Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien’s Legendarium

Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth:

Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien’s Legendarium

Edited by Cami D. Agan

Mythopoeic Press 2024

Altadena, California, USA

© 2024 by Mythopoeic Press

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Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth:

Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien’s Legendarium

Edited by Cami D. Agan

Mythopoeic Press 2024

Altadena, California, USA

Contents

Dedication

Introduction by Cami D. Agan

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Tolkien’s Cities of the First Age as Mythic Infrastructure by Maria K. Alberto

Chapter 2: Grounding and Traversing the Great Tales: Elven Strongholds of Beleriand by Cami D. Agan

Chapter 3: A Fallen Woman of Arda: The Battle over Wills and Desire of Aredhel of Gondolin by Emily Venkatesan

Chapter 4: Re-Enchanting Built Spaces: On Dwarves and Dwarven Places by Kenton Sena and Kaelyn Harris

Chapter 5: Fair and Perilous: Nature Enchanted in Lothlórien by Rebecca Davis

Chapter 6: But the Beauty of Mithril Did not Tarnish: Tolkien, Material Culture, and the Mathom by Nicholas Birns

Chapter 7: Tolkien’s Panopticon and Foucault’s Towers: A Study on the Limits and Nature of Power by Craig A. Boyd and Joanna Boyd-Wilhite

Chapter 8: Within Bounds That He Has Set: A Stylistic Analysis of Cities and Strongholds in The Lord of the Rings by Robin Anne Reid

Chapter 9: It Mourns for Beleg even as You Do: ‘Living’ Swords in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium by Birgitte Breemerkamp

Chapter 10: Forgot Even the Stones: Stone Monuments and Imperfect Cultural and Personal Memories in The Lord of the Rings by Kristine Larsen

Chapter 11: The Many Faces of Lake-Town by Marie Bretagnolle

Chapter 12: Architecture as Cultural Signifier: Building Identities of Middle-earth on Screen by Mina D. Lukić

Chapter 13: The Stories That Stayed with You: Rivendell and Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia for the American Millennial by Danny Saldana

About the Contributors

Notes

Dedication

For David, with all my love

Enyalië

Carolyn Agan, 1945–2016

Michael X. Agan, 1944–2023

Introduction

Cami D. Agan

Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.

—Michel de Certeau

James Hay’s compelling Afterword to The Audience and Its Landscape changed the course of my work with Tolkien’s legendarium, although his topic had no clear relation to Tolkien or Middle-earth per se. In order to interrogate audience studies as a landscape of inquiry that defies categorization and that requires spatializing (de Certeau 41), Hay employs French cultural historian Michel de Certeau’s notions of places, spaces, strategies, and tactics to conclude that Landscape is that which already is spatially organized but which is continually traversed and gradually reconfigured (Hay 367–68). Already drawn to read Tolkien’s work by exploring the way spaces and landscapes ground Middle-earth, as a result of Hay’s analysis, I began a deep dive into de Certeau’s work, seeking ways to employ his framework in my analysis of Tolkien’s created and constructed spaces. By linking Michel de Certeau’s assessment of how stories ground themselves, how people move through urban space, and how inhabitants negotiate their landscapes, I was able to better envision how places and spaces—sometimes lost to time, exile, or catastrophe—wove themselves into systems of culture for the Peoples of Middle-earth. In tandem with the Tolkien-focused work of scholars such as Deborah Sabo, John Marino, and Michael Drout, this emphasis on place and space eventually led to my readings of the Ainulindalë and The Silmarillion chapter Of Beleriand and Its Realms through the lens of de Certeau.

To note one particular example that I also apply in this volume, in The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau observes a parallel between the ways we navigate the constructed urban space and the way we narrate or craft story. Stories and everyday life, de Certeau notes, involve both understanding a set of fixed positions or ordered systems and give rise to unexpected movements and traversals across and against those systems. As we walk and/or as we narrate, our tendency to fix points or places vacillates continually with our tendency to shift across and between such fixed points. There is the map of the city—positioned and located—and there is the itinerary, the crossings, returns, and shortcuts that our passages mark out across sanctioned nodes of the map. In story, there are attempts to ground and specify place, through naming or locating, for example. There are movements across those named places, descriptions of interactions, conflicts, and operations that suggest space (120). Stories, de Certeau concludes, carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces and spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces. The forms of this play are numberless (118). Thus, Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice (115) for de Certeau, because all texts continually shift between these two distinctions: place and space, a kind of play unique to the processes of that particular story and of reading that story.¹

