved a small territory out of the then-decaying country of Edruie, in return for helping the Edrae maintain their local hegemony... and after a few generations ended up swallowing Edruie from inside and expanding outward into empire. Meanwhile, the Danna resettlements in the islands sparked a rebellion among the Tarranny that threw the Shanish out of the northern archipelago, and that loss in turn sparked a multi-sided civil war in the southern archipelago, such that the Shanish Isles were disunited for several centuries thereafter. (The Tarranny Isles maintained a confederacy a bit on the Swiss model.)

The problem is that the world began with a very, um, faux-Celtic influence on all the names. I have been weeding that out over the years, but that's still something of a work in progress, and all my extant maps of the Isles are still from a too-Celtic period.

Okay, enough background. On with the pictures!



The above image was my first attempt to map eastern Nowe. The city in my terrible story, Siadh Ruin Dhair, does not appear, but a port city called Siadh Cuill Mawr does; that is the capital of the Danna's empire. The Shanish Isles made their first appearance here, for the excellent and logical reason that I just like islands and archipelagos. They're cool, and no one will ever convince me otherwise. (I suspect I imprinted on Earthsea at a young age.) The little asterisk labeled Coll Tip South is a marker showing where I intended to move the Isles, since I'd decided they were too close to the mainland.

The random sketch and notes are mostly in Vicky's handwriting. I don't remember what we were talking about.



My second attempt to map eastern Nowe. The Shanish Isles move. Rivers appear! Also more cities with terrible faux-Celtic names. If this looks a little funny, it's because I literally cut the continent out and used it as a stencil for my next attempted map.



On my third attempt to map eastern Nowe, I got fancy. *wry* Everything is still terribly faux-Celtic, and the Shanish Isles are too far south given what I later decided was the climate around Bar Chellik, but the Tarranny Isles have appeared! They are the three tiny islets labeled the Lonely Isles (because I imprinted on Narnia, too).



On my fourth attempt to map eastern Nowe, we are finally starting to get somewhere useful. The worst of the faux-Celtic stuff has vanished and the rest has been somewhat mitigated. Place names now supply evidence for at least four linguistic/cultural groups, which makes sense given that the mapped region is at least as large as the Indian subcontinent. Neither the Shanish nor Tarranny Isles are visible -- they would be off the right hand edge of the map. There are some notes on things I want to adjust in the fifth map, but I never got around to drawing it. Someday!

Now let's move on to the Tarranny Isles. (I never drew a separate map of the Shanish Isles, which is a shame since the version in my third Nowe map is no longer accurate about the shape, layout, or names of the islands in question.)



Here is my first sketch of the Tarranny Isles, made sometime between my third and fourth maps of eastern Nowe. We're still in the terrible faux-Celtic phase, though there's also some plain old what-the-heck cutesiness going on with the town names. Green dots are towns. Red crosses are larger towns with Towers, aka Shanish imperial garrisons to maintain order and impose colonial rule on the Tarranny. The scribbled lines that cross parts of Stane and Faros are a later attempt at revision once I'd started writing some story sketches set among the Tarranny and realized that Skye needed to be the largest island in the archipelago.



This is a map of Skye and Corianthe; the major towns/cities are marked but not labeled. Those on Skye haven't changed from the previous map (though the town of Ironheart is now called Umber), while Corianthe has added a second town -- Coramendra -- to join Cor Merrit, aka Coramar.



This is a rough sketch of my current mental layout for the Tarranny Isles. Skye is by far the largest and most central; Faros and Stane are not much bigger than Wykke and Skep Dhu. Gar seems to have fallen off the map (which is weird, because it still exists in my head...), a new island of Ordhan has appeared in the north, and Corianthe has moved away from Skye to become the southernmost island and the one guarding sea routes between the Tarranny and Shanish Isles. The only towns marked are those with Tower garrisons: Coramendra on Corianthe, Kingsmouth, Penthe, and Riddenour on Faros; Rhoyne on Stane (replacing Endra, for reasons I don't remember); Onnit on Wykke; Skepping Lae on Skep Dhu; Ramas, Skedda, Umber, and Waek on Skye; and I legit do not remember the name of the town on Ordhan and can't find it in any of my files, argh.

(ETA four and a half years later: the town on Ordhan is Skellig.)

I really need to get back to writing in this world. I remember enjoying it a lot!

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December Talking Meme: All Days