Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings

3 : Borders and Boundaries

68 3 : Borders and Boundaries J ust like the actual world, all reasonably complex secondary worlds are divided into areas of various kinds. Divisions may be geographical or administrative in nature, with areas demarcated by, for instance , rivers, mountain ranges, beaches, hedges, ditches, dykes, or simply lines on a map. Crossing from one area into another may be fraught with peril, unexciting, or barely if at all noticeable. In fantasy settings, whether primary or secondary worlds, other kinds of divisions and types of areas occur as well.Two areas, while side by side geographically, can have quite different rules for how—for instance— time, space, and causality work. A day in one place might be a year on the other side of the wall. In the middle of snowcapped mountains, there might be a valley of eternal summer. The magic power to change one’s environment inside the forest might simply be superstitious nonsense outside. This chapter is devoted to an investigation of how demarcations between such dissimilar areas—domains—are constructed, how they reflect the domains on either side, and what their relevance is to the worlds where they occur. In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the editors settle for threshold as the preferred term for the various dividing lines of fantasy landscapes and stories. The critic behind the “Threshold” article, John Clute, distinguishes between “physical” and “metaphorical” thresholds. The former type of threshold, the type relevant in this context, marks a “gradient between two places or states of being.”1 Although it would be possible to split hairs and wonder if a threshold is not, in fact, a line rather than a gradient, and to observe that in many cases, including the examples that follow, places and states of being are conflated, Clute’s is a succinct and to-the-point definition. Clute proceeds to list four functions of the physical thresholds. First, they “normally form the spines of borderlands, demarcating regions which borderlands join together.” A borderland, he notes elsewhere, serves as a “marker, resting place or toll-gate be- BordErS aNd BouNdarIES 69 tween two differing kinds of reality.”2 Presumably, Clute’s “normally” is not intended to imply that this is the most common function of a physical threshold in fantasy (I would find that hard to agree with) but that borderlands generally (“normally”) have a physical threshold as a defining feature around which they are situated. The function would thus be dual, both separating and joining two regions of different realities. The second function of the physical threshold is to “announce the presence, or intrusion, of a crosshatch,” that is, a place where “two or more worlds may simultaneously inhabit the same territory.”3 This function is clearly connected to the first (thresholds as spines of borderlands), in that borderlands often provide a strip-like crosshatch region.4 Third, physical thresholds “constitute the perimeter of polders.” And finally, “for those of peculiar talents, they may comprise a map of the land.”5 Land in this context is taken to mean “a secondary-world venue whose nature and fate are central to the plot: a land is not a protagonist, but has an analogous role.”6 If the third function is the most clear-cut, the fourth is the most puzzling; neither Roz Kaveney’s cross-referenced entry on “Maps” nor David Langford’s on “Talents” offers much in the way of enlightenment .7 The term threshold is undeniably versatile when taken as described in the Encyclopedia. As a word, however, threshold implies not only a dividing line but also the intended crossing of such a line. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the figurative meaning of threshold as “the line which one crosses in entering,”8 and Clute’s remark that a threshold “may not even be meant to be liminal, or passable”9 only serves to broaden an already broad blanket term. For all the usefulness of threshold as a term, the geographical focus of this discussion requires it to be complemented by two more specific terms: border and boundary. A border corresponds to the first two functions of the physical threshold. It is a line (or gradient ) that separates two places or areas, and it differs from a boundary in that the latter implies a perimeter or circumference. In other words, you can be on either side of a border, but inside or outside a boundary. A polder, for example, is surrounded by its boundary, while two adjacent domains are separated by a border...