Bo Johansson's Map of Barrayar

Lois McMaster Bujold Fan Art

Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels give many tantalizing hints about the geography of Barrayar (barrayarography?). But I prefer to have a map to look at, so I fired up my paint program to draw this map, based on some hints from the books:

The Main Continent is in the northern hemisphere.
The South Continent is smaller and quite far away.
Kyril Island is in the Arctic.
Vorbarr Sultana is at the head of navigation of a river.
The Vorkosigan District is south of Vorbarr Sultana and the Vorbarra District.
Vorkosigan Vashnoi is southeast, downwind and downstream from Hassadar.
From the Dendarii Mountains you look north out over the populated lowlands towards Hassadar.
Version 2: On 30 Mar 2001 Lois McMaster Bujold posted to the lois-bujold mailing list:
"The Dendarii District, Vorbarr Sultana, etc., are all on the east side of their continent.
The river running through Hassadar is not the same one as the river running through Vorbarr Sultana, though they both empty out the eastern seaboard, a couple hundred miles apart."
Version 3: "Komarr" chapter 21 tells us that bloody puffwad grows on the western slopes of the Black Escarpment, indicating that the mountain range probably run in a general North-to-South diretcion, instead of West-to-East.
I have modified the map with this new information.

Of course, it can be discussed how good my map is. I don't think there is much evidence in the books.

Note 1: This is only one hemisphere of Barrayar, approximately from 90 deg W to 90 deg E, and 75 deg S to 75 deg N.

Note 2: The continents are probably a bit too large.

New: A very tentative map of Barrayar's climate zones.

The map shows the natural Earth-type climate zones that might have existed on Barrayar before the colonization, and before terraforming and agriculture influenced the vegetation.

Notice that the map shows Earth-like climate types, on Barrayar the equivalents of "temperate forest", "savannah" and "steppe" might be "scrubland", "semi-dry scrubland" and "dry scrubland", respectively.

The climate zones have been generated with the program World Builder 2.0.

All comments about these maps are welcome to bo@dendarii.com

See my entry in The Lois McMaster Bujold Webring.

	Version 2 of the map is still available.
	Version 1 of the map is still available.
	Se my notes on Map Projections.
	You can also view some (very) provisional maps of the World of Chalion.

Dan Tilque has a map of Vorbarr Sultana and Vorkosigan District.

	I have tried my skills as a Fan Artist and made some Vor Arms or Logos as I imagine that they might look.
	All Bujold fans have surely waited for the Vorkosigan ComConsole, reskinned versions of Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Netscape, or MS Internet Explorer with a "Vorkosigan" look.

Note 1:	This is only one hemisphere of Barrayar, approximately from 90 deg W to 90 deg E, and 75 deg S to 75 deg N.
Note 2:	The continents are probably a bit too large.