In the complex layering of Tolkien’s legendarium, there are myriad oscillations between place and space: to position characters in a named place (such as the Third Age Dead Marshes) calls forth a story involving complex relations and passages across the space of the landscape (the Second Age Last Alliance). As John Marino suggests, the intersection of the Third Age narrative—Frodo, Sam, and Gollum making their way through the Dead Marshes—calls forth a past (the Second Age) narrative, when that place went by another name and other associations: The past is recalled in comparison to the present and therefore impinges on the present (173). In this movement toward Mordor, the three hobbits locate themselves in a present place, but also in the context of another time, space, and story: as they traverse the plain of Dagorlad, The landscape itself is read and constantly interpreted as an open text (Sabo 108–91). As another example, the battle of Helm’s Deep allows for a set of historical and geographical relations: along with the Rohirrim, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas prepare for battle in a place of prior significance and ground their hopes in past battles and crossings into that stronghold. In The Lord of the Rings, to cite a place and to retell past events while moving through that space interweaves past place-tale with current adventure. Through the dynamic interaction of social memory and linguistic agency in settings of ancient places, Sabo deftly explains, Tolkien’s characters construct a past that is meaningful for their present need (109). These examples reflect the legendarium’s focus on encounters with the past as well as what de Certeau identifies as the texts’ particular play between place and space. The fact that these moments when place, movement through space, and connection to a past tale often occur within range of a city, a stronghold, or the tale of a lost kingdom suggests that these built habitations serve a particularly resonant role for Tolkien’s world-building.

By emphasizing space as practiced place (117) and the resulting stories that shift between named locales and itineraries crossing through them, de Certeau casts a helpful light on the central position of cities and strongholds in Tolkien’s legendarium. Concerned with multiple layers of names, with locales (that also have multiple names), with connections across landscape and time, the legendarium dedicates time and thematic purpose to both the places—often mapped, named, and renamed—and the spaces that develop as the inhabitants of Arda traverse the landscape, establishing, constructing, crafting, abandoning, and then memorializing those places-spaces in their lore.² Indeed, de Certeau’s observation that A whole series of comparisons would be necessary to account for the magical powers proper names enjoy. They seem to be carried as emblems by the travelers they direct and simultaneously decorate (104) eerily echoes Tolkien’s legendarium, with its layers of names—given, inherited, alluded to, and invoked as powerful forces for peoples and cultures. Whether directly experienced, witnessed as ruin, or referenced/named as lost to time, the cities and strongholds of Arda consistently develop as primary signs of culture, of loss, and of memory, for both inhabitant and reader. Through their various lenses, the essays here emphasize the linguistic, narrative, visual, thematic, and mythic uses of the places-spaces of cities/strongholds. Aside from Nicholas Birns’ chapter, the essays in this volume do not expressly employ the lens of de Certeau as I have done. Yet, their insights into the functions of cities/strongholds of Tolkien do observe how every day, [stories] traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories (115).

Alongside my work with de Certeau’s notions of place-space, the idea for this volume began to take shape following the publication of The Fall of Gondolin, Christopher Tolkien’s last edited compilation of his father’s Great Tales of the First Age. Like the previously published Great Tales (The Children of Húrin and Beren and Lúthien), The Fall of Gondolin stretches back in time with a double perspective, both to the Elder Days of Middle-earth and to Tolkien’s first attempts to render his created world as text: The tale of the Fall of Gondolin gathers as it proceeds many glancing references to other stories, other places, and other times: to events in the past that govern actions and presumptions in the present time of the tale (Preface 16). Reading Tolkien’s various versions of the Gondolin’s fall, it became clear that Beleriand’s cities and strongholds, as much as the natural world of Middle-earth, undergird the events of this ancient history and serve as a kind of psychic, sacred reference point for the inhabitants of Arda in later days.³ Each of the Great Tales intersects and weaves their narrative strands through the cities and strongholds of First Age Beleriand: Doriath, Vinyamar, Tol Sirion, Minas Tirith, Nargothrond, Gondolin, Angband, to name a few. Because most of my scholarly work has concentrated on The First Age, I began to consider the ways in which the constructed habitations of Middle-earth form a nexus around which the Great Tales could circulate, develop, and interconnect. As constructed sites, they remind us that space cannot be separated from practice (Buchanan 127); references to and activities in these cities pinpoint places on maps. As importantly, they reflect cultural interactions, productions, and political/social strategies. These sites of refuge, sprinkled throughout the Great Tales—and that also continually seep into the tales of later Ages of Middle-earth—consistently rearrange the traversal of the narratives in which they appear.⁴

