I came across this photograph of Seljalandsfoss in Iceland recently, and it immediately struck me as one of those places that seems too fantastical to be real.
At first glance it’s simply beautiful. A waterfall plunging over an emerald cliff into impossibly green fields beneath a sky that looks as though someone had been a little overenthusiastic with the paintbrush.
Then I noticed the tiny figure standing by the bridge on the left. That’s a person.
Suddenly the whole image changes. The waterfall isn’t merely pretty—it’s immense. The landscape goes from “that’s a lovely photograph” to “good grief…”
It also reminded me of something that fantasy writers occasionally run into.
If we’d invented this place from scratch, some readers would probably accuse us of overdoing it. The colours are too vivid. The waterfall is too dramatic. The cliffs are too perfect. Tone it down a little. Make it more believable. Except… It’s real.
Nature has never shown the slightest interest in whether we find it plausible.
Peter Jackson understood this when he filmed The Lord of the Rings. He didn’t take the magnificent landscapes of New Zealand and bury them beneath layers of CGI. Those mountains, rivers, forests and valleys were allowed to stand on their own. They already looked extraordinary.
The magic happened within those landscapes.
The visual effects brought hobbits, ents, Balrogs, orcs and other inhabitants of Middle-earth to life. Buildings were added where necessary. Ancient ruins appeared. But the mountains remained mountains, and the forests remained forests.
Middle-earth felt real because so much of it was real.
I think there’s a lesson there for fantasy writers.
We spend a great deal of time trying to invent worlds that readers will believe in, when some of the finest fantasy settings already exist. Iceland. New Zealand. The Giant’s Causeway. The sandstone towers of Zhangjiajie. The Giant Sequoias of California. These places don’t need embellishment. They’re already astonishing.
Perhaps that’s why fantasy resonates so strongly with us. At its best, it isn’t about creating the impossible. It’s about taking the extraordinary things that already exist and asking one simple question.
What if a dragon lived here? Or elves. Or a wizard with a pointy hat and an unfortunate tendency to arrive precisely when he means to.
Sometimes the best inspiration for worldbuilding isn’t another fantasy novel. It’s our own remarkable planet.
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