Alpennia: Emergent Geography

[hrj]

By serendipity I’d already been planning to answer the following question from aryanhwy:

Maps. Tolkien once said that you start with a map and then write the story [paraphrased]. I would love to know (a) if you agree and (b) if there is a map of Alpennia and (c) if we’ll ever see it?

And then just yesterday I got the following question on my Goodreads Author page:

Silly question: Where exactly would the fictional nation of Alpennia be located in this universe? I ask (because I have time on my hands and I'm silly like that) because in both Daughter of Mystery and The Mystic Marriage, a route via Marseille is being discussed and I just can't see Austrians travelling that way.

Which isn’t a silly question at all, of course. The short answer to the first set of questions is, “No, sort of, no.” But here’s the longer version.

My understanding of the geography of Alpennia—both internal and in relation to the rest of Europe—emerged as the story developed. In essence, I invented things as I needed them and then reviewed them for internal consistency on a book-by-book basis. Most of the internal geography came out of the needs of the story: the idea of a central capital city, distant enough from the town of Chalanz that it wasn’t a casual journey but neither was it a difficult one. The distance from Rotenek to the Saveze lands needed to be more significant. Other aspects started as arbitrary and then had to be accounted for: a throwaway line in the initial chapters of Daughter of Mystery established that Saveze was in a mountainous region, and then this was elaborated later. Once the action moved to Rotenek, I had to lay out the internal structure of the city in a bit more detail, at least in terms of relative positions. And more to the point, I had to have a good idea of the city layout so that even throwaway references would all be consistent with each other. But there are still a lot of details, especially for the broader countryside, that are vague in my mind.

I’ve come to the point where I need to review all the geographic references in the existing books (and the needs of the current and future stories) and draw them up in something relatively fixed for my own use. Exactly where is Turinz located? And what are its neighbors? What are the factors that affect the navigability of the Rotein downstream from Rotenek, and how will they be affected by water levels? When the Rotein floods, which parts of the city will be under water, and by how much? (Oh, oops … I mean if the Rotein floods!) I’ve been holding all this loosely suspended in my imagination, but I’ve started to find myself almost falling into contradictions. (Is Helviz north of Rotenek or east?)

Similarly, with much of the action in Mother of Souls and Floodtide taking place in the western part of the city, I’m starting to feel the need for a much more detailed city plan, with the locations of various people’s homes noted, and the courses of the canulezes --the smaller channeled tributaries of the Rotein that fall within the city walls, as well as the man-made transport canals.

But I’m not going to make these maps public. In that, I tend to follow MZB’s philosophy regarding Darkover: “I might need to put a city there some day!” I know that my current knowledge of Alpennian geography is fuzzy and incomplete. But if I publish a map, then I’m locking in not only the known parts, but the unknown parts. Maybe someday when the series is complete.

With regard to the relationship of Alpennia to the rest of Europe, the question is both easier and more difficult. When I decided to set my story in a “Ruritania”—an invented country inserted into the existing map—it was to give myself a sandbox where I could play with social and legal history without worrying about being “wrong”. But the consequence of this is that it’s not possible to point out on a map where the borders of Alpennia run, because it’s inserted in between existing countries without replacing them.

So the most I’m willing to say outright is that Alpennia borders on France, Italy, and Switzerland, but probably not directly on Germany. It has no seaport, but the Rotein is sufficiently navigable that there’s a thriving foreign trade using it, that necessarily passes through France (with all the complications and annoyances that has meant in the past). Travel to the east or southeast involves mountain passes and is restricted pretty much to the summer and fall. Travel to the west involves France, but there’s sufficient hand-wavy geography that Alpennia has, historically, managed to avoid simply being incorporated. Travel to the north or north-east goes through the mountains in summer or skirts them awkwardly by bad roads the rest of the year.

The Goodreads’ questioner’s concern about travel between Alpennia and Austria (which, recall, are separated at the very least by Switzerland or northern Italy, depending on the precise route) is very much contingent on the time of year and weather. When the Austrian party is traveling to Alpennia toward the end of Daughter of Mystery the question is whether they will come before the passes close or whether they would need to travel much farther out of their way once winter sets in. Similarly, when Kreiser becomes persona non grata temporarily in mid-winter in The Mystic Marriage, his return to Vienna couldn’t be by the more direct route, hence the speculation that he might have gone downriver and taken ship at Marseilles (with further options for getting past the Italian peninsula and so forth, but that doesn’t concern me). Conversely, when Frances Colfield, the English botonist, finds herself in Saveze accidentally during a summer specimen-collection trip in The Mystic Marriage, she had started out in Switzerland and (it is implied) strayed over by mountain trackways that might reasonably be hiked from village to village. And similarly, Kreiser's clandestine (and definitely deliberate) visit to Saveze that summer was by the ordinary Alpine route that would be the most direct one.

All in all, you can see why I’d rather be vague and fuzzy about just where the borders lie, exactly what the Rotein joins up with further downstream to feed into the Mediterranean, and so forth. A linguistic detective might be able to make certain guesses about what parts of our existing map have echo-duplicates in Alpennia. (Though when I mine ancient place-names in that area for Alpennian forms, I rarely attempt to stick to actual relative locations.) The one give-away I’ll offer is that the name of the Rotein is related linguistically to that of the Rhone. But this, of course, means nothing in terms of identity, as we know from all the European rivers named with cognates of the Danube.

Comments

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

I concluded very early on (on linguistic cues) that Alpennia was near the Languedoc. The references to mountains put it adjacent to either Switzerland or the Basque region, and explicit references to other countries made the former more likely.

Of course, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick is also tucked between France and Switzerland, and it speaks English with no hint of Occitan :-)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

It is always an underlying purpose in my writing to give readers fun puzzles to work out. (Some day I hope to have someone present me with a linguistic analysis of the Kaltaoven language as presented in snippets in the skin-singer stories. It will be drastically incomplete because the stories are much too short to indulge in more than a few tastes. But still…)

[vnend.livejournal.com]

I love the scenery there. That's a big part of why I watch the Tour de France coverage each year; the views of the Alps (and Pyrenees).

Countryside built for drama.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

At some point, I really should do a "research" tour of the approximate region where Alpennia sits. (I've done a lot of online browsing, but it isn't the same.)

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I enjoyed reading this quite a bit.