Beyond my own interest in the lost Beleriand, I expanded to theorize how centering the built-and-adorned spaces of Tolkien’s legendarium could highlight vital threads in the tapestry of Tolkien’s created world. Of course, the natural world of Middle-earth—its flora and fauna, its changing terrain, its vast catalog of locales—reminds us continually of Tolkien’s attention to Nature as a primary element of his world-making.⁵ While Tolkien’s concern for detailing the natural landscape of his created world helps to render the places and spaces of Arda as fully realized, this volume contends that cities and strongholds likewise serve as vital reference points and as markers of cultural operations that open up spaces for the tales in which they so often feature. That is, these built habitations, the cities and strongholds of Middle-earth, succeed in making sub-created Arda real, so that we believe it, while [we] are, as it were inside (OFS 132). In tandem with the natural world, the legendarium dedicates a great deal of time to the habitations within that natural space: how they are conceived, constructed, adorned, sustained, ordered, protected, hidden, and how they crystallize in the memory when they are no more. As Sabo explains, specific places that figure importantly in the intellectual life of a group of people serve a mnemonic function. Being in the place triggers the memory and calls up the poetry or the oral history (102). Even when being in the place (102), such as vital locales in the drowned Beleriand, are no longer possible, tales and objects from the ancient past function to recall those lost cities/strongholds. These relations then form critical symbolic associations across time and narrative.

As Yi-Fu Tuan explores the power of the human city as metaphor, his observations also pinpoint the symbolic and narrative power of the cities and strongholds of Tolkien’s legendarium:

The city is a place, a center of meaning, par excellence. It has many highly visible symbols. More important, the city itself is a symbol. […] Massive walls and portals demarcated sacred space. Fortifications defended people against not only human enemies but also demons and the souls of the dead. […] A city draws attention to itself, achieving power and eminence through the scale and solemnity of its rites and festivals. (173)

These centers of meaning characterize cultures, histories, and interactions in their own moment; particular constructed elements, such as walls and portals or stairs and hidden entrances, communicate political power and architectural/aesthetic skill. At the same time, later peoples of Arda hearken to earlier cities/strongholds and fold their meaning into tales and songs of the present, for it is by thoughtful reflection that the elusive moments of the past draw near to us in present reality and gain a measure of permanence (Tuan 148). Because of their cultural import, cities and strongholds of Arda ground the past, tales about that past, and in some cases, are cited in later times as markers of cultural significance. We are accustomed to thinking about the cyclical nature of Tolkien’s legendarium—how various elements of narrative, thematics, or peoples repeat through the Ages⁶—and this volume seeks to highlight the functions or purposes of cities and strongholds as an important strand in this cyclical structure.

Some of Tolkien’s habitations, like Gondolin in the Elder Days or Minas Tirith in the War of the Ring, contain (or at least we presume they contain) vast networks of political and social organization, craft, lore, individual and communal living spaces, developed with the expressed purpose of guarding those within from some force without. Others, like Lake-town or Bree, stand on the borders between cultivated communities and unknown or dark spaces: in the case of Lake-town, between the Elven-King of Mirkwood and the Desolation of Smaug/the Necromancer’s lair; in the case of Bree, between the hobbit enclave of Buckland and the wild lands and mountains that surround Rivendell. While each city or stronghold has a clear relation to the natural world, and often the text emphasizes the integration of built structure and natural surroundings, it nevertheless implies processes of conscious construction—houses, inns, quays, towers, fountains—and a complex system of relations between the Peoples of Middle-earth.⁷ 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, the unknown.

