Five hundred years ago, a Zurich pastor drew the first atlas. His sea monster still inspires fantasy

A sea serpent lurks off Italy, a dragon waits in the English Channel, and a tentacled creature with malevolent eyes appears between Norway and England. These monsters inhabit a map drawn nearly 500 years ago by Johannes Stumpf, a Zurich pastor and chronicler.

The map is not from a modern fantasy book. It comes from the first atlas of the Swiss Confederacy. Its fortified city, with pointed towers and tightly packed gabled roofs, is Zurich. Nearby, sailing ships and small boats move peacefully across a lake. Unlike the ocean, the inland landscape contains no monsters.

Stumpf likely believed in the creatures he drew. He also believed that dragons existed, including a supposed dragon on Mount Pilatus. In his time, maps featuring dragons and other monsters were not unusual. The familiar inscription “Here be dragons,” however, was an exception rather than a standard feature.

Modern readers may find the images easy to mock, but Stumpf was depicting the world as he understood it. It was a world full of unknowns, with room for blank spaces even in the Swiss Alps. That blend of geographical representation and imagination has attracted modern fantasy writers, whose maps often resemble those of the early modern period.

The connection to J. R. R. Tolkien is direct enough for Zurich’s Central Library to display Stumpf’s atlas beside a first edition of “The Lord of the Rings.” The library, which holds Switzerland’s most important map collection, has opened an exhibition on “fantastic maps” with the private collection Ex Carta. Several guided tours are scheduled during the Long Night of Museums.

Stumpf was born in 1500 in southern Germany and came to Zurich as a member of the Order of St. John, which sent him to the order’s commandery in Bubikon. In Zurich, he joined Zwingli’s reform movement and married into a prominent Zurich family.