Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien's Cartographies

Bloomsbury Perspectives on Fantasy

by Anahit Behrooz, Matthew Sangster (Series Editor), Dimitra Fimi (Series Editor)

In this cutting-edge study of Tolkien's most critically neglected maps, Anahit Behrooz examines how cartography has traditionally been bound up in facilitating power.

Far more than just illustrations to aid understanding of the story, Tolkien's corpus of maps are crucial to understanding the broader narratives between humans and their political and environmental landscapes within his legendarium. Undertaking a diegetic literary analysis of the maps as examples of Middle-earth's own cultural output, Behrooz reveals a sub-created tradition of cartography that articulates specific power dynamics between mapmaker, map reader, and what is being mapped, as well as the human/nonhuman binary that represents human's control over the natural world.

Mapping Middle-earth surveys how Tolkien frames cartography as an inherently political act that embodies a desire for control of that which it maps. In turn, it analyses harmful contemporary engagements with land that intersect with, but also move beyond, cartography such as environmental damage; human-induced geological change; and the natural and bodily costs of political violence and imperialism. Using historical, eco-critical, and postcolonial frameworks, and such theorists as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and Edward Said, this book explores Tolkien's employment of particular generic tropes including medievalism, fantasy, and the interplay between image and text to highlight, and at times correct, his contemporary socio-political epoch and its destructive relationship with the wider world.

198 pages, Hardcover

Published February 22, 2024

Reviews

[Renée · Rating 3 out of 5]

This study of the maps Tolkien devised for his secondary world was long overdue, and the author is to be commended for the initiative. The result is interesting and thought-provoking, with excellent analyses of aspects like the environment, imperialism, and colonialism, especially the latter. Her dive into deep time to look at the 19th century divide between catastrophism and uniformitarianism and its traces in the Legendarium, is fascinating; Lewis & Currie briefly touched on the subject in "The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien"(2002), but it was more thoroughly discussed here.

However, I have a few nits to pick as well. The language is in place heavily academic and could have a kind of gatekeeping effect (probably not intentionally) on non-Anglophone and non academic Tolkien students. Fortunately the parts where the theory was applied to Tolkien's work were more readable. Another quibble is the absence of a methodical analysis of the maps. The author assumes they are all diegetic, which is probably correct, but hardly any arguments are provided for this assumption.

To go into more detailed criticism in one particular case: in her analysis of Tolkien's unfinished story "Tal-elmar" Behrooz misses a few points: the framing of Buldar's people as usurpers of a territory previously occupied by other "wild men" which were chased into the mountains (reminiscent of the Bantu being framed for having usurped the Khoisan in South-Africa); the emphatical identification of the protatonist Tal-elmar as "entirely"of Elmar's people (= white Númenoreans); and Tolkien's indirect identification of the invaders as Faithful who come to drive the natives away and make "a settlement against the King"- said King being identified as Sauron in Christopher Tolkien's endnotes. These things make the story even more controversial than it is in Behrooz' analysis. It is a pity she has missed Dirk Wiemann's analysis of Tal-Elmar in "Politics in Fantasy Media" (2014), and my own take on it, published in 2022 in the Luna Press publication "Not the Fellowship".

That Behrooz dates the colonization of the Americas to 1452 instead of 1492 must be a typo of sorts, but I'm surprised the editors overlooked it.

[Brenton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a smart book that plays with mapping in all kinds of ways. The introduction and chapter one are some of the best things I've read. The book closes with a compelling reading on Tolkien, race, culture, and empire (but I have more reading to do myself on the subject). I simply didn't resonate with the middle chapters, but this could be my issue rather than a problem with the book. I have a love-hate relationship with the F-word--Foucault--which is a critical part of chapter three.

[James Ashcroft · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is much too long for the original thinking it contributed or the thoughts it provoked in me as a reader. Not without value, but a real slog to get through, and not at all helped by the author’s excessively verbose and convoluted paragraph length sentences.

The audience for this book is unclear as I don’t think it will win many admirers amongst either the general reader or the academic community.