Tolkien’s Crusaders & Nostalgia for the Golden Age

[Buster's Uncle]

Russian novel retells “The Lord of the Rings” from the bad guys’ POV
Posted on February 23, 2011 by Chris Walters



The Last Ring-bearerFifteen years ago, Russian paleontologist Kirill Yeskov decided to rewrite Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” for fun. His new version, “The Last Ring-bearer,” assumes that the original story of the Ring of Power is actually a retelling of a major war as written by the victors — and as with human history, the vanquished were painted with a more villainous brush than they deserved. You can’t find it in any U.S. bookstores, but you can download the ebook for free.

I haven’t read it yet, but Laura Miller at Salon says “The Last Ring-bearer” is presented as “the more complicated and less sentimental true story” of the fall of Mordor. It has “the wizard Gandalf [as] a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies.” The elves ally with Gandalf because they want to take over Middle-earth and remake it in the image of their homeland. And Mordor is a land of science and technology, led by a ruler who wants to replace ancient magic with modern enlightenment.

Although that comes across a little like Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” in concept, the hero of “The Last Ring-bearer” isn’t Sauron — who remains off-stage for the most part — but a pair of men sent to find and destroy a powerful elvish weapon.

Yeskov writes that “The Last Ring-bearer” was intended for “a very specific audience” of Tolkien fans who both love the epic fantasy and love to tinker with it, pick it apart, and argue about its flaws:

Briefly, I was attracted by a logical challenge to come up with a consistent explanation for several obvious contradictions in the image of Middle Earth that the Professor painted, demonstrating thereby that those contradictions are not real.

…

Looking for a place for ‘The Last Ring-bearer’ in the long row of literary apocrypha, I dare place it next to my personal favorite Rozenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead (the movie, not the play). An exquisitely paradoxical post-modern game Tom Stoppard played against the Shakespearean backdrop is precisely the relationship with the source Text that I sought to accomplish. Whether I have succeeded is for readers to judge.

This may sound like the world’s biggest work of fanfic, and Yeskov admits that he’s not a professional author and that he wrote the book for his own amusement. But that doesn’t mean it’s amateur; it was published commercially in Russia in 1999 and has achieved enough acclaim and popularity to have since been translated into other languages. Just not English, for fear of lawsuits from the flaming eyeball of Tolkien’s estate.

But readers always find a way, and now a fan named Yisroel Markov has translated the work into English and, with Yeskov’s editing and blessing, made available a noncommercial version.

Update: Some of the links below no longer work. Check out this page for more current epub and mobi downloads.

“The Last Ring-bearer” page [ymarkov.livejournal.com][/size]

http://booksprung.com/russian-novel-retells-the-lord-of-the-rings-from-the-bad-guys-pov


I do not recall how or where I found out about The Last Ringbearer years ago, but I downloaded it from somewhere and read it -- I cannot recommend the first 100 or so pages too highly; Yeskov knew his Middle Earth thoroughly, and the setup and exposition was brilliant and astonishingly credible.  (Once they get to Umbar, it turns into this genial spy story that I've completely forgotten despite the tremendous WTF!? factor of extensive tradecraft chatter in a Middle Earth story - I can't recommend any of that.)

How the TLR take relates to my thesis ought to be obvious...

[Buster's Uncle]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer  -Good summary for them as is sure ain't going to bother to read any of the book - but doesn't manage to convey how convincing the POV manages to be.

I only just found the title again - it's been a while...

[Elok]

Wiki makes it sound like His Dark Materials, honestly--not a good thing.  I can get why Lewis's heavy-handed theistic axe-grinding could be met with heavy-handed atheistic axe-grinding, but dangit, Tolkien was pretty subtle about it all.

[Buster's Uncle]

His Dark Materials?

Again, I found it a credible (and well-crafted; you just don't get the well-crafted part reading a summary) perspective that works, is all.  I wasn't exactly expecting to like anything about a "everything you knew is wrong" story, either, until I read it.  A defensible take given the assumption that Tolkien's account could be more-or-less true in the plot but hopelessly biased and full of glaring omissions about the right and wrong of it...

At any rate, the idea that the whole thing was a preemptive war by the ancient forces of magic against an incipient industrial revolution speaks to someone else having perceived something in the Middle Earth legendarium that I did - without ever framing it quite that way, conservative v. progressive.  Not so much that The Last Ringbearer is true or something as that all the pieces he found to subvert and play with were consistent with reactionary forces and world view as the Good Guys in the original, according to the author...

[Elok]

HDM is a sort of anti-Chronicles of Narnia written by a British atheist in the nineties.  Only even more on-the-nose about it than Lewis, and that comes off as more irritating since he emphasizes atheism over humanism for the most part.  They tried to make movies out of it, but stalled after the first one, The Golden Compass, flopped at the box office.  Long story why.  If you don't remember it, it involved a multiverse, a cowboy with a zeppelin, and an armored polar bear voiced by Ian McKellen.  Circa 2006.

Not going to argue about your book, just saying the Wiki summary makes it sound like HDM: "God hates your brain and spends all His free time keeping you stupid and oppressed," etc.  Possibly this is simply a flaw in the Wiki summary.

[Buster's Uncle]

Naw, it's a flaw in summaries in general when you just had to be there.

Since I'm watching a Star Trek fanfilm right now featuring the mirror universe, just look at it as one of those if TLR bothers you, conceptually, instead of dismissing it.

But I already made my point in the second paragraph of my last, so moot beyond that.

[Elok]

It suddenly occurs to me to note that hatred of industrialization and/or economic change is or was very much a "progressive" thing in the US.  Certainly the GOP has been rabidly free market for all of my lifetime.  It's hard to say what the [Sleezebag] hurricane will do to the whole thing.

Seriously, though, take a look at Tolkien's letters.  In a couple of them he goes into extreme depth as to the metaphysical significance of it all, way too much for me to quote or paraphrase here.

[Buster's Uncle]

True, true - and a good point.

You can see how it would be different to someone born late Victorian, though.

[Buster's Uncle]

I mean, the anti industrialism thing came in with the hippies about the time I was born.

For the hippie movement, machines were very long-established, thus nothing a conservative would rue...  You can see that it would have been different to a man whose grandfather predated steam engines...  ISTR the same fellow being deeply puzzled that the hippies loved his stuff so.

[Elok]

Well, it's not that machinery is bad in itself (as he explains it), but that he views it as a perfect means for those in power to exert their will on the populace.  Also that it inevitably entails pollution of the environment--in case the ents didn't clue you in, the man LOVED trees--and economic growth always involves "creative destruction."

Of course "magic" is used in much the same way in LOTR: the will to domination beginning as a drive for control in the name of efficiency . . .

[Buster's Uncle]

...And that way lies Saruman and then Sauron, and engines get involved - both of them got their starts as Maia in the retinue of Aule the smith...

Sure.  Interesting, the intersection with radical views coming from a very different place.

[Elok]

Saruman was originally intended to be in the service of Manwe, BTW.  It's in one of the letters.  See you in May!

[Buster's Uncle]

*sigh*  I'll look forward to it.

[Yitzi]

The OT is part of the history, but full of outmoded commandments

Or so claims Christianity, anyway...

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh, absolutely.

Sorry 'bout that; the Christians really do tend to pick out the nasty bits to justify nasty behavior...