New Book: High Towers and Strong Places by Tim Furnish

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

High Towers and Strong Places: A Political History of Middle-Earth by Timothy R. Furnish

The hundredth anniversary of the terrifying and tragic Battle of the Somme seems a fitting time to review a new book about Middle-Earth, as it was born at the Somme  from the imagination of a young British officer who survived it, J.R.R. Tolkien. From the death and destruction of the Western Front, Tolkien wrought a deep and elegant mythology that has entertained and fascinated hundreds of millions of readers for decades, spawned a sword and sorcery genre of popular fiction, major motion pictures, video games and even an academic field, “Tolkien Studies“. It is to the latter that High Towers and Strong Places by Dr. Timothy Furnish belongs and it represents a major analytic contribution; Furnish takes that which is well-known and widely read and breaks new ground.

Departing from the tradition of analyzing Tolkien’s works as literature, poetry, linguistics, mythology, culture and even roots in Christian theology, Furnish applies the disciplinary lens of political science and opens up into view the geopolitics of Middle-Earth; Sauron as tyrannical theocrat, Gondor as hegemon and Gandalf as the grand strategist of the West. Furnish, a former Arabic linguist and Army chaplain with a PhD in Islamic history, emphasizes that J.R.R. Tolkien, as a scholar and “subcreator” was deeply concerned with history and historical realism as a substantive basis for his fictional world that he took to “amazing lengths” of detail. This makes Middle-Earth a prime candidate, Furnish argues, to be analyzed in “real-world fashion”:

….The Silmarillion and LotR are both shot through with politics – whether about the intrigues of noldorin princes of the First Age, the even more byzantine plots of the Second Age Numenorean kings, or the dynastic struggles of the rulers of Arnor and Gondor in the Third Age. But the latter two are in even larger measure books about wars, while even The Hobbit contains a major, and important, battle before its end.

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