Nowhere and Back Again Book II Outline & Notes (Patreon)

Thought I'd give my $2+ backers a treat here. As I've just nailed down the structure of Nowhere and Back Again Book II, this is a synopsis of it. I haven't written any of the essays yet, so what you read here is subject to change, but going into Book II, this is how I expect it to play out.

From the outset of Nowhere and Back Again, I've envisioned a structure of six internalized books for a hopeful three volumes (I do hope to publish a print edition of the blog someday), starting with a first volume covering Mordor and Gondor. I suppose I wanted a volume on the War of the Ring, but ultimately I realized this didn't make geographic or structural sense and would deprive Nowhere and Back Again of the originality I sought for it. So I wrought my plans over again, and decided Volume 1 would cover Mordor and Rhovanion, the expansive region which covers the known portions of northeast Middle-earth. This meant I could dedicate an entire book to the East, while the second volume would look at the West, and a third would... ah, sorry, spasm in my wrist. Can't recall what I was typing there.

What I can tell you is that Book II will cover Rhovanion, or Wilderland as the Hobbits call it, picking up directly from Book I's survey of Mordor and its surrounding lands. Like Book I, it will focus broadly on the East, and the peoples thereof. Book II will have numerous essays on the Dwarves, from those of the Iron Hills to Erebor to Moria. It's emphatically the book where we depart from Tolkien's villains and explore characters and territories associated with more ambiguous attitudes in Tolkien. As Rhovanion serves as the setting of most of The Hobbit, much of Book II will cover that particular book and its film adaptations (particularly The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies), although to deem it the "Hobbit book" would be a mistake. Nowhere and Back Again parallels The Lord of the Rings in its structure, but it doesn't ape it: rather it uses its idiosyncratic narrative shape to tell a wider story of Tolkien's secondary world. The latter chapters of the book (essays should be considered "chapters") will cover locations broadly featured in the latter chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring and its Book II, and will largely spill into the beginnings of Book III, as there's little to distinguish where southwestern Rhovanion ends and northeastern Gondor begins beyond thematic and aesthetic conventions.

On the whole, Book II will be a more sprawling and intentionally messy work than Book I, with a similar focus on the subaltern to Book I, but with our first glimpses of the Elves and the Istari. As Mirkwood is an isolationist elf fortress and Lothlórien is more complex than it might initially appear, our first glimpse of the Elves will be troubled, wartorn and showing the cultural fringes of the more delinquent Children of Ilúvatar. In short, this will be a very weird set of 24-or-25-odd essays, and I'm extremely excited to start writing it. Here's a rough list of essays I plan to write, although it may mislead the reader: what is listed as a single entry may span three or four blog posts, and subdivisions with slash marks are often just notes of surrounding areas I need to dedicate a paragraph or so to (Erebor and Lothlórien will likely have particularly long runs on the blog). In short, nothing is wholly nailed down, but nothing ever is. The whims of subcreation are ever in flux, so with that notion, I predict that Book II will consist of:

Dorwinion/The Iron Hills

The Grey Mountains (Withered Heath, Gundabad, Framsburg)

Erebor

Dale/the Desolation of Smaug

Lake-town (The Long Lake/The Long Marshes)

Mirkwood (Thranduil’s Caverns/Enchanted River/Old Forest Road)

Rhimdath/Eagles’ Eyrie

Goblin-town/High Pass

The Carrock

Rhosgobel

Vales of Anduin/Gladden Fields

Caradhras/Fanuidhol/Celebdil

Moria

Lothlórien

Dol Guldur

The Brown Lands

Emyn Muil/Nindalf