I have two major obsessions when it comes to fantasy novels - maps, and family trees. My obsession with maps began back when I was fourteen and started reading The Lord of the Rings. I was constantly looking to the back of the book whenever places were mentioned to figure out where they were in relation to everything else. I poured over the map of Middle Earth until I knew everything I could from it. When I was fifteen or sixteen and started my own fantasy series, the map was where I began. I didn't have a story, I didn't have characters, but I had kingdoms and cities and villages, forests and marshes and oceans, I knew where I wanted to write, I didn't know what the story was.
I suppose my love for family trees had it's beginning with Tolkien as well. I was so interested in knowing how people were related, and who had married who, who in the line of kings from Númenor were good, and who were bad. And once I had established characters for that horribly written fantasy series back in my teens, I set about creating family trees, figuring out their genealogy.
Well, about ten years have passed since I wrote that rip-off of The Lord of the Rings. That series, which I had called The Keeper of the Crystals (just drenched in mimicry, am I right?) has been shelved for many, many years. And I've moved on to a more distinct, unique world and storyline with my first two published books of the Chronicle of Crowns series. And while I've still spent months and months pouring over a highly detailed map, that isn't featured in the books, and is more sort of a personal reference guide, I didn't do much in terms of genealogies. Every character I had, had a family tree that went back about two or three generations, and that was really it. And often, their ancestors weren't even mentioned in the novel.
But I started thinking about the primary setting of my series, The Kingdom of Aralia. At the beginning of the novel, it's ruled by King William I Ariyan, the son of King Henry III Ariyan, who's heir is Prince Edward Ariyan. And that was as far as I'd gone in terms of the ruling family tree. I mentioned a couple kings from the past, most notably King Braygen I Ariyan, the third king of Aralia, and his tangled love story with Lady Artoria Faventia of Rhaynus Antium, there was King Dohmnall I Greystorm, who was murdered by the former queen Tremellia Inlavia, who paved the way for the invasion of the Halfmoon Empire. And there was King Raven I Ariyan, the cripple, who was abused and mistreated by his father, King Duncan III Ariyan. But these ancestor's were just names in the story with little meaning behind them.
I had always wanted to flesh out the ruling family, and create a layered, intricate history for this kingdom, but the task seemed daunting to me. My family trees for royal houses in The Keeper of the Crystals was very linear. Father begat son, whose own son assumed the throne after him, and so on and so forth. And how DULL is that. Real life monarchies aren't so linear!
So this past week I set about creating a detailed, and layered monarchal history for my novel, and I couldn't be happier with the way it turned out. I really didn't know how to set out, how many monarchs I needed to span the amount of time I was trying to fill, and really it was just a lot of math and trial and error. I started with a list of 50 names, and ended up with 44 monarchs (including two foreign leaders who had controlled the kingdom for about 32 years in the middle of the kingdom's history). In total, it spans 817 years, which is more than I expected it to. And with each king came a story, sometimes they were more tragic than others, but I tried to flesh out each monarch in my mind. I still need to jot down their deeds and stories, and I'd like to write a brief history of the Kings of Aralia, sort of like the history of the Númenorean kings in The Silmarillion. And I've been thinking of posting each one on here, as a blog post on Wednesdays, which would mean no shortage of content for the next few weeks, haha!
Below I've posted the genealogy table I created through photoshop. Hopefully it opens, I posted it on Facebook, and there was no way to zoom in close enough to see everything. I am pretty proud of it though!
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