Let's Read Tolkien 83: Vae Victis 3-4

Middle Earth, the arid belt 

A natural history brief 

Two types of climate epochs follow one another in the history of any world, including Middle Earth – pluvial and arid; the growth and shrinking of polar ice caps follow a single rhythm, which is a sort of a pulse of a planet.

Talleyrand, as depicted in the

KOEI video game L'Empereur

I said climatology and I meant it. Yeskov is a biologist, and he talks us through the idea that planets go through cooler and warmer climate periods. This, he states, is "obscured" to historians, even though climate change is much more meaningful to history than most of what we consider important historical events. This is exactly the kind of reductionist Jared Diamond nonsense that non-historians love, where they take something that's obvious to any historian, in this case something I teach as part of our high school history curriculum ("climate impacts society!"), and present it as a devastating new insight that none of us have heard of. It's nonsense in terms of Yeskov's own story as well, but I'll get back to that.

What we're told is that Middle-earth (I don't know why the translator insists on "Middle Earth") is entering a drier phase, and that's bad news for Mordor: with less rainfall hitting the mountains, agriculture in Gorgoroth goes into a crisis. They decide to fix the problem with an irrigation scheme drawing on Lake Núrnen, charmingly depicted in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The trouble is that while this is initially succesful, in the longer term poorly done irrigation will lead to so much salt building up in the soil that it becomes a wasteland, and as is explained to us in a slightly excruciating but factual infodump, this is what happens to Mordor.

We're told the architects of the irrigation scheme were sentenced to twenty-five years in the lead mines, by the way, which suggests I was on to something with my Soviet Mordor schtick in War of the Ring. Seeing as how Mordor is "the smithy of the nations", they can compensate for this by importing food, and their prosperity continues: a full-fledged industrial revolution is underway, with steam engines and everything, and King Sauron VIII even proclaims a national literacy law.

For what it's worth, I have an issue with this story. Yeskov writes that Mordor "could trade its manufactured goods for any amounts of food from Khand and Umbar. Trading caravans went back and forth through the Ithilien Crossroads day and night". Khand is southeast of Mordor and Umbar, as we know, is to the south. If food imports from Khand and Harad are feeding Gorgoroth and especially the city of Barad-dûr - how? How does the food get there? Caravans, he says, but that's a terribly uneconomic way of hauling food. At some point, and it isn't very far, the animals hauling the grain or whatever else start to need so much fodder for the trip that there's no room for anything else. Maybe you could haul food from the Anduin to Minas Morgul, say, but getting it to Barad-dûr? But there's no conceivable water route to Barad-dûr either, and if there was enough rainfall on the Gorgoroth plateau to dig canals, they wouldn't be necessary to transport food in the first place.

I would suggest that given the technology involved, transporting enough food to Barad-dûr to feed a city simply can't be done. Logistics on this level couldn't be carried out by land until the invention of the railroad, and even though we've heard of steam engines in Mordor, so far they've been stationary and there hasn't been so much as a whisper of rails. This idea that Barad-dûr subsists on imported food is, I think, impossible.

So in my opinion, ironically enough, Yeskov hasn't quite thought this through. It's not like this is a fatal flaw, but if you're going to have a go at Tolkien for this stuff, it's only fair you be held to the same standard yourself.

**

We move from climatology and irrigation to completely different things, with this dramatic paragraph closing the third chapter.

But it was exactly at that time that the words that changed the entire history of Middle Earth were said; strangely, they repeated almost exactly a prophetic utterance made in another World regarding a very different country: “A nation that is unable to feed itself and is dependent on food imports cannot be considered a formidable foe.”

Somebody asked about the quote on stackexchange, and I have no idea where it's supposedly from either, or even what the country is. The parallels made in the following chapter are all intensely 20th-century, and Britain comes to mind first, but I have no idea who would have said something like this about them, or indeed anyone else for that matter. It could be that the idea got lost in translation.

