Setting to work, al-Idrisi consulted all the books and travel reports he could find, synthesizing knowledge from Arabic, Latin and Classical sources on the subject. Case in point: Paul Sturtevant’s lively account of a 12th-century cartographic masterpiece by a Spanish-Muslim refugee at the Sicilian court of Roger II. In the popular imagination, the medieval era is stagnant, archaic, and literally and figuratively “dark.” This couldn’t be farther from the truth, as the writers at The Public Medievalist show time and again. Paul Sturtevant, “A Wonder of the Multicultural Medieval World: The Tabula Rogeriana” Unmarked on the map.Ī modern copy of the Tabula Rogeriana, upside-down with North oriented up. I zoom out and from the sky look for signs of a tent or a blue hammock in the trees, but everything is simply too dense. I am desperate to do a grid search, replicating 2010 when investigators walked side-by-side, three-feet-apart, scanning for her body. But Google hasn’t travelled down these roads. I drive Hana Highway and peer down roads that lead to the Pacific, and up toward Haleakala. Other times, in the middle of the night, I rewind my way through Maui, where my aunt went missing. And there are giraffe drinking on the opposite side of the dam. With one click, I am married again, waking up beside the dam, drinking coffee on the porch while the dogs run their noses, tracking the previous night’s movement-zebra, warthog, hyena, impala and leopard.
I look for my Land Rover parked outside of the little cottage on Lerato where I once lived, my forever home in South Africa. Some mornings, when I’m homesick, I make my way back to 2007. Google Maps now allows me to time travel. This 2014 essay by Maggie Messitt - about the subtle connections between place, memory, and the maps that anchor both - is still as fresh and as moving as when it was first published.
MAGIC MAPS FOR MAGIC WALLS ARCHIVE
Maggie Messitt, “North 20★4, West 156☁4”īending Genre, a site focusing on the art of narrative nonfiction, has been in archive mode for a couple of years now. Each box he’d ordered from faraway America added another facet to our knowledge of this invented world, arriving like an explorer at home port. On my next visit he had been forced to shift the entire tapestry up towards the gable, as another boxed set had added an Arabian Nights-inspired continent to the south. I would visit and stare in awe - first at four massive posters depicting the world of Forgotten Realms, a standard issue Tolkien pastiche, then at additional maps completing the planet of Abeir-Toril: first came vast steppes to the east, a continent of Mayan-style temples and deep jungles to the west, then the calligraphic maps of a far-eastern setting.
He covered one of the sloped walls with maps he collected from the various Advanced Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets that were released in the early 1990s. I remember a boy a little older than me whose room occupied the attic of his parents’ home, a typical half-timbered southern-German house tastefully updated in a cool, vaguely Scandinavian style. They were all around us growing up, stitched into the texture of adolescence: a basic feature of nerd interior design imported to Western Europe from America.
MAGIC MAPS FOR MAGIC WALLS SERIES
In his recent Longreads essay, Adrian Daub weaves together the history of fantasy maps - the kind you encounter in Lord of the Rings and the Song of Ice and Fire series - with the personal story of growing up as a map-obsessed Dungeons & Dragons geek in 1980s Germany. Ready for your own domain name, advanced design options, and more? Find the right plan for you. Here are three stories from the Discover archives exploring the power of maps.Īdrian Daub, “Here at the End of All Things” For many a cartophile, however, they’re at once a beautiful object, an inspiration for storytelling and adventure, and the product of incredible craft and care. We often think of maps as utilitarian tools that help us get from A to B without too many detours.
0 kommentar(er)
