Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm living in Brasil and have no way to find the Stephen King's Dark Tower world map.
I can see parts of this map by googling, but not the entire map:
This map may represent the entire world (refered by the books), but is not where the fragments I show (more detailed) came from.
There are a bunch more maps in that same style on the Dark Tower wiki, including the one at http://darktower.wikia.com/wiki/File:Barony_of_New_Canaan.jpg -- I did a reverse google image search for that one to find similar images on other sites (to do a reverse search you just have to click the camera icon in the search bar on the image search page), and I came across a page at http://creativevisions.scificincinnati.com/gunslinger_born_1_page.html which shows that this map comes from the first of the Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born comics. So, I would guess that all the images from the wiki in the same artistic style come from those comics (whose different titles are listed in the article here announcing the release of the Dark Tower Omnibus which collects the entire comics series), probably not part of a single giant map since many of the wiki images have borders around them (like this one of Hambry that you included in your original question).
Also, one of the reviews on the amazon page for the Dark Tower Omnibus mentions that it comes in two volumes, the first volume constains the main story of the comics while the second is devoted to supplementary materials (that might have been published in installments in the original comics issues):
The second volume in the set collects all the material that has previously been left out of the graphic novel releases of the Dark Tower. Each of the original comics featured a chapter of the story and then a brief essay on Roland's world by Robin Furth. This volume collects these essays together for the first time. Also collected for the first time are the Gunslingers Guidebook, the End-World Almanac, the Guide to Gilead, Marvel Spotlight: Dark Tower, and the Dark Tower Sketch book. Added to this are more than a hundred pages of sketches with commentary.
The End-World Almanac and the Guide to Gilead seem like the most likely spots that maps would be included (one of the reviews on Guide to Gilead mentions that the Barony of New Canaan is one of the locations highlighted, so it wouldn't surprise me if that first map I linked to would be found in that section).
There isn't a comprehensive canonical map of All-World1, but the closest we can get may be Bev Vincent's map from his book The Dark Tower Companion:
However, Vincent admits that even this map is partially unreliable:
NOTES CONCERNING THE MAP OF MID-WORLD:
This map assembles the known geography of Mid-World. Few distances are known, so the scale is arbitrary and probably wildly different in different parts of the map.
The biggest problem is this: if there is a Beam that goes due north, there cannot be a Beam that goes southwest. Since the Beams are arranged like the hours on a clock, that means there are two in the northwest quadrant. One runs from the eleven o’clock position south-southeast toward the Dark Tower, and the other runs from the ten o’clock position east-southeast.2
For a long time, the relative placement of Gilead was unknown, but in The Wind Through the Keyhole we learn that Tree is on or near the Beam of the Lion that ends in the north, and that Tree is north of Gilead.
After Roland saves the Beams, he believes that Shardik’s Beam has snapped into an eastward direction, which might lead one to assume it was the one that begins in the ten o’clock position. However, we also learn that the Western Rail Line used to run from Gilead through Debaria all the way to the Mohaine Desert. This is possible only if the Mohaine, which is south of Shardik’s Beam, is relatively far north. Closer to eleven o’clock than ten o’clock, in other words. This also means that Roland crossed only one Path of the Beam before reaching Tull, and not two. How he ended up near the Western Sea without reaching it before he visited Pricetown is another mystery.
There are other issues. According to Roland, the Western Sea used to be only a thousand miles from Gilead. We have only his word on this point, and there’s a lot about Mid-World that he doesn’t know. The distance from Lud to Topeka is around eight thousand miles, and this is only a segment of Shardik’s Beam. Mid-World has expanded a great deal if both pieces of data are accepted as fact.
We also know that the Arc of the Callas extends all the way to the region where the snow falls. That means Roland must have crossed it at some point. Perhaps the Callas are widely spaced and he went between them.
Garlan’s position on this map is arbitrary. It is to the west of Gilead and Debaria. But how far? No one knows. Presumably not near the Callas.
Here’s the bottom line: if you ever find yourself in Mid-World, you probably shouldn’t stake your life on this map, even if directions and distances are no longer drifting.
- The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King's Epic Fantasy
Still, this map does have a lot going for it: Vincent is probably the world's third greatest Dark Tower expert (after Stephen King and Robin Furth); Vincent interviewed King for his analyses of the Dark Tower; Vincent had the help of Robin Furth (King's research assistant, the author of the *Dark Tower comics, and the author of Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance) and Marsha DeFilippo (King's personal assistant); and so on. None of this means that Vincent's map is canonical or official, but it does mean that it is very likely to be the best anyone can do.
