Idyllic Arcadia: rolling hills, stands of trees, sparkling streams, lambs frisking in the springtime, fields of crops. . . a likely location for the hero to grow up. Unusually enough, you don't often get this as a bad landscape in fantasy, a countryside filled with ignorant, surly, willfully insular country bumpkins, though it appears in other genre. The closest is the uninteresting backdrop to battles and campaigns in military stories. Otherwise, once the hero grows up he tends to leave. Often treated as a natural setting, ignoring the enormous effects agriculture and pasture have on the landscape.
The forest has several variations. On one hand, if the hero knows it, and particularly if it's where he grew up, it tends not to have magic; if it's somewhere he happens on the way, on the other hand, it can hold marvels -- it can be replete with marvels. And it can run the range from a comfortable refuge, through a strange, deep, ancient labyrinth of trees, to the utterly evil forest, radiating evil and populated by twisted trees and abominable monsters.
Though the later version often merges into the swamp, which is always evil, though often, oddly enough, passable.
The ancient city with its winding streets and fountains and towers, and walls. And magic. Many a hero grows up here, and when he does, often enough, he stays. And why not? The city is also the place of intrigue and politics, and heroes and villains can operate here without ever finding the stage cramped. Though the city can also be a way station, especially for characters from elsewhere, where they stop to consult the Wise King or the Sage. Or have a siege. Obviously the best location for it, since it has the walls. And deep underneath is a labyrinth of passages and rooms. Sometimes verging on an underworld.
The wasteland. This may be a desert, but not by nature. The barren place, where thorns are the only thing that grows, the haunt of goblins and other unpleasant beasties, kept withered and unpleasant by the malign presence of the Dark Lord.
What are some of the settings you remember best? Do you recall other archetypal settings prevalent in your reading?
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I spent a lot of childhood pretending to live in the world of giant trees that was Greensky, from Zilpha Keatley Snyder's trilogy (Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration). And I liked the landscape of Lawrence Yep's Sweetwater, a half-submerged city.
Edited at 2010-02-13 02:54 pm (UTC)
Fritz Leiber's decadent and corrupt Lankhmar in all its wretched squalor becomes a character in its own right in Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
These are two of my favorite memorable and diverse settings.
Hmmm. Except that what I really remember about Watership Down is the Orwellian warren.
According to the research and work done there it would appear that the world's pre-human state was far more open than we think it was. In other words, when Tolkien's Noldorin awoke for the first time, it was beneath wide open skies with stands of trees in the distance, and they shared their world with bison and lion instead of fox and squirrel. :)
The dense forest, as in America's eastern woodland? The result of human interference. Before Man came herds of wisent and mastodon kept the land mostly clear, and herds of white tail roamed. What Man did after the mastodon were driven extinct was use fire as a substitute for the great beasts, but imperfectly. The modern white tail is largely a solitary animal not because the condition is natural to them, but because the land they live on is too densely vegetated to allow herding.
The Wikipedia page also mentions other re-wilding sites; such as in Siberia, where scientists hope to recreate the mixed grassland and woods pre-human Siberia was known for.
How do you see goblins, elves, and gnomes developing in a veldt as on the east African plains?
Then you have the wildlife reserve I mentioned above, where they found geese cropping down most everything growing. So effectively the silly beasts almost denuded the land. In the eastern US deer are known for munching on seedlings to the point forest cannot get established where it hasn't been, or re-established where it once was. The world aint always as we think it is.
And there's a difference between destroying trees and destroying a forest.
As for destroying a forest, a few deer won't do it, but when they reach into the thousands it becomes a much different story. As somebody once said, "quantity has a quality all its own."
'Sides, think of the possibilities. :)
Besides, thousands of deer means lots and lots of wolves and panthers and mountain lions -- and no more thousands of deers.
Imagine an elven kingdom established ages ago in a world of veldt and savannah. A kingdom of pastoral nomads, riverside farmers, and marshland dwellers. A kingdom where the elves ride tough, hardscrabble horses tending red deer in great herds, while their cousins hunt elk in the scattered woods.
It is a harsh world, of harsh winters and near constant wars; for the elves are in a state of near constant feuding, when they're not using their skills and their magics to keep humans, goblins, and dwarfs alike in check. For the elves have long memories, and hold grudges and spites for a very long time.
Imagine elves who follow the way of the horse and the bow. Elves who dance with the wind, and lay out their dead for vulture and crow to take. Imagine elven convocations in tent cities that shiver with magic and color, and any oath sworn by the Huntsman and the Mare is upheld to the death.
Imagine a nation under threat by other peoples, peoples who think they know how the world should be. Imagine a race who long ago learned to accept the world as it is, but now face extinction from enemies who either will not understand, or who cannot understand.
Learning means having to change how you see the world. But it need not make the new world something to dread and avoid.
Nantucket as depicted Nightbirds of Nantucket, by Joan Aiken. (Although not as well depicted as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase the image of a Puritan woman in a black frock running along a massive cannon stuck with me. It doesn't hurt that I have relatives on that island.)
The Shadowlands of Tad Williams new series. The idea of a moving line of shadow? Creepy.
So many places in Lord of the Rings ring true and deep. I think it's a combination of the names and the understated way in which he seizes the imagination wholly and utterly.
The cold and frozen world of Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger as well as his world-girdling forest of Midgard.
An ancient yet Nordic world with a massive fortress, dark and dim, and yet ancient shores of battle and Valkyries? All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear.
Alien ribs curling over piles of stone and train-tracks, rife with magic, insect headed women and talking cacti? One cannot escape the incredible savor of China Mieviell's Perdido Street Station. Not to mention the ocean-going archipelago of ships in The Scar.
The coal-burnt brass-girdled environs of London enveloped in dust and alien conquest: Whitechapel Gods
Ah, I fear I am getting far afield. Let me draw closer to true fantasy. I would have to say that the seaborn feel of Ursula K. LeGuin's excellent Earthsea trilogy never tires.
Hard upon its heels though - I read them less than a year apart IIRC - is the cold world of black fortresses and rare wizards as seen in Barbara Hambly's Darwath series.
No taxonomy would be complete without consider the Land. There is a place where one might feel transported. Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, standing upon Stormreach, and surveying the Land? Yes, I want to believe.
There must be many more. I think the supply of worlds and settings that engage our imagination is limitless.