Helen Conrad-O’Briain and Gerard Hynes’ J. R. R. Tolkien: The Forest and the City offers crucial insights into the built locales of Middle-earth, as that volume recognizes the interdependence of nature and culture in Tolkien’s world as well as his art (18). As such, The Forest and the City gathers together vital essays underlining the relationship between cultural constructions and the landscapes across which they develop. Cities and Strongholds seeks to continue these conversations about how the legendarium consistently details the processes of lived environments within a landscape.⁸ By orienting our readings to cultural and built spaces, this volume suggests that the construction of cities and strongholds, their adornment and habitation, and their existence (or disappearance) in particular places in Middle-earth, invest the texts with particular meanings, signal movements or relations of peoples, and function as pivot points throughout the legendarium.⁹ Likewise, representations of Middle-earth’s cities as illustrations in texts or as elaborate sets for Peter Jackson’s films and Amazon’s Rings of Power television series offer visual detail about the styles of those habitations, as well as the activities, cultural, political, and narrative, that take place within the walls of those cities/strongholds. In their various ways, the essays in Cities and Strongholds 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. These essays reveal all cities and strongholds of the legendarium function as makers of meaning, containers of relations, outposts of history, and evocations of the Past.

The Essays

The volume progresses generally from a Middle-earth studies emphasis—with attention to the meaning of built spaces within the Secondary World—and then transitions to a Tolkien studies or historical studies perspective of how the legendarium might base its cities/strongholds on Primary World examples, and concludes with discussions of extra-Tolkien representations (illustrations, film sets) that expand our understanding of what the cities and strongholds of Middle-earth might be.

Maria K. Alberto opens the volume with an examination of the First Age stronghold Nargothrond, which, she claims, serves as mythic infrastructure for later Third Age peoples and their narratives. After grounding her reading in the study of infrastructure, Alberto posits that ancient cities exist primarily to serve Tolkien’s mythopoeic project, allowing for a focus on the mythic figures who find and move through the cities such as Nargothrond without any necessary attention to mundane details of upkeep and quotidian function. The references to cities, Alberto observes, carve out a general space and presumed infrastructure but ultimately emphasize the mythic figures and their actions in the tales that survive through the ages.

My exploration of the great strongholds of First Age Beleriand in Chapter 2 echoes Alberto’s in that I observe how the ancient Elven cities function as nodes or pivot points for the three Great Tales, as characters move in, through, and between the ancient cities, often transporting significant objects that mark the bearer and the relations between peoples and cities. Through the lens of Michel de Certeau’s notions of place-space and the creation of story, I narrow to focus on Nargothrond, observing how central figures of the Tales—Beren, Finrod, Lúthien, Túrin—move from Doriath to Nargothrond, often transporting objects of power—the Ring of Barahir, the Nauglamír, the Blacksword—that ignite the final destruction of those central spaces.

Emily Venkatesan reads Aredhel, the White Lady of the Noldor and Turgon of Gondolin’s sister, as a fallen woman once she asserts her agency and will to leave the hidden stronghold. In the process of her narrative, Venkatesan points out, Aredhel is reduced to a pawn, possessed, fought for, and ultimately killed in a dispute between males (Ëol and Turgon). As Aredhel moves beyond the bounds of Gondolin, she becomes a marker for the city’s eventual disintegration, so that her fallen state sets the grounds for the final First Age Elven city’s collapse.

Kenton Sena and Kaelyn Harris draw attention to the aesthetic production of dwarves across the legendarium, noting the characteristic dwarven concern with water and natural motifs such as trees in the great cities and strongholds across the three ages. In the process, they note the textual and critical tendency both to credit Elves with the aesthetic construction of strongholds such as Menegroth and to relegate Dwarvish making with mining or lesser craft. Their revisioning of Dwarvish design, construction, and aesthetic succeeds in reorienting our ideas of these sites as more than Elvish Beauty.

Rebecca Davis reads a cautionary tale in Galadriel’s stronghold of Lothlórien, suggesting the Noldorin queen, in establishing her Elven stronghold, comes dangerously close to the exercise of power over rather than a stewardship of nature. Working with Val Plumwood’s conception of dualities such as nature/culture, Davis reflects on Galadriel’s desire to preserve and slow time as counter to natural processes of death, decay, and rebirth. The Elven queen’s ultimate decision to renounce the freely offered One Ring and depart for the West saves her from a more Saruman-like fate.

