With my fifth (Tales of Brannhår in Niðavellir)  and seventh books ( working title : Pavane for the lost magic) {yet to be published} the concept required that it be set in an entirely different world: in fact, an afterlife. I couldn't rely on my reader having any foreknowledge about it and so I had to start with something which was at least fairly generic. The world is a real planetary system but it mirrors the ancient home of the Dwarves.   I will attempt to show how I played with geology, geomorphology, climate systems, ecological systems, flora and fauna, anthropology, sociology and the like just to provide a (mostly believable) location for the story. It was educational and I even threw in some fractals to draw the maps.

As the stories have developed I needed more and more details about the creatures and societies that inhabited the world. With the advent of book seven the world is getting much more complex. I have to continually update the website to keep up: particularly in creating the history of the planet before the Dwarves arrived.

Before We Start

 Creating a different world starts with some fundamentals; In reality the dialogue, vocabulary and commonplace items of a completely different world would be nothing like English. However, writing the book in Dwarfish Runes  wouldn't attract many readers. Hence, in common with many other authors I have used English terms, names and concepts to tell the story. In keeping with the underlying Mythology, I use terms that that might have originated in the language of the Scandinavian and/or Icelandic regions.

 Cosmology and Geography

Svartalfheim (or in Old Norse: “Niðavellir : pronounced Ni-tha-vell -eer) was one of the nine worlds mentioned in Norse mythology. It is the realm of the dwarves.

The nine worlds exist in one of the fifty six possible three dimensional projections of an eight dimensional physical space which included our own world (Midgard). Each of the nine worlds were inter-dimensionally linked together forming a small pocket universe.

In mythical times these worlds began to separate and, as the local dimensions stabilised, the worlds condensed to have a more mundane cosmology. The original dwarf settlers migrated to one of the more stable solar systems along with other species and races that had grown tired of their noisy, warlike neighbours: the Norse gods (both sets), the giants and the elves.

New Svartalfheim is now in a planetary system with a binary star. It is more massive than earth although its diameter is smaller. It has seven tiny moons which have little influence on the system. The binary star and the high gravity make its weather systems tempestuous. The tidal forces exerted by the twin star also make its core highly active with the result that the land masses are covered with geothermal features; volcanos, geysers, hot springs, vents etc.

The southern hemisphere is taken up by a huge ocean and one single supercontinent-sized land mass that ranges from the equator to the southern polar region. The dwarves call this continent Frábært Suðurúrgangur or the great Southern waste. The western coast of this continent is lined with mountains caused by tectonic activity where it meets the ocean. A peculiarity of the world’s axial tilt and its precession around the binary orbit causes the prevailing wind in the southern continent to always circulate west to east. This makes the southern continent a place of flat stone deserts sheltered behind a massively wide mountain range with dense jungles along its western coastline. The jungle receives most of the continent’s rain hence the interior of the continent is lashed by fierce dry winds.

The highly dense core of Svartalfheim creates a magnetic field much stronger than the earth’s. Combined with the binary suns and the large axial tilt, this makes Svartalfheim’s skies produce an intense aurora during hours of darkness. These aurora can be seen over the whole planetary surface.

Svartalfheim also has a unique feature, one that can only properly be appreciated from space. It is called the gouge. At some point in the early prehistory of the planet just after it solidified Svartalfheim was struck a glancing blow by a comet. The comet plunged through the thin atmosphere which was mostly methane and ammonia at that stage but it only grazed the planetary surface. The result was that it gouged out an enormous shallow groove flanked by twin parallel mountain ranges. Over the millions of years since the event, this became a shallow sea flanked by low lying islands. The sea between them is now home to innumerable banks and shoals which house gigantic floating mats of plant life. These plants cover a vast area of the planet and they act as the major source of oxygen that sustains life. The banks and shoals shift so often that crossing the gouge by sea is almost impossible for ships with deep keels.

Designing a world, or in this case a picture of a world can be a little bit daunting. There are numerous 'design yourself a map' apps out there but none would exactly do what I wanted. As usual I ended up using a hybrid of techniques. Each island (even the tiny ones) is a fractal outline with the geography eroded into it using some of my own software. The islands are then coloured first by contour filling automatically and then by adding final touches by hand... I needed detail because it was necessary to get a feel for the distances my characters would have to travel on their adventures. Then I assembled the islands /continents into a world and added ice caps and oceans. Finally I used some 'free software' provided by NASA ( G.projector)* to plot my map onto a globe. 

* For info: G.projector can transform any image into any one of a few hundred different map types... the example files include a topographic map of mars... It's worth a look.