Unnatural Histories: The Lonely Mountain, Part 1

Like many of you, I saw The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug last weekend. Like many of you, I've read "The Hobbit" several times (and had it read to me many times before that). But how many of you have wondered what kind of mountain the Lonely Mountain really was?

Tolkein's description and drawings of the lonely mountain bring to mind an inactive volcano. With its narrow peak and symmetrical slopes. But here's my thought - the Lonely Mountain works much better as a part of a much older and much larger tectonic history of Middle Earth. Let me explain with a little background information, first.

We're told that the Lonely Mountain was a solitary peak perhaps 2,500 - 3,000 meters or so above sea level (since there was some snow on the peak year-round). Assuming the latitude/climate was similar to that of the northern Alps. We also get some backstory on the great Dwarven kingdom of Erebor, which was famous for its deposits of gold and precious gems. Mithril, Tolkien's "unobtanium," was found only in Moria - several hundred miles to the Southwest. To the east lay the Iron Hills. To get to the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo and the Dwarves had to cross the Misty Mountains - a long north-south trending line of imposing peaks.




The photo above is Mt. Baker - A Composite Volcano that I photographed from the (relative) comfort of my economy airplane seat, about 30,000 feet above sea level. The summit reaches a height of about 10,780 feet above sea level. Note the relatively low-lying topography around the summit and the lovely symmetry of the mountain itself.



Here's another grand mountain peak, Grand Teton (summit is 13,775 feet above sea level) from the Garnet Trail, Grand Teton National Park Wyoming.


And here is a wider view of the Teton Range, Wyoming. Relatively young, these mountains are the direct result of extensional tectonic stresses, causing the block of crust I'm standing on (along with the barn) to drop downwards relative to the uplifted mountains in the background. But this tectonic stress is spread out along a north-south trending fault line - made of not one, but many mountain peaks worn sharp by glacial ice and not yet brought down by millions of years of erosion.



This is what gold mining in the western United States used to look like - a long narrow shaft to dig into the gold-rich ore (north-central Nevada). You can see how the mine follows the "vein" of high quality ore along a linear path into the hillside. But there aren't any big mountains nearby...



Longs Peak at sunrise on the Chasm Lake Trail, Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado). Another lovely mountain peak. By comparison to other areas in Colorado, the rocks in Rocky Mountain National Park are relatively poor in economically valuable minerals like gold and silver. Fortunate for us, because it was easier to set the area aside as a National Park.


Abandoned Iron Mine in Ely, Minnesota. One doesn't need giant mountains to produce economically viable deposits. The iron found in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan comes from ancient sea-floor deposits over one billion years old.

So we're faced with a few questions. First, if the Lonely Mountain was once a volcano, why is it extinct? What kinds of patterns left by geologic processes here on Earth similar to those described by Tolkien? How do we get gold deposits in such abundance (aside from the "because, magic" clause)? Why did I include a picture of an iron mine?

For this first part, I'm going to leave you with a quick sketch map (drafted in "ArtRage" on my iPad). Look over the topography - where are there areas of likely active tectonics?

Next, I'll go over some of the features and discuss what might lie below the surface as a product of things that happen over what we geologists like to call "deep time."

For a complete overview of this series:
Part 1: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain.html
Part 2: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_16.html
Part 3: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_9632.html
Part 4: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_1042.html
Part 5: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_5911.html

Part 6: http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2013/12/unnatural-histories-lonely-mountain_8985.html

Mapping the City of Tien: A palimpsest of culture and process

Today's topic: the city of Tien. Tien is the capital city in the Kingdom of Zhan - a whirling nest of high court intrigue, magic, assassins, and the occasional undead. You can read about it in the amazing Kelly McCullough's new book, which I blogged about mapping yesterday, too.

I want to point out my process for making the city map. My goal was less about topography and more about neighborhoods. Where is the Stumbles? How close is it to the Royal Docks? Where is the Ismere library in relationship to the Royal Palace and the River Zien? How do the canals provide transportation and sewer service?

And, summarily, how would all of this have accreted over the centuries as new places sprung up, old ones decayed or gentrified, and more and more people tried to use the space?

While I'm not a geographer, I do spend a fair amount of time thinking about how people interact with the landscape. Starting from a scanned sketch from Kelly, I knew where the major features were. In this case, I had to do less geologic creation, and more urban planning. I did know that there were four major hills - kind of like the seven hills of Rome. So my first thought was to figure out how those hills got there - this would give me geologic constraints on the locations of various streets and neighborhoods. Plus, I would illustrate the general topography and keep the detail for specific places and buildings named in the book. Since we had a river that flowed into the harbor, my first thought was to have the four hills as remnant high stream terraces, with the majority of the city built around the (heavily modified) floodplain or low terraces. But there were some plot devices used in the book that needed good bedrock cliffs. So I adjusted my terrace idea to be remnant bedrock highs, surrounded by the lower floodplain. Plus a remnant terrace on which to place the Royal Palace and a few other neighborhoods - these breaks in the flat-lying landscape often create neighborhoods in real cities (especially ones along rivers).


