Worldbuilding

In this post, I’d like to give a short introduction to worldbuilding in general, as well as what I aim to do with my Worldbuilding page. To many, the term ‘wordbuilding’ might not be familiar, but many have heard of J.R.R. Tolkien and his Middle-earth. As such, let’s start with him.

Tolkien released The Lord of the Rings starting in 1954. Even today, people who read it are blown away by the depth of it all. However, it was only after his death that much of his “legendarium” became apparent with the release of The Silmarillion in 1977 by Tolkien’s son. That book sketches the history of a universe entirely of Tolkien’s making, called Eä. Within Eä there is Arda (Earth), and within Arda there is the Middle-earth we all know. He wrote many stories detailing the history of his world. As a philologist, he also spent extensive time crafting detailed languages (such as the Elvish languages of Sindarin and Quenya).

Tolkien popularized the modern fantasy genre. He also popularized the idea of creating an entirely unique world and setting multiple stories in it. Unfortunately, he died before he was able to put these stories into a consistent narrative himself. Instead, his son, Cristopher Tolkien, took care of most of that. It is in the tradition of Tolkien that the modern art of (fantasy) worldbuilding developed.

Nowadays, worldbuilding is not just found in high fantasy literature. It is everywhere. The Marvel Cinematic Universe took a lot of worldbuilding, for example. The internet paved the way for a much more detailed form of worldbuilding. As information about how planetary weather systems, geology and history became more accessible, people started making guides on, for example, how to make a plate tectonic system for your world. With digital image editors also becoming widespread, you can now easily create a huge world map, with all the info you can wish for. Computers also make it much easier to neatly store large amounts of documents about your world. All this has revolutionized worldbuilding, making it into a separate hobby today. To illustrate its popularity, take a look at /r/Worldbuilding, which has over 800,000 members.

I started building my current world in 2016, but its roots are older. It incorporates ideas I had and played out when I was just a kid. Since I was easily able to commit them to paper (digitally), I can still use those ideas today.

Finally, building my world has taught me many things, some more useful than others. I hope I can share some of that knowledge.