Mapping Middle Earth
One of many great things about the Perspectives on Fantasy series from the Glasgow University Fantasy Centre is that their contract with Bloomsbury requires the publisher to produce paperback editions at affordable prices. You have to wait a year from initial publication for the paperback to appear, but once it has you should be able to get it for around £25. Or, having waited a year already, you can wait a little longer for Bloomsbury to have a sale. Which is how I ended up getting a copy of Mapping Middle Earth for just over £20.
The book is the product of research done by Anahit Behrooz for her PhD. As the title suggests it examines Tolkien’s use of maps in his Legendarium. In many ways it builds on Stefan Ekman’s ground-breaking study of fantasy maps, Here be Dragons. Behrooz, however, is interested in only a very small, albeit very famous, subset of the fantasy genre, and that allows her to go into much greater depth.
I should start, as Behrooz does, by noting that all maps are political. We should all know that. I presume that most of you know that the well-known Mercator projection of Earth over-states the size of land at the poles, and under-states the size of land at the equator. That has been all over social media of late, as people have gleefully pointed out that Greenland is nowhere near as bigly as Donald Trump thinks it is.
Behrooz situates Tolkien’s maps between two traditions: the mediaeval map (such as the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi), and the modern map (typified by the UK’s Ordnance Survey). Mediaeval European maps are mostly religious in nature. They generally have Jerusalem at the centre, and are oriented towards the East, where the Garden of Eden was believed to lie. Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth in the First and Second Age are much more like mediaeval maps. Prior to the sinking of Númenor, Middle Earth was flat and it was possible to travel directly to Valinor. So the heaven of Middle Earth was literally on the map.
The Ordnance Survey, as the name suggests, was originally a military project. Specifically it was created by the English army to help them find their way around the Scottish highlands, all the better to round up any Jacobite resistance. Military maps need to be highly accurate, and while that has been a great boon for later generations of hikers, we still have to remember that the maps were created as a tool of military conquest.
Personally I think that Behrooz has missed a trick here. I suspect that the maps of Middle Earth are in large part influenced by the work of Thomas Moule, a Victorian producer of faux-antique maps. Moule’s work was very popular, and I’m sure that Tolkien would have been familiar with it. The maps use the Ordnance Survey as a basis, so are highly accurate, but are also decorated to look like something much older.
Behrooz then goes on to talk about Tolkien’s relationship to the environment, and his representation of the non-human on his maps. We are all familiar with the Ents and Huorns, with the grumpy old mountain, Caradhras, and with Old Man Willow. The Legendarium gives a voice to many non-human characters, and not just members of races other than mankind. The maps represent places like Mirkwood and Lothlorien, and give some indication of their character.
This section led me to a grudging acknowledgement of the necessity of Tom Bombadil. Behrooz points out that his function in the story is to disabuse the naïve Hobbits of their simplistic views on life, and introduce them to the world outside the Shire. I can see that is an important story function, though I still don’t see why he also has to be a purveyor of terrible poetry.
The next section is all about geography and geology. There is a lot of focus on Númenor’s Atlantis-like fate and how Tolkien sought to navigate between this essentially mediaeval view of history, punctuated by god-sent disasters, and the modern scientific view of deep geological time with its fossils and continental drift.
Finally we come to a section on Imperialism and Race, where Behrooz looks at how maps are used as a function of imperialist projects, erasing the existence of indigenous peoples and replacing them with “unexplored” lands to be conquered and assimilated. This also happens in Middle Earth, as various human societies, mostly notably Númenor, seek to expand their territory at the expense of both other races and of the natural world.
What I particularly like about this book is how it zeroes in on the contradictions in Tolkien’s work. He’s pro-environment, but also pro-Hobbit, and the Hobbits are very much managers of their environment. He has written a religious history of his world, but is also aware that science has moved on since mediaeval times. And he is concerned about the destruction of cultures by industrialisation, but is also a product of the British Empire and its educational system. Behrooz writes:
Readling Tolkien, I am struck continually by the contradictions of his approach: the moments where he edges towards a strikingly anti-colonial mindset, the moments where he falls back on the harmful racialization that characterized, and indeed fueled, the gutting force of the British Empire. To place Tolkien within a context is to place him inevitably within an imperial context, which is to say, inevitably within a racist context. What can looking fearlessly and unbiasedly at his work tell us about the necessities of understanding the entanglement between human and non-human harm? What can it tell us about an author who was suspended, constantly, between past, present and future?
And that sort of thing is why I like reading academic books. They can be so much more interesting than the simplistic takes you see on social media, or even in blog posts.
The book has also got me looking forward to the forthcoming seasons of Rings of Power, as the story should get much more interesting, if the script follows what Tolkien wrote.
Title: Mapping Middle Earth
By: Anahit Behrooz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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