The Dangers of Fantasy Cartography: Area and Population

by Shinobaka

Oh, fantasy maps! What hours of fun I have spent with you, pulling out my hair trying to figure out whether or not a mountain range could actually produce a desert where I just added one in, or if the drainage pattern of the river I just drew is realistic. Is this forest too big? Are these cites far enough apart? Would a trade road between them follow the river exactly, or would it cut across the open plain here? Does limestone naturally occur in mountain ranges? How many acres would have to be dedicated to agriculture to keep this country going?

So many details to figure out! At the rate I am going, I will never get around to revising my religions and political infrastructure, let alone actually writing the bloody book! But I am going to do it, because mapping your fantasy world is a good way to learn more about it, not to mention that it can actually be fun.

So why was it a mistake for Christopher Paolini to do it?

The answer is that it was not necessarily a mistake for him to make a map, but it was a mistake for him to include it in the books before he was done writing the entire trilogy, because now he cannot revise the map without looking foolish, and he has gotten himself into a bit of a fix with it.

Although there are more topics to cover regarding the Alagaesia maps, this essay will concentrate on the issue of land area and populations within the Empire.

Many people have lamented the fact that the maps included in the Inheritance books do not include a scale, and this is truly unfortunate, because it means that I have been forced to take a figure from the forward of Eldest, a ruler, and a bit of string to figure out a rough working scale. To be succinct, the small diamonds that indicate large cities are equal to about ten miles/sixteen kilometers.

From this, we can deduce some important details about Alagaesia. For example:

 

• Alagaesia ≈ 376,000 mi² ≈ 950,000 km² ≈ Half again the size of Texas or France + Germany
• Galbatorix's Empire ≈ 112,000 mi² ≈ 290,000 km² ≈ Arizona or Italy
• The Beors ≈ 86,400 mi² ≈ 223,800 km² ≈ Minnesota or Romania
• Du Weldenvarden ≈ 84,000 mi² ≈ 217,000 km² ≈ Utah or Romania
• The Hadarac ≈ 76,800 mi² ≈ 198,900 km² ≈ South Dakota or twice the size of Iceland
• Surda ≈ 16,800 mi² ≈ 43,500 km² ≈ Connecticut or Denmark

 

So what does this mean for Paolini? For starters, it means that we have real world comparisons to Alagaesia now, which leads to things like discrediting the Battle of the Burning Plains. In Eldest, Paolini put Galbatorix’s army at 100,000 men. Ignoring the utter chaos that supplying this host would take, we know that in the history of Earth, armies of this size were not exactly common in medieval Europe. In fact, most of the examples of armies of this size in the Medieval Ages come from the Muslim world, which at its smallest controlled an area at least seven or eight times that of Galbatorix’s empire. In one example, the second Arab siege of Constantinople —which took place during the height of the Umayyad Caliphate—the loss of a mere 80,000 troops was enough to severely stunt the Muslim expansion. More recent examples circa fourteen and fifteen hundred AD come from the Ottoman Empire, which also vastly dwarfs Galbatorix’s area of control. Couple this with the extreme lack of cities, and Galbatorix’s army of 100,000 seems increasingly unfeasible, especially considering that we are undoubtedly due to be greeted by an even larger army towards the end of the third book. The closest population figure yielded by a quick internet search was one of about 5-7 million people in England circa 1300. Since the Empire is somewhat larger than England, we can estimate its population at about 8-9 million, making Galbatorix’s draft seem like 100,000 men were taken from New York City overnight, and never came back.

But let us look at cities again. Because Paolini did not see fit to include any kind of map key whatsoever, we not only do not know exact measures of distance, we do not know populations, or even what the symbols on the maps represent. The best guess is that large diamonds are capitols, small diamonds are large cities, and dots are anything smaller. That being said, there are a total of ten large cities in the Empire, including the capitol, and five smaller population centers. Simply put, this is a ridiculously under-populated country. Going by the apparent technology levels of the humans, Alagaesia seems to be about on par with Europe circa the 11 th century, yet maps of the British Isles circa 802 AD, Italy circa 1050 AD, and even Greece circa 362 BC show much greater population density, despite being from earlier time periods, and being the same size or smaller than the Empire. In fact, the population density from the above maps that most closely resembles that of Galbatorix’s Empire is the Island of Sicily circa 1050, which is only about 25,000 km². Smaller than Surda, a country that coincidentally has six major cities despite being a fraction of the Empire’s size.

Couple this with the five major dwarven cities and the six major Elven cities, and it is a good thing for Galbatorix that he is magic, because he is pretty well outnumbered.

What it comes down to is that Paolini probably never meant for Alagaesia to be so big, but because he threw in a map with no scale and then tossed out a distance for a routable journey without thinking, he now has a country that is far too big for itself, though he probably does not realize it, and will continue writing as if Alagaesia were the size of western Montana. The lesson to take away from this is that fantasy maps are fun, but if you do not know what you are doing, never publish one.