Where the Map Ends

J.A. Wrenfield on trolls, fragile places, and listening for what still lives beyond the human world

There are forests that become settings in stories, and there are forests that seem to resist being reduced to scenery. J.A. Wrenfield writes about the second kind.

In The Keepers of Elderfen, humans share an old northern landscape with trolls, spirits, small guardians and other beings whose relationship with the land reaches further back than maps, registers and modern ideas of ownership. Elderfen itself is more than a backdrop. The lake remembers attention, neglect, promises and erasures, and the series repeatedly asks what happens when people who have never really stood in a place are allowed to decide what that place is worth.

In The Lake That Left the Map, that question becomes literal. A living lake is gradually moved into the past tense by human records even while its water, birds and hidden inhabitants remain very much alive.

We spoke with Wrenfield about trolls, forgotten landscapes, old stories, and why she believes fantasy can sometimes make the real world larger rather than take us away from it.

Your books bring humans and trolls into the same landscape without treating the trolls as intruders into a human world. Why was that important to you?

Because I don’t think of the forest as naturally belonging to the humans in the first place. We do that very easily, don’t we? A human being walks into a forest and suddenly everything else becomes part of our landscape. The trees become timber or habitat, the lake becomes recreation or water supply, the animals become wildlife, and anything stranger gets pushed off into folklore.

I wanted to turn that around a little. What if the human being is the visitor? What if there are already communities there, old obligations, old quarrels, things going on that have absolutely nothing to do with whether a human has arrived to observe them?

That was one of the earliest pleasures of Elderfen for me. The trolls aren’t waiting around to become part of Elias’s story. Mossheart has work. Grimdor has stories to keep. They have disagreements that began long before he appears. Some of them think humans are a nuisance, some are curious, some have made terrible mistakes of their own. I didn’t want nature on one side and humanity on the other, with trolls standing in for some perfectly wise natural order. That would be too easy. Nobody in Elderfen gets to be that pure.

Why trolls specifically?

Ah, I love trolls. I think part of it is that they feel as though they were already there before anyone began writing the story down. They belong to stone and wet ground and forests and mountains. They have weight.

There are more graceful creatures I could have chosen, certainly. But trolls don’t need to be graceful. They can be awkward and stubborn and funny and ancient all at once. You can imagine one sitting beside a boulder for three hundred years and having very strong opinions about what somebody did to the stream in 1784.

And they belong to an older imaginative landscape that fascinates me. Skogsfolk, hidden people, water beings, things living under hills, creatures attached to particular stones or trees. There was once a much stronger habit of imagining that a place might already be inhabited in ways you did not understand.

I suppose that is the thing I keep coming back to: someone else may already be here. Behave accordingly.

You use the word “listen” a lot when you talk about these stories. Is that also part of how you write them?

Very much. I’m often less interested in sitting down and inventing a creature than in wondering what sort of creature a particular place seems to have room for.

A peat bog doesn’t suggest the same things as a mountain ridge. A small black lake in a northern forest gives you something different from an open sea. Even the sounds change what you imagine. If you stand somewhere and there is water under roots, wind moving through spruce, some bird calling where you can’t quite place it—well, the world already feels populated before you invent anything.

And then there are the old stories. I don’t mean that I take a specific legend and disguise it. It’s more that I listen to the kinds of things people once allowed themselves to believe might inhabit the landscape. Forest folk. Guardians. Spirits. Trolls. Dangerous crossings. Places where you had to behave properly because you were not entirely sure who was watching.

There’s something wonderful in that. Modern fantasy can sometimes be enormously crowded with invented worlds while the actual landscape underneath becomes oddly empty. I’m interested in going the other way. Start with the real place. Then allow reality to get bigger.

So for you the fantastic is an expansion of reality rather than an escape from it?

Yes. Exactly that.

I don’t want the magical world to replace the ordinary one. I want you to be standing in an ordinary forest and realize that perhaps your definition of ordinary has been a little stingy.

The moss is still moss. The birds are still birds. The wetland still has migration routes and water levels and arguments about conservation funding. Those things matter enormously. But perhaps a path can also remember being walked. Perhaps naming something for generations leaves some kind of weight behind. Perhaps there is a small keeper under the roots noticing a loss that no committee has thought to measure yet.

That’s the feeling I’m after. Not, “Here is another world.” More, “Perhaps there was always more in this one than you noticed.”

Human beings are often responsible for the danger in Elderfen, but usually not because someone consciously wants to destroy nature. Why did you choose that?

Because deliberate destruction is almost too easy to understand.

The obvious environmental villain arrives with machinery and says, “I don’t care what happens here.” Of course that exists. But so much damage happens through people who would never describe themselves that way.

Someone changes a classification. Funding ends. A path disappears from a maintenance plan. A lake becomes “inactive.” Somebody decides there are more important places to protect. A committee has limited resources and makes what looks, from inside the room, like a perfectly defensible choice.

Then another decision follows it. Then another.

Ten years later, nobody can quite remember when people stopped going there.

That frightens me. No one has to wake up in the morning and decide to erase a place. Everyone can be reasonable. Everyone can be busy. The place disappears anyway.

That is something The Lake That Left the Map takes literally: human maps and registers become powerful because people have built institutions around believing them. When those systems begin treating Elderfen as finished, the living place itself begins to lose names, routes and memories.

Is that where the fragility of nature enters the books?