The scene it sets up is a meeting of the White Council in the Tower of Amon Sûl. Again, the diacritic is wrong in The Last Ringbearer, where it's rendered Amon Súl, like Barad-dúr (sic); later on we also get Nazgúl, as if the acute accent was the only diacritic that exists. In Appendix E of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explains that the acute accent is used to mark long vowels, with the circumflex (^) used in Sindarin for long vowels in stressed monosyllables, because "they tended in such cases to be specially prolonged". So it's not a horrible crime to write Amon Súl instead of Amon Sûl, but with modern word processing, swapping out the circumflex is inexplicable. The only message I'm getting from it is that the translator can't be bothered to write names properly.

The White Council of this chapter consists of Saruman, Gandald, Radagast and a fourth wizard dressed in blue. Gandalf has just finished advocating that they go to war with Mordor. With the aid of a foretelling device called the Mirror, which I presume is the Mirror of Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings, the wizards have determined that the development of industry and technology in Mordor will outstrip the western nations and soon become unstoppable. Gandalf's proposal is to enlist the elves, "the inhabitants of the Enchanted Forests", on their side, and offer to lend them the Mirror for the duration of the war. The elves, Saruman warns, are only ever out for their own advantage. He argues against war, referring to it as a "Final Solution of the Mordorian problem", and predicting that if Gandalf wins, he'll write history to justify himself, i.e. the Lord of the Rings. Saruman fails, and resigns his position as head of the council.

The prose is not only clunky but melodramatic; it shifts jarringly between registers and fairly clobbers you with anachronisms, so I have to be honest and say that the fourth chapter isn't exactly pleasant to read. It ends with a quote from, of all people, Talleyrand. But thematically, what's being set up here works as an anti-story to the Lord of the Rings. Gandalf says:

The Middle Earth [sic] is a multitude of peoples living in harmony with nature and the heritage of their ancestors now. These peoples and their entire way of life are now under a dire threat, and my duty is to avert it at all costs.

The idea of protecting the immemorial customs - the mos maiorum - of Middle-earth from evil innovation is basically identical to Tolkien's theology of the Machine; in Tolkien's terms, Gandalf is setting off to fight Sarumanism, just as he did in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's Gandalf would probably not have taken this as far as launching an offensive war to destroy science and literacy, but many of Tolkien's fellow religious conservatives certainly do, from Afghanistan to Alabama. So the Gandalf presented here is a very credible evil doppelgänger to Tolkien's kindly wizard, indeed quite close to what many critics of Tolkien seem to have imagined his Gandalf actually was. Tolkien's Gandalf stressed that he felt pity even for orcs; Yeskov's Gandalf dismisses pity as weakness. Maybe this is something like what Gandalf would have become if he had accepted the Ring when Frodo offered it to him. In that sense, what we have here is both a counter-narrative to Tolkien and, arguably, a very Tolkienian exploration of how power might corrupt even Gandalf.

In his speech against Gandalf, Saruman makes the argument that Gandalf is jealous of Mordor, which works as an inversion of the position in the Lord of the Rings, where Saruman imitates Sauron. Here Saruman's argument is that magic, as used by the wizards, can never really advance; on the contrary, as time goes on, more and more of it is lost, whereas science and technology can grow. This is also a fair extrapolation of Tolkien's conservativism: new things are Sarumanism and therefore bad. But it's also an interesting inversion of one of the points of Tolkien's cosmology, namely that evil can never truly create new life. Here it's turned on its head: conservative, backward-looking magic can't create new things, but science can.

**

So chapters 3 and 4 are a bit of a mixed bag. Where the certain clunkiness of the prose was, at worst, tolerable and at times almost endearing in the first two chapters, here it's at times difficult to read because, well, it's quite bad. There's a didactic, almost smug tone to the infodumps of the third chapter, and Saruman's heavy-handed, anachronistic moralizing is very poorly executed. Tolkien used anachronism deliberately to create distance between the narrator and the story; Yeskov uses it to batter the reader into submission. I don't know if it's an artifact of the translation or a quality of the original, but these chapters especially left me with the unfortunate impression that Yeskov may be very clever, but not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.

Having said all this, the counter-narrative is taking shape, and I'm definitely interested in seeing where it goes, even if it's rough going at times.

**

Next time: diplomacy.