At this point, I’d moved back to MS paint, and had grown so technologically adept that I actually learned to change fonts in an image. Here’s the third version of the map, and the last one I drew myself. But, then, I only needed to know where the important noblemen were in relation to each other.Īnother one you’ll have to click on to see. This, obviously, was far too simplistic and didn’t include enough of the nobility.

Though that may seem like another continent, it’s actually a close up on Arelon, depicting the division of land in the kingdom between the various lords.

The mountains are just a squiggle, and it’s very confusing as to what line is pointing to what. I named the countries, placed them where they needed to be, and moved Teod over to the West. At this point, I didn’t even bother with the advanced power of MS Paint I just “drew” the map in Microsoft Word, using their drawing functions.Īt this point, I began to figure out some specific political geography. That’s a screenshot of my second version of the map. This one is hard to read unless you click on it for the larger version. This changed very quickly as I began writing.

Note that in this preliminary sketch, Teod was up in the Northeast, and Arelon was kind of bulged. Arelon is to the West, with mountains in the middle. This was only intended as reference for me, giving me an idea of what the continents looked like. I made very liberal use of that spraycan tool, eh? And, at this stage in my life, I only had MS Paint. This is the first image I ever did for Elantris-I do all of my maps on the computer, rather than drawing them by hand. Realize, however, that I never intended these to be seen by anyone other than myself.

It’s a good thing I turned out to be a much better writer than I did an artist. For a lot of these maps, you’ll need to click on them to see the larger version to make out a lot of the detail. I recently managed to track down some very old versions of the map, and thought it would be fun to show the map in all of its various stages. The map for Elantris has come a long way. Warning! This essay contains some spoilers for the book! If you haven’t read Elantris, I’d suggest reading the introduction to the book instead.

Elantris audible