What if it sounds flat to my other one, my cosmopolitan ear too?
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But isn’t it the war of the roses, too? Funny, because it was the tudors that began the modern colonization of Ireland.
Cartography was never an exacting science until relatively recently.
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I think that they were bad at maps if the goal of said map was geographical accuracy. What if that wasn’t why people in the past made maps?
Thanks, exactly my point.
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Historical maps are as you portray, but the science of cartography is one where fantasy writers tend to fall down in narrative as well as artwork.
It’s common for fantasy protagonists to have access to much more precise cartography than is realistic, and the maps printed in novels are usually portrayed as an accurate representation of the world.
OTOH, the cartography failings of fantasy writers are nowhere near as bad as the biology/ecology/psychology/sociology failures of typical SF writers, so…
Since we’re doing map critique, what do the amateur geologists and ecologists think of this one?
That supports my point that there’s no reason to expect fantasy maps to be geographically realistic by modern standards
The image I posted is some funny meme thing I found and doesn’t mean I literally think they were ‘bad’ at making maps 
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Which tells you something about the world view of writers of fantasy - they expect maps based on accurate cartography, because that’s what they expect from maps. I’d suspect they feel it helps the reader understand what’s happening in the story.
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Yep. But I think @Wanderfound makes a good point about how fantasy maps are written with a modern sense of cartography in mind.
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Copyright clearance would be a nightmare,
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