Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age Maps

[deuce]

Today seemed a good day to start this thread. Here is a quality scan of REH's 1936 map. By that time, he was basically done with writing Conan yarns. It contains the most detail of the three surviving maps he drew.

[Deleted]

Here are the scans of the Robert E. Howard's earlier maps from the first volume of Conan (Del Rey/Wandering Star) 1932-1933

[deuce]

Thanks for posting those, Hun.   

[deuce]

Al Harron looks at the REH maps:


theblogthattimeforgot.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/hyborian-musings-mappa-mundi.html


He talks about Scotty Henderson nailing down REH's source map, as well as plotting the REH maps onto a globe. Cool stuff, for Hyborian Age cartography fans.  

[crkrueger]

The map at the end of the link you posted, Deuce, shows the Barachans being an island extension of the Rabirans, which makes perfect sense. However, the Poitanian mountains basically go to the Zingaran coast, which means both the Black and Thunder Rivers cut through those ranges on their way to the sea. Water gaps are a known phenomenon, whether you want to attribute them to glacial movement, or whatever, and Howard's world has enough Cataclysms and powerful ancient sorcerous races that anomalous geology shouldn't be difficult to buy.

My question though is, does anyone know of any REH source that points directly to the Poitanian Mtns extending to the Zingaran coast or not?

Here's the map I'm talking about embedded...

SPOILER: Click to show

[deuce]

Oct 24, 2016 19:28:18 GMT -5 crkrueger said:

The map at the end of the link you posted, Deuce, shows the Barachans being an island extension of the Rabirans, which makes perfect sense. However, the Poitanian mountains basically go to the Zingaran coast, which means both the Black and Thunder Rivers cut through those ranges on their way to the sea. Water gaps are a known phenomenon, whether you want to attribute them to glacial movement, or whatever, and Howard's world has enough Cataclysms and powerful ancient sorcerous races that anomalous geology shouldn't be difficult to buy.

My question though is, does anyone know of any REH source that points directly to the Poitanian Mtns extending to the Zingaran coast or not?

Here's the map I'm talking about embedded...

SPOILER: Click to show

Hey CRK!

I did not link to that post because of this "experiment" map by Al. It's virtually useless. While it does "map" in certain cases, there are even more instances where it directly contradicts the REH texts. Those contradictions can't be explained away by "glaciers" in most instances. Quite simply, the cataclysm that followed the Hyborian Age changed the map. in some cases, lands were raised up. In others, mountains were cast down. Modern day "equivalents" to HA geography are nice, but they shouldn't "lead" us to any conclusions. Al is known for whimsical stuff.

There is nothing in the REH texts that truly says one way or another that the Black and Thunder rivers cut through mountains. Personally, I doubt it.

[crkrueger]

I knew you were pointing out the other maps, that last one just stuck in my mind since it had the mountains separating Zingara from the Pictish Forests, which I've seen in some maps, and not others.

The biggest surprise of the maps in that link is that once you know what map Howard used to trace his original Hyborian maps, then you realize the Vilayet doesn't run straight north to south longitudinally, it cuts at a pretty good angle, going from roughly Tehran to east of the Urals. It's at least a good 30 degrees angle from straight up and down, which is what most maps depict.

[deuce]

Oct 27, 2016 22:23:05 GMT -5 crkrueger said:

The biggest surprise of the maps in that link is that once you know what map Howard used to trace his original Hyborian maps, then you realize the Vilayet doesn't run straight north to south longitudinally, it cuts at a pretty good angle, going from roughly Tehran to east of the Urals. It's at least a good 30 degrees angle from straight up and down, which is what most maps depict.

Yeah, Halfdane and Scotty Henderson, especially, did some very cool work tracking down the source map and with mapping the HA maps onto globes. Having done Thurian Age maps, I know that 2-D maps always distort. Only globes give an accurate idea of geographical placement and size. Mapping/cartography is a very arcane science when you start getting beyond the micro level. Whether REH realized that is hard to say.


It would be beyond awesome to have a Howardian globe of Hyborian Age Earth. 

[thatericn]

Oct 28, 2016 9:51:55 GMT -5 deuce said:

Oct 27, 2016 22:23:05 GMT -5 crkrueger said:

The biggest surprise of the maps in that link is that once you know what map Howard used to trace his original Hyborian maps, then you realize the Vilayet doesn't run straight north to south longitudinally, it cuts at a pretty good angle, going from roughly Tehran to east of the Urals. It's at least a good 30 degrees angle from straight up and down, which is what most maps depict.