Here was my first pass at organizing the city landscape. I ended up symbolizing the hilly areas differently, but it gave me the layout of the major features.


Now came filling in the neighborhoods and implying that most of the city was a dense maze of city blocks - it's a lot easier to erase away the streets to define the general pattern. I didn't intend to draw every single building - that way would lead to madness...

With much of the street layout defined, I started to place a few important buildings and work out how I was going to show the reader where the hills were located. It's tricky. Many maps use hachure lines to display topographic information. But this didn't mesh with the way I had drawn some of the other features, so I played around with some possibilities. Besides - some of these hills were really steep bedrock cliffs, while others were just rounded and steeper than the surrounding plain.

This was too "smeared" and I also didn't think it would reproduce well as a halftone bitmapped image.


This was better - plus, I could show the ruggedness of the slopes.


So here's the city with the four major hills and the streets. I adjusted the canals so they would at least seem to have the potential to act as both a sewer and transportation system.

Tossing in some text, a few important buildings and a rough scale, here's the finished map.


Keep in mind that this map was being printed only 3" wide, so I gave prime location to the names, rather than specific features. A few tweaks to the final halftone so the grays would reproduce well and it went with it's sibling world map to the publisher. And now it's in print. That makes me happy. So go buy the book already!

Making a Map

Guess what? Today is the release date for Broken Blade, a new fantasy series written by my good pal Kelly McCullough. Having read the beta versions, I can say that if you enjoy fantasy novels and film noir, you'll enjoy these books.

Beyond reading the beta copy, I drew the maps used in the book. It's partly an homage to the maps in Tolkein's Hobbit and LOTR, but it's also done from the perspective of 1) A geologist who understands some aspects of how the geography of a region might evolve as a result of some underlying physical process and 2) a traveler or map-maker living in this fictional world, trying to convey what it's like to "be there."

I started with a fairly simple sketch map that Kelly drew up as he was outlining the story. From this, I drew a pencil & pen sketch of how I thought it should look. I scanned this map into the computer so I could adjust things in Photoshop - it's much easier to add text, move mountains (literally), and prep the map for publication as a digital image. Several years ago, I drew a map for a friend, and I had done everything in layers of tracing paper so I could adjust rivers, forests, etc. I much prefer the digital method.


Here's a scan of part of my pen/pencil sketch. I also worked on a map of the principal city, which took Kelly's original sketch and went straight into the computer.


Before going any further with line work, I wanted to make sure that I would draw mountains, hills, and rivers that behaved in a reasonable manner. In the real world, the geography is a function of climate, underlying bedrock, and elevation. I didn't have time to draw up a geologic map, but I had both likely climatic and geologic characteristics in my head when I sketched out a rough elevation map.


The rough elevation map: white=high elevation. This gave me a way to keep things organized - where the mountains should be, where rivers and lakes should be (so I wouldn't draw rivers that had to flow uphill)


Here's a detail that shows how I combined representations of mountains (in a semi-oblique view) with rivers.


And the finished geography portion of the map. I tailored the geomorphology to have some areas with fairly young, active topography, with areas of older, more mature topography.

Then there was the need to provide place names so that people reading the story could check the map to see where they were. I tried to keep large areas of negative space so that I could place text without having to contort it too much. But this is where digital map-making really helped - I could just select and drag an entire mountain or stretch of river and drag it out of the way to accommodate text. Or I could curve text, tighten the kerning or otherwise keep the text legible (although at published size, about 3" wide, nearsighted readers may have some difficulty).


And the finished project, complete with labels. And in print, it looks even cooler (since there's an awesome story that unfolds around it).

So go get a copy!

Ben - here you go:

Geomorphically "Correct" Art, Part One

Among my various side-projects, I've been drafting a map for my friend and awesome author, Kelly McCullough. He's working on a new series, set in a far-away land (TM). One of the challenges for the map was a forested area, surrounded by rivers. There was also a mountain jutting out from the middle of the forest. Adding to the complexity, the region is bound by mountain ranges. The trick was to combine these features into a visual representation that looked good, but also didn't obviously break any "rules" regarding how landscapes evolve and relate to each other:


At some point, once the first book is published, I'll revisit more of the features, including how I managed to fit country and city names into these features, without making any one piece too hard to read.

This post was inspired by Riparian Rap's "Geomorphically Incorrect Art" series. I've always looked at fantasy maps as serving two masters. First, it needs to supply the necessary elements that enhance the storyline. Second, it has to contain sufficient realism so as not to destroy the readers' suspension of disbelief. If the map looks like it depicts a real place, the story benefits. If the map looks like it was thrown together by someone who wasn't there, the story suffers. The maps in J.R.R. Tolkien's books are examples of the former - even though they aren't always geomorphically plausible, they have a sense of place and history that serves the tale.