Welcome to SPACE, our adult continuing education program which offers interactive monthly courses for personal enrichment! Learn more here.
Being Scheduled
Mixed Lecture/Discussion
Low intensity
Days and Times
As soon as we obtain enough interest in this class we will be in touch to work out a meeting time that works for the group. Thank you for keeping your January 2027 availability up to date!
This class needs more pre-enrollment by December 1 to get confirmed.
This module is a standing candidate which means it will be ready to launch as soon as it gets enough interest. Token holders can set aside a Token to reserve their seat for class and help it get confirmed.
This four-week lecture course examines geography as a generative force in Tolkien's legendarium, treating landscape not as backdrop but as the engine of story, meaning, and feeling. Each week pairs a one-hour lecture with a discussion session, moving outward from the Shire to the furthest edges of the map while the critical lens deepens in parallel: philology and cartography in Week 1, ecocriticism in Week 2, the sublime and postcolonial critique in Week 3, and sacred geography and loss in Week 4. Tolkien's own account of his working method, given in a 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison, provides the course's title and its guiding premise: he built the story to fit the map rather than the reverse.
Participants will trace how that premise plays out across the legendarium, from the compressed histories encoded in place names such as Rivendell and Barad-dûr to the ideological work performed by the pastoral Shire, the contested racial coding of Mordor, and the eventual withdrawal of Valinor beyond any mortal map.
For anyone who has ever lingered over the endpapers of a Tolkien novel tracing a river or a mountain range, this course offers a chance to read those maps properly, as texts in their own right. Along the way, familiar places take on new depth: the Shire's cosy fields turn out to carry buried questions of class and belonging, Mirkwood and Moria become studies in dread and the sublime, and the fading of Lothlórien and Valinor emerges as one of the legendarium's quietest, most powerful meditations on loss.
No background in literary theory is required, only curiosity and a willingness to look again at a world many of us feel we already know well. Across four weeks, that familiar map will start to look a good deal stranger, and a good deal richer, than it first appeared.
The module will follow an 8-session structure and is shown by weeks:
Participants will trace how that premise plays out across the legendarium, from the compressed histories encoded in place names such as Rivendell and Barad-dûr to the ideological work performed by the pastoral Shire, the contested racial coding of Mordor, and the eventual withdrawal of Valinor beyond any mortal map.
For anyone who has ever lingered over the endpapers of a Tolkien novel tracing a river or a mountain range, this course offers a chance to read those maps properly, as texts in their own right. Along the way, familiar places take on new depth: the Shire's cosy fields turn out to carry buried questions of class and belonging, Mirkwood and Moria become studies in dread and the sublime, and the fading of Lothlórien and Valinor emerges as one of the legendarium's quietest, most powerful meditations on loss.
No background in literary theory is required, only curiosity and a willingness to look again at a world many of us feel we already know well. Across four weeks, that familiar map will start to look a good deal stranger, and a good deal richer, than it first appeared.
The module will follow an 8-session structure and is shown by weeks:
| Week | Topic |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | Cartography, Naming, and the Birth of Middle-earth |
| Week 2 | The Shire and the Ecology of Home |
| Week 3 | Wilderness, Threshold, and the Sublime |
| Week 4 | Sacred Geography, Loss, and the Limits of the Map |
Required Texts
A copy of The Lord of the Rings
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