Announced and on Amazon UK now, a new book-length survey of Tolkien’s places. It’ll be by John Garth, with the cooperation of the Tolkien estate. We’re going to have to wait a bit for it to appear, though, as Princeton University Press won’t be publishing Tolkien’s Worlds: The Places That Inspired the Writer’s Imagination until 17th March 2020 June 2020.

If every place in his life were to be covered then that’s a lot of ground to cover, and at just 192 pages (inc. pictures, bibliography, index etc) I’d guess the book might then be more of a gazetteer with short precise entries and inset mini-maps.

But I suspect, from the title, that it’ll just be the places which can be definitely be 100% tied to literary inspiration. In which case I can see how it could be done in the page-count. I guess the book may also be oversize, in which case there would be room to be more expansive. Possibly it’ll be a mix of the two approaches, with an expansive focus on the inspiring places, and a tighter but exhaustive listing of all the others — maybe each with a 1-to-5 ‘probability ranking’ for the various local claims of possible inspiration.

I assume Princeton University Press will have a crack team of picture researchers on such a prestigious job, so it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.