Friday 14 August 2009

Need help getting around the Seven Kingdoms?

I've always been vaguely dissatisfied with the maps of Westeros that have appeared in A Song of Ice and Fire so far. The CAD line-drawings in the earlier books were not great, although the new, illustrated one that appeared in A Storm of Swords was nice. The full-colour map in Guardians of Order's 2005 roleplaying game was excellent, but it missed quite a few locations and was therefore incomplete. The map created by Ran over at Westeros.org in the Citadel subsection is excellent and the most up-to-date map out there, but compared to the many excellent maps of Middle-earth, the Discworld and Robert Jordan's 'Randland' out there, Westeros still felt under-represented.


This map (second-to-last on the right), created by Cartographer's Guild member 'Tear', is now probably the finest map of the continent to appear to date. So if you ever wondered where the Dornish prison-island of Ghaston Grey is located or how far Sam travelled in A Feast for Crows, now you know.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice map, thanks. That website is very cool too.

Jamie said...

Looks great, but the scale seems enormous. 300 miles or so from King's Landing to the Trident?

Adam Whitehead said...

The scale of the Westeros maps was a matter of debate for many years as GRRM said you can't use the 300-mile-long Wall as a scale bar. However, lots of research by people like Ran on Westeros showed that going by that distance wasn't inconsistent with the books, so GRRM decided to confirm that you could use the Wall as a scale after all, and distances given in AFFC back that up. Brienne's, long, tedious journey in AFFC backs it up being over several hundred miles ;-)

The only problematic area is Cat's journey from Riverrun to Ashford to Storm's End and back to Riverrun, which seems to happen awfully fast despite covering well over a thousand miles (maybe closer to two). Luckily, A CLASH OF KINGS takes place over a longer span than the other books (possibly a year or more), so it works if you squint a bit.