Nicholas Birns zeroes in on the material objects of Hobbiton—via a discussion of the mathom—to explore the construction of material culture in the Third Age. Considering the mathom, that Hobbit storehouse for things not needed, Birns offers the mathom as a metaphor for Tolkien’s ideal balance of the aesthetic and the useful. Lived spaces housing objects of both beauty and use are peppered throughout the legendarium, not just in cozy hobbit-holes. Indeed, Birns observes, the mathom functions as an apt signifier for Tolkien’s own processes of sub-creation.

Craig Boyd and Joanna Boyd-Wilhite take Foucault’s reading of the Bentham’s panopticon as a locus of discipline and power to compare Denethor and Saruman’s use of a panoptic vision from their strongholds, Minas Tirith and Isengard. Both figures view their domains/people from on high, both fall prey to the furthering gaze of the palantíri, and both reject community or fellowship for isolated and dangerous power. Foucault’s claims about the coercive nature of power thus echo Tolkien’s own concerns with domination and isolation.

Robin Anne Reid uses applied linguistics to detail the ways in which the narrative personae of The Lord of the Rings mark out the bounds of cities and strongholds, specifically Rivendell, Moria, Lothlórien, Edoras, Helm’s Deep, Isengard, and Minas Tirith. For each of the Third Age sites, Reid observes three personae—third person point of view characters, third person objective, and third person omniscient, authorial persona—and her analysis reveals how these different personae of the novel syntactically foreground different types of bounds that encompass these cities/strongholds. Reid’s exploration begins an important study revealing how the grammar and narrative choices of The Lord of the Rings themselves contribute to the framing and significance of the habitations of Middle-earth.

Birgitte Breemerkamp historically grounds the trope of living swords—the notion of the weapons as living beings—in early medieval culture, as they cast light on the swords of Westernesse in The Lord of the Rings and Anglachel/Gurthang in The Children of Húrin. Breemerkamp notes extensive medieval cultural and poetic examples of swords that resonate with power for their makers/wielders that she then connects to similar weaponry in Tolkien’s texts. She works with five characteristics of such objects: their age or status, their legendary origins, their particular aesthetics, poets’ personification of them, and any other anthropomorphous details they carry. In her discussion of these living swords, Breemerkamp attends to the ways smiths and their forges formed a particular social network in cities, both in the Primary and Secondary worlds.

Kristine Larsen explores ancient geological sites as they impact later cultures, who often seek to redefine or remythologize those sites when the original meaning/inhabitants are lost to time. Her numerous references to ancient English and world sites—such as megaliths, standing stones, indigenous stones or mounds of the Americas—establish a pattern of later peoples resorting to folklore and legends once the original peoples have disappeared. Larsen grounds her reading of a similar process in Tolkien’s work in Deborah Sabo’s analysis of archaeology in the legendarium to reveal Tolkien’s understanding and use of (often imperfect) cultural memory, with its constant threat of othering the unknown past and its peoples.

Marie Bretagnolle works through British and American illustrations of The Hobbit’s Lake-town, from Tolkien’s own treatment and possible sources, through the Peter Jackson trilogy. Beginning with Tolkien’s illustrations Lake-town and the Death of Smaug, Bretagnolle explores how various artists/illustrators respond to Tolkien’s original art. She notes that later artists generally fall into three options in their work: they follow the original almost exactly, they offer slightly different perspectives of the town, or they move beyond The Hobbit’s description of the town and Tolkien’s original artwork completely. In each instance, Bretagnolle notes the medium, genre, audience, and real-world potential sources for artists’ Lake-town depiction.

Mina Lukić offers an examination of architecture and material culture in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy: specifically, she argues that the attention Peter Jackson’s production design team took to present cultures visually echoes various Primary World styles and systems. In her analysis of Hobbiton and Bag End, Rohan and Gondor, Lukić observes the ways the built environment and the objects therein reinforce cultural identity for the characters in that culture and also provide helpful repeated motifs of cultural significance for the viewer.

