Jan 3, 2022

Let's Read Tolkien 82: Vae Victis 1-2

Is there a sight more beautiful than a desert sunset, when the sun, as if ashamed of its whitish daytime fierceness, lavishes a bounty of unimaginably pure soft colors on its guests?

Last summer, I finished my series of blog posts on the Lord of the Rings; my Let's Read Tolkien series took 81 posts to cover the Hobbit and the three volumes of the Lord of the Rings. Obviously I started thinking about what to do when it was done. Having a regular monthly blog post has been a fun thing to do, and doing a sort of leisurely close reading of books I know and love was just a pleasure. Now, though, I decided it was time for something completely different.

That's right: I'll be reading Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer, the unofficial sequel or retelling of the Lord of the Rings, denied official publication in English by the Tolkien estate but nevertheless released unto the world in 1999. I have to say that it's completely beyond me why the grandchildren of a man who died in 1973 are allowed to exercise this kind of control over creative works by other people, but here we are. As I don't read nearly enough Russian to be able to tackle the original, I'll be working with the second edition of the English translation by Yisroel Markov.

The essential background reading is Yeskov's essay in Salon, "Why I reimagined "LOTR" from Mordor's perspective". It's kinda charming, and at this point, I was completely sold:
Plus Middle Earth surely has PR and info wars (how else?); perhaps it even has its own Professor Fomenko to claim, in all seriousness, that there was no Second Age, Angbad is nothing but Mordor, and Fingon, Isildur and Aragorn were the same person…
A Middle-Earth Fomenko! That's it, I'm definitely reading this.

Yeskov's starting point, in brief, is that he loves Tolkien's world but isn't that crazy about the stories Tolkien set in it. So he's decided to rescue Middle-earth from Tolkien with a sort of counter-narrative to the Lord of the Rings. I'm definitely interested. A couple of points he made struck home, the most important of which echoes the observation made by the commenter to my earlier Tolkien blogs: Tolkien didn't really care about human geography. Yeskov has set out to fix this, and gleefully introduces his trick question to Tolkien scholars: when the hobbits drink beer at, say, the Prancing Pony, what kind of money do they use to pay for it?

It's a damn good question. I claim partial credit for having asked questions about the hobbit economy way back when I did Chapter 2, including what, exactly, the inherited Baggins wealth is and where it's held, including whether there's a hobbit bank somewhere. I've even run an entire Middle-earth Role-Playing campaign, where we just used the game's anodyne system of metal coins in denominations of ten, without ever giving the whole matter a second thought. But more to the point, I agree entirely that Tolkien managed the perhaps slightly strange trick of totally neglecting huge parts of his "sub-creation", while still making it compelling enough to make you want to fill in the blanks.

Other than that essay and a general awareness that The Last Ring-bearer exists, I don't really know anything about it, and I'm going to keep it that way. The book is divided into four parts, with lots and lots of chapters which look quite short, so I'll be tackling several of them in each blog post. Probably. Like I said, I don't really know what I'm getting into!

I'm doing it anyway. Here goes.

**

After some Kipling and a short paean to deserts, we meet who I presume are our main characters trudging through one: Haladdin the Field Medic, and Sergeant Tzerlag of the Cirith Ungol Rangers. They're refugees from Mordor's South Army, defeated in the Morgul Vale, and Haladdin is severely wounded from an elven arrow to the leg ("poisoned, as usual"). They've had a harrowing escape, hiding out next to a gallows erected by the Western army and crossing by Cirith Ungol. It all sounds like a sort of reverse Shadow of War, and frankly, I'd play the hell out of that.

Haladdin tries to persuade Tzerlag to leave him behind and make for safety, but the Orocuen (i.e. "orc") won't have it: if the elves find him, they'll torture him and find out too much. They get water from what's called an adiabatic collector, apparently better known as an air well, or in other words, a pile of rocks that condenses moisture out of the air. It's unclear if these were ever actually used anywhere, but it's an interesting concept and works nicely here. They hide for the day in a dugout quickly prepared by Tzerlag, and Haladdin passes out to a hallucination where he's back in Barad-dûr. Therefore, it's time for exposition!

Gorgoroth has a long history as a prosperous oasis in the Mordor desert, where a whole bunch of Orocuen have settled down, while most of the others still lead nomadic lives in the desert. Caravans from Umbar make the long trek to trade here, especially for valuable metals mined from the Ash Mountains by the trolls, and all these people - who are throughout described as human - intermingle and -marry.

This, then, was the yeast on which Barad-dúr rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.
The diacritic in Barad-dûr is consistently wrong, by the way, and that's annoying. The impression we're being given here is of a sort of idealized secular Arabic-Islamic civilization, juxtaposed with the primitive West "picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor" - only a slightly caricatured rendition of early medieval Europe and what we now call the Middle East. Haladdin has fond memories of the streets of Barad-dûr, his time at the university and a certain trollish girl called Sonya.

Sadly, Haladdin's consciousness returns to the desert, and when night falls, the two get underway again. Tzerlag has explained to him how the desert, which seems barren and featureless, is divided between the various Orocuen clans, and how it contains much more life than the casual observer would think. Tzerlag also reminiscences on how he grew up as a nomad, became a traveling craftsman, and ended up in the army. He roundly curses the war and wonders who wanted it in the first place.

**

And with that, the short second chapter ends. This has been an effective, if slightly cliche introduction, but hey, they're cliches because they work, right? We've met who I assume are our protagonists, but at least two characters, and we've been given a strong introduction to the "counter-story" to the Lord of the Rings that we're here to experience. The prose is a bit clunky, but its no-nonsense modernity and the expository focus on exactly the kind of human geography Tolkien cheerfully ignored, it's effective, and I'm curious to read more.

**

Next time: ...climatology?

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