Description: 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.
Brief description: Anahit Behrooz is an independent research scholar and arts journalist. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK and has taught at Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University. Her work has been published in Walking Tree's anthology Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J. R. R. Tolkien's Works, its Precursors, and Legacies and Fastitocalon, and The University of Edinburgh's The Dangerous Women Project.
Review Quotes:
"[An] often illuminating, intentionally provocative study." --Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
"A useful counter to the still far too common caricature of Tolkien as a nostalgic, largely apolitical conservative. Behrooz's book is also a helpful guide to the ways in which Tolkien responds to some of the questions posed by what she calls "our own collective mistakemaking."" --Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research "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