Writing about libraries set my muse off on an essay about libraries in fiction but thinking about libraries set my head in the direction of the Name of the Rose and its geographical puzzle of a library which set me thinking about castles and before you know it I’d written more about castles than libraries.
So it looks like I’m writing two posts now which led to a couple more. Which is fine but I needed an introduction because it has been awhile since my previous plot geography posts and that introduction got longer…
Plot geography! Not a thing, just me rambling. The posts last year started after Alex Ack’s thought-provoking posts on the geography/geomorphology of Middle Earth. That set me thinking about how Tolkien used different terrain to mark thematic changes in the plot. I’m not a scholar of fantasy fiction so the sources I drew on are just those that came to hand in my head: Middle Earth, Earthsea, Gene Wolfe’s Ruth in the Book of the New Sun, as bits and bobs from other sources such as Star Wars.
I’m not trying to be either authoritative or normative. If somebody wants to write about a swamp that isn’t much of an obstacle and in which nothing lurks quasi-supernaturally then I have zero problems with that. Likewise I’m not railing against cliches here, if a story has a swamp with a tentacled thing waiting to pull you under then I’m all for that as well (sorry, I mean ‘you’ generically – I don’t want any readers to actually be drowned by a tentacled monster in a swamp.)
The emphasis in that last set of posts was on places that characters travel through. That is not a feature confined to fantasy but stories that set people off on journeys will place characters in a dynamic with the landscape.
These next posts are more about locations. Dots on the map of a fantasy land rather than features. Places you travel to rather than zones you travel through.
It’s not an exhaustive list. I’ve intentionally left off inns, villages, towns and cities. I’ll be mentioning those but I don’t have enough things to say about them currently. I don’t have monasteries, schools or tall towers lost in a dark forest as specific topics but I’ll touch on them. Not everything in the list above will get its own post as some are pairing were I want to contrast their roles. I don’t want to be overly literal about locations either for example in Lord of the Rings the elven kingdom of Lothlorien has some of the features of a fortress: its is a defensible position where the characters are not in immediate danger of direct attack by the forces pursuing them. Yet Lothlorien has no stony walls or battlements. I believe plot wise it is something other than an unusual castle but I’ll get to that later and I wouldn’t look askance if somebody included it in a list of castle-like places in Lord of the Rings.
As always feel free to add your own examples, argue against my examples or suggest aspects I’ve forgotten.
Camestros Felapton 
15 responses to “Plot Geography: Plaza, Palace, Castle, Fortress, Refuge, Labyrinth and Library”
Tom Bombadils house is like Lothlorien; it is not a fortress, but it is a space more safe than a fortress.
LikeLike
Exactly! I’m calling places like these a ‘refuge’ but I’ll elaborate later
LikeLike
Despite having the same “Safe for a while” aspect of a fortress, I’m not sure a hidden land like Lothlorien is really a castle or fortress.
A castle or fortress has the implication (usually realised) that it will be directly besieged. A person in hiding in one of these tends to have to look for enemies to attack from without and trap them there, that they will be surrounded. The castle (though not the fortress) also tends towards the tropes of the seat of power and therefore the less overtly violent but often equally dangerous struggle for power from within the walls; in fact, I’d say the power struggle element is the key differentiation between the two. But generally, even when safe for a while, a character in a fortress is on the brink of the action, and the action is coming to them where they stand, even if it washes up against the wall.
By contrast, the hidden land is almost never *directly* besieged. It is almost always a fully secure break from the action, even when there is an implication that, should the enemy not be stopped elsewhere at some fortress, it may someday become besieged, but it’s also often implied that this would be the last place to fall, and will remain far from the action for longer than anywhere else, and the reason the characters don’t hang out there is because they need to get back where the action is, and the action won’t find them if they stay.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Rivendell; fortress or vidden land?
LikeLike
Hidden
LikeLike
Hmm. It and Lothlorien have a lot in common besides the people that live there. Both are breather spaces where the characters can be fairly sure nothing bad is going to attack while they’re present. Rivendell is also treated a bit more like “home base mark 2” as well; the place you start the action from. Before that, the Hobbits think they’re on a short, if dangerous, jaunt to a nearby neighbour, and they’ll be done. After it comes the big wider world, the big wider plot, and the real investment in events.
(and in theory, home base is the place to retreat to when adventuring is done, which will remain untouched – implied by Bilbo’s retirement there at the very start, and some of the post adventure but pre Grey Havens visits there. But of course, Tolkien even undermines “home is safe and won’t change” by the Scouring of the Shire, so it’s not like these tropes were *ever* hard and fast, even in their creation.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sometimes a fortress can become a trap for the besiegers. In Feist’s A Darkness at Sethanon, the fortress city of Armengar is besieged by the Big Bad’s army. As the heroes retreat out the back gates, they ignite the natural supply of naphtha which had been seeping into the city’s basements throughout the ages (and which was usually pumped into barrels for use or storage.) Can you say fuel-air explosion kids? Sure you can.
The Big Bad’s army is mostly destroyed, but of course the Big Bad himself has plot armour.
LikeLiked by 2 people
What would you do about a labyrinthine library in the basement of a palace in a fortress that’s a refuge? Asking for a friend.
Libraries and labyrinths do kind of overlap a bit, in my experience. Pratchett’s L-space, the “finis Africae” in “The Name of the Rose”, that sort of thing. It’s not uncommon for a library to be somewhere you need to search, and that you can very easily get lost in. (Though a labyrinth need not be a library. I never heard of the Minotaur as a big reader.)
LikeLiked by 3 people
I think the Minotaur must have been a reader because what else would he do all day? Also, why did he kill people he found in the labyrinth? He’s a magic cow-person not a werewolf…ah but if he killed them because they disturbed his quiet reading time then everything becomes more sensible…
LikeLiked by 1 person
K.B. Spangler’s Greek Key puts a slightly differing twist on the whole Minotaur thing 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
I don’t the book, I’ll have to look it up 🙂
LikeLike
with cover by Oor Wombat!
(the polyglot koala alone is worth the price of admission)
LikeLiked by 1 person
No, no… what it is, see, is he paints. And he doesn’t like people coming down and maybe smearing the paint before it’s dry. Because he paints on the walls, see. It’s a labyrinth, there are loads of walls around, and of course he’d paint on them, because, as you say, he’s a cow person, so naturally he’d paint moo-rals. Geddit? Cow person? Moo-rals? I’m here all week folks. (I’d say “try the veal” but it seems tactless in this context.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Moorals? I’d have gone with frescows 🙂
LikeLike
If it’s a low-technology setting the cows won’t say fresh very long.
LikeLiked by 1 person