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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoNo Old Maps Actually Say 'Here Be Dragons' - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic2013-12-12T22:42:50+00:00
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/no-old-maps-actually-say-here-be-dragons/282267/
robertogrecoIt must at least pre-date the publication of Dorothy L. Sayers' short story "The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head" in Lord Peter Views the Body (London: Gollancz, 1928), in which a character refers to having seen "hic dracones" on an old map [spotted by both Andrew S. Cook and Benjamin Darius Weiss]. Does it pre-date the publication of the text of the LenoxGlobe in 1879? Why dragons, and not one of the other terrifying creatures depicted on old maps?
The final answer, Blake writes, may be just this: “We don’t know.”
Maybe it’s this: Those famous words served as a warning to the map’s original users and a kind of flourish from the map’s artisan makers. To us, they seem to comment both on the travails of the terrain (“We don’t know what’s here!”) and about the dangers of ignorance (“There might as well be dragons in this unknown spot!”).
Now, we use here be dragons to name our novels full of knights and kings, our treatises on fantastic maps, and even our investigations into extraterrestrial life. The words remind us how different our modern-day map-making is: Shot from cameras in the sky, and available on every smart phone, maps are ubiquitous and photographic, and, the creatures they catalog are too small to see."]]>robinsonmeyer maps mapping history 2013 cartography monsters herebedragons globes erinblake fantasyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2f64f58dd9f1/