Ithilien, Blackbird Hamlet
May 14, 3019
“So you just announced it to the entire Emyn Arnen: ‘merry men of the Blackbird Hamlet?’”
Together with the men of Blackbird Hamlet, our heroes are planning to rescue Faramir.
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Faramir and Éowyn are being held in Emyn Arnen, and they're plotting to escape with the help of Beregond. The Blackbird Hamlet gang are plotting to free them, and now Tangorn and Tzerlag participate. Various spying shenanigans ensue, leading up to Tzerlag sneaking into Emyn Arnen to free Faramir. The attempt fails, and it looks like they're going to be killed, but Aragorn's spies let them escape.
Two constants remain. The names are all over the place: the man Beregond clandestinely meets is called Runcorn, and they're caught by the Gondorian "counterspy" called, ludicrously, Cheetah. Anachronisms abound: the espionage and counter-espionage are fully 20th-century, as is the martial art Tzerlag is trained in. Someone actually shouts "Freeze! Drop your weapons!". And so on. Yeskov's Middle-earth is a total mess. The only redeeming feature here is that it's Blackbird Hamlet.
What's worse is how Yeskov ruins his story by turning everything into a sterile intellectual exercise. Whether it's intelligence and counterintelligence, or a fight in a hallway, one side always know exactly what the others expect them to do, and then do something different. Everything works out just so, and this is explained to us by nearly omniscient characters as if everything was always completely obvious. Faramir and Éowyn are the only ones who are allowed to escape this, and therefore the only characters in these chapters who even remotely resemble people. With everyone else, there's no human element present at all.
Again, the overriding impression is that Yeskov very badly wants us to think he's incredibly clever. This could have been a decent spy/heist story, but it's just soulless. By the way, our Nazgúl main character Haladdin is barely even mentioned in these chapters.
Where this all ends up, then, is that Faramir and Éowyn are free, Haladdin and Tzerlag have access to Faramir's palantír, and Tangorn sets off for Umbar.
**
In other news, I'm happy to say that I finally got to give my lecture on Tolkien at the Helsinki Adult Education Center, as part of our lecture course on the history of heresy. I talked about evil, Manicheanism and Pelagianism, and did my exegesis of Frodo's experience on Amon Hen. I thought it went all right, and I'm very pleased I got to put together some of the stuff I've been writing about here into a proper lecture.
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Next time: Aragorn.
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