After a bit of a break, I’m easing back into the mapping game with this quick map based on Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry, a high fantasy trilogy published in the 1980s.
The trilogy consists of the novels The Summer Tree (1984), The Wandering Fire (1986) and The Darkest Road (1986) and was Kay’s debut solo work. His previous work in the fantasy field had been assisting Christopher Tolkien in editing The Silmarillion for publication in 1977, so Kay came into the field with rather more impressive credentials than most fantasy authors.
The Fionavar Tapestry sees several Canadian students summoned to the magical world of Fionavar, where the kingdoms are under threat from a dark lord, Rakoth Maugrim. The students find themselves taken on new guises and powers in this world, even re-enacting ideals from other mythologies (one of the students finds herself fulfilling the role of Guinevere in a revamp of the Arthurian legend) before the final great battle is fought.
Kay’s later work has been much more rooted in real history, with an arguably declining level of magic in his later novels. He’s also, remarkably, never written a trilogy again, with the closest being his Sarantine Mosaic duology. Fionavar did get a sequel of sorts, however, with Ysabel (2007), a fantasy novel set in our world which is mostly self-contained, but does feature several characters from the earlier trilogy.
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