There be dragons

Reflecting on the genesis of Treasure Island, the adventure yarn that grew from a map of an exotic isle he had drawn to amuse a bored schoolboy on a rainy day, Robert Louis Stevenson observed: ‘I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find that hard to believe.’ It’s fair to say that Thomas Reinertsen Berg cares very deeply about them, and his book, sumptuously produced with lots of full-colour images, is a kind of potted treasury of cartographical history that gleams with pieces-of-eight-like snippets of information.

With a title that tips its hat to Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas produced by the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius in 1570, Thomas Reinertsen Berg’s approach is both impressively global and touchingly parochial, as his native Norway and Scandinavia in general often and unashamedly take centre stage in the narrative. (A note in the foreword explains that the book has to a certain extent been de-Norwegianised for the English edition.)

But it is, in a sense, a work of thoughtfulness that could only really come from someone who hails from a part of the world that was either off the global map entirely or the victim of some decidedly wayward speculations by cartographers. He notes, for instance, that if the Hereford Mappa Mundi, created in about 1300, contains possibly the first convincing representation of a ski trail, certain areas at the northern extremities are still shown to be inhabited by ‘people with dog heads’.

Norway, you come to appreciate, has in any case been a tricky country to map. For a start, there’s its basic geography, the coastline and all those mountains, rivers and fjords. And then it was a Danish colony for more than 400 years and after that spent close to a century shackled to Sweden.