I was having some thoughts the other day that coalesced around this idea of the "Wild World" and this concept of the unknown. It's a fairly common trope in most fantasy worlds that the world is portrayed as an untamed and dangerous place. Bastions of civilization are focused around a handful of cities and alcoves. I alway found the concept of the regarding the world as we know it and how its relates to our fantasy narratives as very interesting.
In most fantasy narratives it is implied, if not explicitly stated, that the world is mostly uninhabited. There are pockets of dense populations, often times reflected in larger cities, but generally speaking, when your heroes or adventurers are out wandering the world, they are wandering into the unknown, into the wild. Even the established routes between known population areas are portrayed as dangerous.
I suppose there is a sense of wonder in breaking away from our now common familiarity of travel. We can easily travel fifty miles without much of a thought with modern transportation and, there is little of the unknown wilderness still to traverse in that travel. Of course one has to be careful and not fall into the colonial concepts of barbarians or uncivilized peoples and portraying those as "lesser". T
Bringing this back to our own world though, it really made me think about what the 19th century and earlier must've looked like to most people. Even into the 1800's there were wide swaths of the world that were largely unexplored and you can see this reflected in all sorts of artwork. It triggers a bit of romanticism does it not? To think about our own world and imagine it more wild, one that is perhaps less populated and full of new places to discover. Would such a world be a better place if we brought modern (western) sensibilities to it? Who is to say, but it is fund to imagine.