Let's Read Tolkien 94: The Umbarian Gambit 36-

Umbar, the Fish Market

June 2, 3019

The shrimp were excellent.

Nah, you know what, he's lost me. I read several chapters of a thoroughly modern, really hackneyed and badly written spy novel, starring Baron Tangorn as James Bond in exotic Umbar, and was bored to death. I started skimming forward, and it just kept going and going. There's no longer any point in talking about anachronisms or themes: the story has nothing to do with Middle-earth or Tolkien any more, and I'm just not interested.

Sadly, this means I'll never find out what dazzlingly clever plot twists the dude came up with for the end of his story. I can live with that.

**

So, that was the Last Ringbearer, as far as I'm concerned. It's much more interesting as a concept than an actual text. I liked some of Yeskov's ideas, but the execution is so bad that I honestly can't recommend it to anyone.

When I started reading the Last Ringbearer, coincidentally a year ago, one of the great points Yeskov made in an interview I read was that a lot of Tolkien's Middle-earth doesn't really make sense. For all his talk of sub-creation, Tolkien wasn't really interested in creating a consistent, or even coherent, fictional world: he was interested in creating a backdrop for his stories and his languages. One of the reasons I was interested in the Last Ringbearer was that I thought Yeskov would try to make it all make sense. But he does the opposite. One of the central tenets of his reimagining of the War of the Ring fails spectacularly, and in general, his alternative versions of Mordor, Umbar and so on are a completely incoherent mess of orientalism and anachronism. Reading Yeskov makes you admire Tolkien's creative vision and consistency all over again, which, given the tone of Yeskov's work, cannot have been the effect he intended.

So anyway that was that. I can't say I think it's a coincidence that I've heard so many people refer to the fact that the Last Ringbearer exists, and so few references to its actual content. As I'm actually quite busy nowadays, my Tolkien-reading series will continue at some later time, maybe. For now, happy new year.

Let's Read Tolkien 93: The King and the Steward 31-35

Gondor, Minas Tirith

May 17, 3019

“Her Royal Majesty the Queen of Gondor and Arnor!”

We now go to Minas Tirith, where we get to know Aragorn and Arwen a little bit.

**

Aragorn, we learn, is unhappy: despite winning the throne of Gondor, Arwen refuses to actually marry him. They're only pretending to be king and queen, when in reality she's his elven "advisor". It turns out they're also running rival espionage operations, competing for the technical knowledge of Mordor and Isengard by running rival Operation Paperclips. After some repartee with Arwen, Aragorn receives the White Company, Faramir's former guards.

The scene then shifts to a quarry in the White Mountains where Kumai, a Troll engineer, is held captive along with a black Haradrim mûmak, sorry, múmak driver, Mbanga. We're given an infodump about how the Harad Empire fought against slavers from Khand. It's puerile, at best orientalist and cliched, and boring. The significance is that Mbanga gets into a fight with the guards and is killed. There's some very cringey orientalism about how he now gets to go to the heavenly lion hunt or something, and also a frankly uninteresting flashback to Kumai's war experiences. The guards also beat Kumai badly, but this provides an opportunity for him to be smuggled out of the quarry by the anti-Gondor resistance.

However, unbeknownst to Kumai but beknownst to us, it isn't actually the anti-Gondor resistance at all, but a fake resistance movement run by Aragorn's agents. Apparently they all have animal codenames, because Cheetah debriefs Mongoose and sends him to Umbar to capture Tangorn. And with that, chapter 35 and part II come to an end.

**

So, that was part II. I have to say, as a fantasy or adventure novel, this is really not very good. If it was an original IP, so to speak, I would not be reading it any more. So this is kind of a slightly weird exercise where I'm actually interested in Yeskov's alternative Middle-earth, but I'm finding it a chore to trudge through his prose. These chapters highlight the problem: I love the idea of elven and dúnedain spies racing to secure the legacy of Mordor; I dislike the silly stuff about Harad and Khand and so on; and I'm bored by everything else. The combination of the terrible narrative voice and the total incoherence of the fictional world is just really offputting. Also I actually miss Haladdin.

Looking at the table of contents, there's four parts and 69 chapters (nice), so I'm pretty much halfway through. I'm going to keep at this, mostly to see if he comes up with any other cool stuff. But I think I'll be sticking with this sparser narration, largely because I can't really be bothered to engage with the story more closely.

**

Next year: part III

Let's Read Tolkien 92: The King and the Steward 25-30

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.

**

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.

**

Next time: Aragorn.

Let's Read Tolkien 91: The King and the Steward 23-24

Mountains of Shadow, Hotont pass

May 12, 3019

“There’s your Ithilien.”

We're back with Haladdin and the gang, who are making their way across the mountains into Ithilien, with the help of some trollish resistance fighters. We visit the trolls of the Shara-teg valley in a sort of flashback, and then our heroes find some of the Baron's old soldiers.

To use Tolkien's terms, we're now in Yeskov's own particular sub-creation, and a couple of things do stand out.

First, the language. We experience Hotont Pass, Shara-Teg valley and meet Ivar the Drummer. Oh, and they drink vodka. There is no logic to these names, or to the kind of culture and language Yeskov is trying to portray. Everything is eclectic and poorly thought out, and keeps getting worse as the story goes on.

This is underlined by my least favorite feature of the story, which is the relentless anachronism. We again have guerrilla fighters in a preindustrial society behaving like modern professional soldiers. People point bows at others like they're guns and hold modern military ranks. While they're staying with the trolls, Haladdin meets, of all things, a graphologist. The graphologist produces a psychological profile of the elven officer they killed in Mordor, and Haladdin uses this to come up with a key idea for his plan, to which we are not privy.

