Wasteland

Fantasy stories (and sometimes other genres) often have some place which is twisted, or cursed, or marred by horrible events in days of old – the swamps of unrotting corpses outside Mordor in Lord of the Rings, the post-apocalyptic Cursed Earth in Judge Dredd, the results of torque bombs in Perdido Street Station, come to mind but there’s certainly many more. (Last I checked, Dwarf Fortress’ continent generator creates some cursed areas where it rains blood, or poison, or vomit, or acid. The excellent mech-roguelike Gearhead has an area where nothing lives and corpses do not rot.)

I’ve always wondered what it would take to mend these places. What would a magical clean-up crew look like? What spells, rituals, etc. would need to be performed? What price would you have to pay to un-mar the world?

(The Narnia books, in which the world is not actually all that scarred, explicitly deal with this by a version of the Christian apocalypse – entrance into a new world of which the previous was merely a shadow. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, in some drafts, had its own apocalypse, but it’s not clear whether Tolkien wanted these kept in. Tolkien, I gather, initially conceived of Middle-Earth as a kind of mythological prehistory to our own world, and made it deliberately pre-Christian, so evil can be defeated (for a while) but there’s limited prospects for healing and redemption – it lacks the price paid by Christ on the Cross.) (Qualification: IANATolkienScholar.)