Christopher Paolini Discusses the Map of Alagaësia

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Transcript:

I was digging through some of my old sketches and stuff and I pulled this out. This is actually the very first version of Alagaësia that I drew. This was one page and, as you can see, most of the major features are in place. We have the Spine, we have the ocean, we have Vroengard island—although it wasn’t called that so far.

And this is what I used as the map when I was maybe a third of the way into Eragon. I realized I needed a map and drew this. The problem is, as I continued to write, I realized that this wasn’t big enough. I was running out of room for my story. So I grabbed a bigger piece of paper and I did this. Now, as you can see, I didn’t really know what was out in the east, so I just put those giant peaks there and just scribbled them in where the forest Du Weldenvarden ended up. And it was actually when I did that that I started asking myself, “Gee, what if the mountains really were that big?” But, of course, I wasn’t really pleased with the arrangement of features in this map in the east. It was just too sketchy and it needed work. It needed work, so this was another intermediate map.

Then, I did what became the finished map. And this I did with ballpoint pen, in two pieces. And we have all of our finished features here. I actually think there might have been another intermediate sketch map around somewhere. I’ll have to dig it up. But this got all the main features, some of the names ended up changing from here to the published version, but I did all the lettering by hand as well.

After I finished this, I went ahead and decided that I wanted to do an old time-y pirate map, almost, for Alagaësia. And this was the beginning of that. Now I never actually finished this, as you can see. This was pencil, not pen. I still really like the feel of this map, and I would love to finish it off one of these days for a special edition of some kind. The only problem is drawing all of those little mountains just takes forever. So we’ll see. One of these days I may go back to that and finish it off.

But that’s kind of the evolution that Alagaësia went through and the maps went through.