Finally, Danny Saldana considers Peter Jackson’s filmic Rivendell as a site of nostalgia for both the Elves and other peoples of Middle-earth in order to explore how it embeds layers of nostalgia into the millennial American viewer. Thanks to Jackson’s concern with being faithful to Tolkien’s vision of Middle-earth, Saldana notes that millennials, even those without knowledge of the novel, discern the deep history of Middle-earth through the particular autumnal richness of the Art Nouveau-inspired Rivendell; these same viewers drew comfort from and identified with characters such as Frodo, whose arrival in Rivendell marks his awareness of fate and prompts the decision to the take the Ring to Mordor; finally, American Millennials, with their particular experience of trauma and uncertainty, can now hearken back twenty years to their first experience of that locus of memory, Rivendell, remembering both a younger version of themselves and their first experience with Jackson’s vision of Middle-earth.

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. Any map, as Denis Wood observes, "embeds a fundamental, ontological proposition inside a locative one. The locative proposition, this is there, nestles within it the ontological one, this is (56; author’s emphasis). A map points to a fixed location—this is there—and suggests a reality of existence, this is. If we recall the cities and strongholds in Tolkien’s legendarium and on his maps, the sense of their distinct position and their actual existence function together and remind us, too, of stories passing through them. These particular positions on the map of Middle-earth are locatable there, in a certain place and no other (this is there), and their existence likewise implies thriving centers, spaces of maritime construction, of commerce, of strategic surveillance, and thus of multitudes of stories (this is). The maps of Middle-earth locate cities and strongholds in particular times and places, narratives then embed them into tales as primary locales for their protagonists, later tales and legends reference or cite earlier cities and strongholds, characters consult maps that locate various important cultural centers. In contrast, others sing or compose tales that reference ancient adventures crossing in and out of lost cities and strongholds. As Sabo details, these ancient places map a people’s story onto the land, and at the same time contain a culture’s memory, thus ensuring that the story can be re‐mapped into the minds of future generations" (95). 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.

Works Cited

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Conrad-O’Briain, Helen, and Gerald Hynes, editors. J. R. R. Tolkien: The Forest and the City. Four Courts Press, 2013.

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Acknowledgments

Many colleagues, friends, and fellow Tolkienites played crucial roles in the long process of developing, proposing, and bringing this volume to fruition. First and foremost, many thanks to MythPress editor Leslie A. Donovan and the Council of Stewards of the Mythopoeic Society, who welcomed me into the scholarly fold at my first Mythcon in 2008 and who continued to foster my exploration of Arda at conferences and in print. Leslie and Janet Brennan Croft, in particular, have modeled insightful, deliberate, and cooperative scholarship in Tolkien/Middle-earth studies—I seek to continue that work in this volume. Likewise, I am grateful to the Tolkien Society for their opportunities to present and publish developing ideas and, most importantly, for introducing me to a vast international community of scholars in the field. It is with particular satisfaction that several young, promising, international scholars I first encountered through Tolkien Society conferences contribute strong inter-disciplinary essays to Cities and Strongholds.

At my home institution of Oklahoma Christian University, I extend thanks to the Dean’s Council for approving my sabbatical in spring 2020 to attend the Tolkien: Voyage en Terre du Milieu exhibit at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris. With the support of my department chair, Dr. Gail Nash, and my colleagues in Language and Literature, particularly Dr. Travis Montgomery, I was able to begin the work of compiling the volume without course and committee demands. Since that sabbatical, the continuing funding and course release offered by Dean Charles Rix and Academic Vice-President Dr. Jeff McCormack have allowed me research time and public acknowledgment of my work. To the long-suffering and always-helpful librarians of Beam Library—Connie Maple, Chris Rosser, Dara Tinius, and JJ Compton—much gratitude for responding to my ILL requests by the dozens and for offering space to present my ideas to faculty and students. Lastly, to my students in my Tolkien course and others who have furthered my ideas about Middle-earth through their exceptional course discussions and often graduate-level research, I am forever grateful and inspired by your insights. Special acknowledgment goes to Elijah Eck, who worked with me in the early stages of editing and source checking, providing an additional set of eyes in the details.

To my family, who has always encouraged my love of Tolkien’s legendarium, thank you for understanding my need to read and re-read, to travel to conferences and exhibitions, and to talk through theory, methodologies, and potential topics at any and all times. To my partner David, thank you for keeping me going and updating me on the Tolkien Reddit feed, as well as for listening to my ideas and love of Elves. To my aunt Paula, you began it all by being the first in the family to