In the map you added in a link in your edit, there are many problems - for starters, it calls the entire place "Mid-World", when in fact, Mid-World is a region of All-World. Gilead, where Roland was born, is in "In-World". The Dark Tower books follow a course through Mid-World into "End-World". Also, Gilead, Mejis, Hambry, and several other locations are in the wrong places.
Part of the problem with constructing a map of All-World is that King is very inconsistent. We can forgive some of this, because he was writing an enormous saga over the course of about 40 years. He also makes some very silly mistakes. For example, we have this passage from The Dark Tower: Book II: The Drawing of the Three:
Eddie finished his tale around four o’clock on the third day of their northward journey up the featureless beach. The beach itself never seemed to change. If a sign of progress was wanted, it could only be obtained by looking left, to the east.
The problem here should be obvious: If you're walking north, and you look to your left, you are facing west, not east.
We can be relatively certain of a few things:
The beach where Roland finds the doors through which he draws Eddie and Odetta is as far west as he's ever been.
As the group makes its way from the Portal of the Bear, along the Bear-Turtle beam, New Canaan Barony and Gilead-that-was are somewhere to the east, along the Lion-Eagle beam.
Hambry/Mejis, where most of The Dark Tower: Book IV: Wizard and Glass takes place, is further east than Gilead-that-was. It may be on the Rat-Fish beam, or between the Lion-Eagle beam and Rat-Fish beam. We don't know.
All-World is a big place. For example, Zalia Jaffords tells Eddie that the Callas are spread across an enormous arc: from Calla Bryn Sturgis, this arc sweeps 2,000 miles to the north and another 4,000 to the south.
We know nothing about most of All-World. We only see a tiny wedge of the world, all of it more or less contained within a small wedge comprising of 1/12th - or at most, 1/6th, of a circle.
If you imagine this chart as a map of All-World, the green section represents the area in which the ka-tet is active - from the desert to the beach to Shardik's woods to River Crossing to Lud to Topeka to the Callas to Thunderclap to Fedic to Discordia to Empathica to the tower itself; all of the main story takes place here.
The blue section represents the area in which Roland's backstory took place: Gilead, Mejis, and Garlan.
The red section represents the areas that are never even mentioned throughout the series: 5/6ths of the world. We have absolutely no information about any of this area.
There ARE official maps, of course, but they are limited in scope, and only cover small areas of the world. They aren't what you're looking for, but they're all we have. These maps were taken from the Dark Tower books themselves, and are included in Furth's Concordance, so they are the maps King authorized. Furth decided to arrange the maps by the books they relate to, so I have followed the same system.
The Gunslinger (Revised) and Drawing of the Three (one map, two sections)
The Waste Lands (one map, two sections)
Wolves of the Calla (one map, two sections)
The Wind Through the Keyhole
The Beams and the Tower on the back of Maturin
A fan made this, and it seems to be mostly correct. However, it is absolutely not canonical, and King did not authorize it:
1All-World is comprised of the regions of In-World, Mid-World, and End-World. However, plenty of people (including King himself) frequently make the mistake of conflating Mid-World and All-World.
2The map of the beams and the tower, as provided in the probably-canonical Complete Concordance by Robin Furth. The Dark Tower series mostly follows Roland and his ka-tet along the beam of the bear towards the tower. Gilead is on the beam of the lion, so it must be to the east of the ka-tet's course.
Furth is King's research assistant, and she wrote the Concordance exclusively for King to use as a writing tool to maintain consistency. She also writes Marvel's Dark Tower comics. King eventually convinced her to publish the Concordance so fans would have access to it. Since the Concordance was King's resource while writing the latter half of the series, we can assume that it is as close to official as we can get.
Well, this isn't the entire world, but it covers everywhere that Roland and company go (at least in Mid-World), I believe.
It's from the Dark Tower Wiki site, specifically, the page on Mid-World
The maps that you were looking at might be from the Dark Tower Comic books, by Marvel Comics. The first issue, for example, contained a segment called 'The Sacred Geography of Mid World' and included a map of New Canaan. Sadly, the style doesn't look the same.
I THINK the maps you are looking at are actually from one edition of the Dark Tower books, but I'm unable to find which one.