Yeah, Halfdane and Scotty Henderson, especially, did some very cool work tracking down the source map and with mapping the HA maps onto globes. Having done Thurian Age maps, I know that 2-D maps always distort. Only globes give an accurate idea of geographical placement and size. Mapping/cartography is a very arcane science when you start getting beyond the micro level. Whether REH realized that is hard to say.


It would be beyond awesome to have a Howardian globe of Hyborian Age Earth. 

A globe would also help cure, I think/hope the weird truncating of proto-Africa, that happens so often in pastiche maps, and to a lesser extent, Asia.  Other globes would have been great to see, including a Thurian Age one, spelling out the location of so many places we all just guess at.

[theironshadow]

Sorry if this is off topic, but i was discussing Conan and Hyboria in general with friend's on saturday night, and was asked when Conan's yarn's actually take place. I suggested that effectively my perception of it is that the millenia Conan tales place in is around about 16'000BC or thereabouts, perhaps a thousand years before the Great Cataclysm...

[sorcerer]

Wikipedia has this:

Most later editors and adaptors such as L. Sprague de Camp and Roy Thomas placed the Hyborian Age around 10,000 BC. More recently, Dale Rippke proposed that the Hyborian Age should be placed further in the past, around 32,500 BC, prior to the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum. Rippke's date, however, has since been disputed by Jeffrey Shanks, who argues for the more traditional placement at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum.

Although many readers may not particularly care, no date is really very satisfying. Human behavioral modernity began something like 50,000 BC, but Asians and Europeans hadn't even separated until approximately 40,000 BC, and the distinctive appearance of various peoples took time to arise, so the Hyborean Age can't be earlier than about 30,000 BC. Yet agriculture hadn't begun until 10,000 BC, and cities didn't begin to arise until 6000 BC. A recent date near 5000 BC would seem necessary to fit all these facts - but we also need a devastating cataclysm to wrack the world between then and now, lowering the global sea level, so... 24,000 BC? And there were totally cities, and money had been around for centuries, so they had writing, and metallurgy advanced to the level of the iron age, and it was all forgotten about and lost and buried when the sea levels rose and nobody found any evidence of it anywhere.

(On the other hand, when you look at how well Hodgson's The Night Land stood up to recent scientific advances, Howard's Hyboria starts to look pretty good.)

[zarono]

I'm not sure where DeCamp got 10,000 BC but I think Lovecraft may have been the first speculate on the date of the Hyborian Age in print with this reference in the 1936 story "The Shadow Out of Time":
 "I talked with the mind---of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000"
I don't know if Lovecraft had spoken with Howard about the timeline (good question to ask of the folks who specialize in HPL and REH's correspondence or if he just came up with the number on his own.

 As side note HPL also references REH's Kull tales in this story too when Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee is listing all the minds he has spoken to:
 "Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia"

[1F409]

Are these attempts at creating an Hyborian Age globe available somewhere? What is the status of the effort? It sounds like the parties involved understand the geometry of mapping, as well as the maps Howard traced from, and so with today's computers it should be a snap to formulate the most accurate interpretation yet. Essentially, I anticipate that every bump and fiber and smudge of Howard's original maps can now be matched to coordinates in some shape or form. I've seen some impressive results from the Middle-Earth DEM Project, using Outerra to programmatically generate realistic landscapes from height maps, which makes me wonder whether such a procedure could work here, perhaps using the fluctuations in Howard's paper and ink to numerically tease out a different landscape from an actual map of Earth.

Edit:

Here's my layman's conception of how it would work:

Obviously, scan Howard's maps as finely as possible. Then play with contrast and such to bring out a meaningful level of difference. Now you have something akin to a height map, albeit not representative of anything in particular -- i.e., no Hyborian landmarks, just random height data.

Optionally, interpolate that map data with actual height maps of Earth. Even with the lightest touch, it might provide useful numerical results, lending the Hyborian data a vague similarity with the world to come.

There will be two critical issues with the Hyborian map. First is a lack of any significant sign of mountains. Second is the presence of superfluous data, such Howard's traced overlay of the real world. In situations where Hyborian national borders coincide with where mountain ranges are mentioned, the "contrast" in the vicinity can be manually raised along the appropriate vectors, effectively drawing upward the height map as if plucking at a bed sheet. Likewise, where rivers are, it can be manually lowered.

The result will be a height map given significant granularity by Howard's own mostly-whitespace paper map, with select intervention to correct for obvious flaws in the method.

This is all just off the cuff, but I hope you can see where I'm going with it.