Yes, although I hesitate over the word fragile, because nature is also incredibly tough. Forests survive storms. Seeds wait years. Water finds another way around a stone. Animals adapt to things we could never survive ourselves.

But resilience isn’t permission.

That’s something people are very bad at understanding. We see that something survived what we did to it and decide, retrospectively, that the damage must have been acceptable. It survived, therefore it was fine. But survival and health aren’t the same thing.

A wetland can remain wet and still lose part of what made it function. Birds can find another stop, but now that other stop has more pressure on it. A river can change course, but something downstream goes dry. You can keep removing pieces from a system for quite a long time before the whole thing announces that you’ve gone too far.

There’s a section in The Lake That Left the Map where migration begins changing because Elderfen is becoming less firmly held as a stopping place. The birds don’t understand registers, of course, but the conditions and patterns that once drew them there are weakening. I love that idea because it shows how a bureaucratic act and a bird in the sky can belong to the same chain without anybody intending it.

Humans in the books often seem incapable of being sufficiently careful. Why do you think that is?

Scale, perhaps. And distance.

We’re actually quite good at understanding immediate consequences. If I move this stone, the stone moves. If I cut the tree, the tree falls. We can see that.

What we are much worse at is understanding ten thousand small decisions whose effects arrive somewhere else, or twenty years later, or in the life of something we never see.

And then—well, we like systems. We need them. I’m not anti-map or anti-science or anti-administration. Quite the opposite. Elias is a field ecologist. He loves records. His mother spent years recording things.

The trouble begins when the record becomes more authoritative than the thing it was created to describe.

That is where humans become dangerous without meaning to. The map says there is no lake, and eventually people stop checking whether their boots are wet.

I think that idea troubles me because it reaches far beyond nature. We make categories because reality is too large to hold in our heads. Then, little by little, we begin to punish reality for not fitting the categories.

Attention seems almost like a moral force in Elderfen.

I think it probably is.

Not admiration, though. That’s different. You can admire a beautiful lake from a photograph and know nothing about it.

I mean attention in the rather boring sense. Going back. Noticing when the first birds arrive. Knowing which path floods in spring. Remembering that a certain bank used to have orchids on it. Knowing where the frogs normally start calling. Realizing that something you have seen for ten years isn’t there this year.

That kind of care is repetitive. It doesn’t photograph very well.

But it’s powerful.

Elias matters partly because he keeps coming back. He isn’t some great chosen hero who suddenly understands everything. Half the time he doesn’t know what on earth he is looking at. But he records it. He compares it with his mother’s notes. He says, in effect, “No, I was here. This existed. I am not going to agree that it didn’t simply because your newer map has left it out.”

There’s something almost defiant in ordinary observation when the larger system has stopped paying attention.

And the trolls themselves have to learn how to care differently as well.

Oh yes. They absolutely do.

I was very determined that the story shouldn’t become “humans have forgotten nature, trolls remember nature.” I don’t believe in that kind of clean division.

The trolls remember some things wonderfully and other things terribly. They have inherited grudges. They tell stories that flatter their own side. Some of them think age makes a tradition correct. Mossheart is extraordinarily devoted to Elderfen, but she also tries to carry far too much responsibility herself. Grimdor preserves history, but sometimes he preserves the accusation along with it. The western trolls are desperate for water and make decisions that are understandable right up until those decisions begin hurting someone else.

That’s much more interesting to me.

Nobody gets to say, “We are the people who know how to live properly with nature.”

They have to keep learning it.

One of the foundations of the series is that Elderfen belongs to humans, trolls, spirits and other beings only in the sense that all of them belong with it. Not ownership. Relationship. And relationships require adjustment.

There’s also a strong sense that the myths and beings in your books come from something humanity once knew more intimately. Is that deliberate?

Very much so.

I’m fascinated by the possibility that what we call folklore was, among many other things, a way of remembering how uncertain the world was.

You didn’t know everything that lived in the forest. You didn’t know exactly what was beyond the next ridge. You didn’t illuminate every path at night. There were places where the sensible thing was to be respectful because you genuinely did not know what you might disturb.

Now we know enormously more about the natural world in one sense, and I would never want to give that knowledge up. But I wonder whether we have lost something alongside it: a certain humility before what we don’t know.

The old stories leave room.

A hill can be geology and still carry a story. A lake can be hydrology and still have a name people have spoken for a thousand years. A creature in the woods does not have to stop being biologically interesting because someone once believed there were trolls nearby.

I like worlds where those ways of knowing don’t immediately cancel one another.

What do you hope readers feel when they leave Elderfen and return to the ordinary world?

I hope the ordinary world feels a little less ordinary.

That would be the greatest compliment, actually.

Not that someone walks into the forest determined to find a troll. Though, you know, I won’t discourage them.

I’d rather they notice an old path they’ve walked past fifty times. Or wonder what happens in the wet hollow behind a road when nobody visits it. Or hear a bird and think about how far it travelled to reach that particular tree. Or see a name on an old map that isn’t on the new one and wonder why.

Perhaps they’ll be a little slower to assume that absence from the map means absence from the world.

We have become very used to believing that reality consists of the things we have successfully recorded, classified and explained. Stories can remind us that the relationship may be exactly the other way around.

The world was here first.

And—yes, I suppose this is the thing underneath all of it—we are still discovering how much of it we have failed to see.