Mapping Middle-Earth - (Perspectives on Fantasy) by Anahit Behrooz (Hardcover)

About the Book

A exploration of the way in which Tolkien's corpus of maps reflect political, colonial, and environmental power dynamics surrounding land in his Middle-earth writings.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Mapping Middle-earth revealed challenges in approaching Tolkien in some ways, it also proved how much there is still to learn about the legendarium by employing others. And it did so through insightful readings, well-structured arguments, and with focus on something I cannot pretend to find other than utterly fascinating: maps, mapping, and cartography." --Journal of Tolkien Research

"This book is an excellent addition to the already impressive Perspectives on Fantasy series edited by well-known fantasy scholars Brian Attebery, Dimitra Fimi, and Matthew Sangster. As Behrooz points out in her conclusion, this framework could be fruitfully applied to other works of map-reliant fantasy and fiction; even other media, and particularly both tabletop and electronic games, could benefit from similar attention." --H-Net Reviews

About the Author

Anahit Behrooz is an independent research scholar and arts journalist. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and has taught both at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University.