Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth:

Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien’s Legendarium

edited by Cami D. Agan


ISBN: 978-1-887726-30-6
Published: Altadena CA, 2024
(purchase below)

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The 13 essays in Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth foreground processes of making and constructing Arda — either within the Secondary world or for readers/viewers — and thus continually assert that the habitations form a vital part of the tales within that world. Because they assume a complex arrangement complete with social, familial, artistic, and political relations, cities and strongholds often define their inhabitants as crafting boundaries between themselves and the outside, the visitor, and the unknown. These essays reveal that all cities and strongholds of the legendarium function as makers of meaning, containers of relations, outposts of history, and evocations of the Past.

As the volume’s editor, Cami D. Agan, explains in the introduction to the volume: “Through the explorations in this volume, we hope that the role Tolkien’s cities and strongholds play in mapping Arda can more evidently resonate alongside the natural world surrounding and inspiring their construction. Indeed, to emphasize the legendarium’s processes of ‘mapping’ cities and strongholds foregrounds the myriad ways they work within the Secondary World. [...] Ultimately, readers mirror these layers of mapping as they consult the maps and illustrations that accompany texts of the legendarium, as they parallel those Secondary World sites to cities, architectural styles, and artwork of the Primary World, as they compare artists and filmmakers’ conceptions of these cities and strongholds, and as they conceive of the cities and strongholds in the imaginative mapping of the Arda of their own minds. Each layer of mapping takes us closer to the experiences of the inhabitants of Middle-earth, who themselves continually seek to map their present and future within and across the habitations of Arda.

Cami D. Agan is a Distinguished University Professor of English at Oklahoma Christian University, where she teaches British literature, including a Studies in Tolkien course. Her scholarly work focuses on First Age materials in the legendarium, with particular interest in landscape and cultural geography. She contributed to Leslie A. Donovan’s Approaches to Teaching the Life and Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (MLA Press) and Donovan and Janet Brennan Croft’s seminal Perilous and Fair (Mythopoeic Press). Recent publications on Tolkien include work in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Mythlore, Proceedings of the Tolkien Society (2019), chapters in Loremasters and Librarians (2022), and a forthcoming chapter on the “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” in Robin Anne Reid’s collection Race, Racism, and Racists in Tolkien’s Work (McFarland).

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Contents

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edited by Cami D. Agan
Published in July 2024; available both in print and electronic formats


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