Stone Intermission

Intermission - Stone of Tears
For this intermission, let's talk about the world Terry Goodkind has created, the world Richard and Kahlan live and adventure in. The world of...
Okay, there's the first problem: the world has no name. Seriously, while individual countries are named, the world itself never is. This is problematic both because it's clumsy to keep referring to “the world of the Sword of Truth novels,” and because I find it hard to believe that none of the cultures in the setting would have coined a term for the place they live in. Heck, Terry Brooks called his fantasy setting “the Four Lands,” which, while not very impressive, is accurate. More importantly, it has a name.
I made a joke in chapter 1 of Wizard's First Rule, referring to the place as “Richard-land.” Looks like that's as close to a name as it gets. Hereafter, it shall be called Dickland.
All right, let's take a look at the map.
The first thing I notice about this map is that there's no scale. The various cities and what-not could be miles apart or hundreds of miles apart. We're told it's several weeks hard ride from the People's Palace to Mud People Village, but that's really not all that helpful...that could mean three weeks, five weeks, two months, anything. A map needs a scale to give any sense of...well, of scale. Looking at this one, I can't tell if it represents an area the size of a US state, a medium-sized country, a small continent, or what.
On a related note, there are no political boundaries marked, no national borders. Cities are represented by a dot – fair enough – but countries are represented by a name floating in a blank area. Take a look at Nicobarese in the upper middle of the map. How large a country is it? Where are its borders? There's literally no way to know.
There are precious few natural features marked as well. There are mountains and rivers, and what I presume to be a sea or huge lake to the south, but aside from that we have no indication as to the terrain. No deserts are marked. There are no forests (despite the fact that Richard's home in the Westland is heavily forested, or so we're told).
I will give partial credit for avoiding any grotesque flaws of geography, such as rivers that go nowhere...but really, if you're going to draw a map, that sort of thing ought to be assumed.
There also seem to be a large number of mountains. Now, Terry Goodkind did seem to realize that mountains typically occur in chains and not scattered around the landscape at random, but...look at that thing. That's a lot of mountains. I'm not sure why there are so many mountains, since they rarely have any impact on the story. Maybe Terry just thought they looked pretty, or wanted to fill up the map with something.
I do have to wonder why anyone would put three huge mountain ranges on their map and only bother to name one of them. The mountains separating the Westland from the Midlands, and those separating the Midlands from D'Hara, are not named. One could argue that they are the “Boundary Mountains,” except that the boundaries went up within living memory. Apparently no one bothered to name these huge mountain ranges. Huh.
There is never any map or mention of the lands beyond, to the east of D'Hara, for example, or in the far north. This isn't a crippling flaw, but it seems kind of odd. For comparison, Tolkien only mapped out the area of Middle-earth that was relevant to the plot of Lord of the Rings, but at least the characters have some idea of what lies beyond their lands. To the southeast are Umbar and Harad; to the north is the Withered Heath, and of course, Valinor lies far west across the sea. Dickland could be off the coast of South Carolina for all we know.
However, what is a serious flaw is that important places the characters visit in the books are also not mapped. Richard travels to the Old World, which is apparently a huge place full of people, yet it is relegated to a tiny corner of the map. And mind you, the Old World is never mapped, despite Richard spending two entire books there.
Finally, a word about the names. There is a strange mix of three types of names on the map: exotic ones like D'Hara and Nicobarese, mundane ones like the Midlands and the Westland, and some that are just plain...wrong. Take, for instance, the town of Southaven, located miles from any sort of haven. Or the village of the Mud People, which, if this map is to be believed, is named “Mud People.”
In conclusion, the map looks like Terry Goodkind sketched in what he needed for his first book, then never bothered to update or improve it.
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