Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien's Cartographies
Ebook
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.
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.
Includes detailed case studies of some of Tolkien's maps that have been thus far been critically neglected
Offers a uniquely political and environmental perspective on Tolkien's writing, and fantasy more broadly, which has been lacking in Tolkien scholarship up to this point
Speaks to the prevalence of the climate crisis in our global cultural conversations
Introduction
- Space, power, and critical cartography
- Literary maps
- Structure and overview
Chapter 1: Political mapmaking
- Medieval cartographic practices
- Modern cartographic practices
- Tolkien's cartography
Map I: I Vene Kemen
Map II: The 'Ambarkanta' diagrams and maps
Map III: Thror's Map
Map IV: The Middle-earth map
Map V: Map of Rohan, Gondor and Mordor
Chapter 2: Environment
- Navigating the human, nonhuman, and posthuman
- Tom Bombadil and the nonhuman
- Mapping the human and nonhuman in Middle-earth
- Stewardship
- Environmental destruction
- Nonhuman agency
Chapter 3: Geology and Time
- Deep time
- Middle-earth's geology
- Mapping geology and geologizing maps
- Fixing experiences of time
- Mapping anthropological change
Chapter 4: Imperialism and Race
- The politics of land and map
- (Dis)possessing Middle-earth's lands
- The threshold space
- Mutual vulnerability and racialization
- Narratives of imperialism
Conclusion
Index
Bibliography
- Title: Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien's Cartographies
- Author: Anahit Behrooz
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350290785, 9781350290808, 1350290807, 1350290785
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350290785
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-11T00:30:10Z
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.