Hi, I'm Tuffy. 
I may be the last person to read Strange Maps’ post about Middle Earth, seeing as how the blog gets a million hits and I only learned about it today, but there’s some good stuff here for LOTR fans who don’t happen to be all booked up on their Tolkieniana. The article describes (with refreshing brevity) how Tolkien constructed his 1930s map of Middle Earth and UCLA geography prof Peter Bird’s recent attempt to make Tolkien’s map jive with Europe’s. The comments on the post are engaging.
Whenever I run across anything about Tolkien’s interactions with the real world I have to pimp my favorite work on the subject, Norman F. Cantor’s chapter “The Oxford Fantasists” in the book Inventing the Middle Ages. Cantor compares the cultural influences and agendas of Tolkien and schoolfellow C. S. Lewis (and, uh, this other guy nobody ever talks about, Frederick Maurice Powicke).
He writes that both Lewis and Tolkien were basically propagandists for the age of Boys ‘n Blades.
“Deeply affected by a nostalgia and a love for a rapidly disappearing England [of] highly literate Christian culture … [they] saw a continuity of this culture stretching back to the Middle Ages. [They] wanted to preserve [and] revitalize this Anglo-Edwardian medieval culture. In the mechanistic, capitalistic, aggressive [1980s] it looked as though their program of cultural nostalgia would have little long-range impact. In the 1990s we cannot be so sure of that.”
Not to mention in RenFaire season.
technorati tags: tolkien, c.s.+lewis, peter+bird, Frederick+Maurice+Powicke, medievalists, medievalism, norman+cantor, inventing+the+middle+ages,
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Cool Tolkien/map link. And you’re right, the brevity with which the point is made is startlingly refreshing. I am reading Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth right now and while I find it a compelling read, it is anything but brief!!!
Wow! That does look like quite a good book. I’ve wanted for quite some time to find a book that talks about Tolkien in the same spirit as the Cantor chapter. I’ll have to go get this right away. Thanks for mentioning it!