A lot of stupid things get said about fantasy and "historical accuracy", especially by people who are fine with dragons and zombies, but insist that if there isn't violent misogyny it isn't "historically accurate". As a historian, I consider this very silly. Fantasy isn't history: there's no reason to demand historical accuracy of it in the first place, and when the demand is made, it's almost invariably made in a way that's so selective that it's obvious it's being used as an excuse.

What I think fantasy or indeed any speculative fiction should be is coherent. If you want to portray a pre-industrial society with Middle Eastern influences, then do that. This seems to be what Yeskov set out to do, but it's constantly undermined by his references being all over the place, his unbearably smug narrative voice, and above all by the fact that all of his characters are clearly 20th-century people who for some reason happen to live in a fantasy world.

Tolkien used anachronisms deliberately, to maintain a distance between the narrator and the story, and sometimes for reasons that are entirely beyond me. I still have no ides why hobbits have potatoes. Yeskov uses them constantly to batter the reader into submission.

I'm still of two minds as to whether or not I actually want to see this whole thing through. Every now and then, I read a chapter and I feel like okay, I want to see where he's going with this. Far too often, though, the "look how clever I am" schtick makes me despair. We'll see what happens.

**

Next time: merry men.

Game of Thrones board game 3: Here I Throne

Elderr Gutlon rose violently, his large frame towering over the seated brethren. "How dare you, Vitus. How dare you, who has yet to earn a single "R" in his name, who has not even completed his study of the ancient works, and can hardly quote from them by memory, judge us?

- Mark Brendle, Something Awful

in 2019, we played our first ever six-player game of the Game of Thrones board game. But since one regular member of our gaming group was away in California at the time, he's missed out on the particular experience that is an entire day dedicated to murdering your friends all across Westeros. Last May, we tried to rectify this - and then the coronavirus happened.

We ended up playing Here I Stand by email instead, which was quite an experience. At the same time, it's downright hilarious that the last season of the Game of Thrones TV series was apparently so bad that the entire franchise simply vanished from the public eye, especially since the dude can't finish a book (the latest novel in the series was published four months before Skyrim). I'm going to start telling people that this boardgame is the original work it was all based on. Anyway, Here I Stand is over, so now it's time for Here I Throne.

**

Our first game was a five-player affair, featuring a Baratheon blitz into the Reach and an ineffective Lannister betrayal; it was won by House Tyrell. Our second game had six players, and featured a Baratheon blitz into the Reach and an ineffective Baratheon betrayal; I won as House Lannister. This time, we've got the Mother of Dragons expansion, and while the Essos board extension barely fits on our table, incorporating House Arryn is easy. We also knew that one player would have to leave early, so we would definitely be using the vassal house rules. So we set up for seven players:

Since I've played as the Greyjoys and the Lannisters, I decided I want to be at the opposite end of the table this time, and picked the Martells. The vassal house ended up being House Arryn, who became vassals to House Baratheon. On the first turn, the Greyjoys came out swinging, grabbing Flint's Finger, Seagard and Moat Cailin for an early lead.

This, of course, concentrated quite a bit of attention onto them in the next few turns. While the war in the north raged, we in the south consolidated our positions, and the Baratheons secured King's Landing. As the Greyjoys were chased back to their islands and the Baratheons stormed the Reach, by turn 4 it was the Starks who looked like the ones to beat.

At this point, the Baratheon player had to leave, so Arryn and Baratheon were vassal houses. I decided this made it high time to grab Storm's End from the Baratheons, and the Greyjoys turned the tables on the Starks with a seaborne invasion of Winterfell.

As turn 5 rolled around, everything happened: we recalculated supply, rebid all the influence tracks and sustained a Wildling attack where they ate all our horses.

Turn 6 saw the Stark player leave the game, so we were down to four players and three vassal houses. The Stark departure made things a little bit easier for both the Greyjoys and Lannisters, and they capitalized on it, with the Lannisters grabbing a lead and threatening to win the game outright.

Therefore, our agenda was clear: a House Arryn offensive, supported by both the Baratheon and Martell navies, cleared out the Lannisters from Crackclaw Point, and a Tyrell attack led by Loras took not only Lannisport but also Riverrun. I used the distraction to grab King's Landing.

Meanwhile, the Tyrells also struck in the south, routing my garrison at Starfall, but Arianne Martell sent them right back home.

Going into turn 7, it was pretty much a dead heat between my Martells, the Tyrells and the Greyjoys.

After the seventh turn, I think fatigue set in for all of us, and it was a slog to get through the last turns. The Tyrell offensive sort of petered out; I got into a fight with them over the Reach, but couldn't make any more headway. The Lannisters never really recovered. Finally, the Greyjoys captured White Harbor at the very beginning of the tenth turn to seal the win.

The game took a little bit over ten hours and we were exhausted.

**

So, I came in second with the Martells after winning the previous game with the Lannisters. I feel like the biggest reason I lost was sheer physical exhaustion: I was out late the previous night, and by the time we got to the endgame, I was so tired I was simply unable to put together a plan to get to victory.

Another thing that tripped me up was supply. In our first game, we took ages to turn up a mustering card, and I suffered for that as the Greyjoys since it stopped me from mustering any units at all. This time, it took several turns until we got a supply card at all, but when we did, I hadn't secured enough supply areas and fell behind. Not being able to put effective armies into the field was crippling, and entirely my fault for overlooking this crucial area of the game.

So yeah, I lost because I played badly. On a positive note, though, we all liked the vassal system. The option for players to drop out is frankly excellent, and while the very limited amount of vassal orders you can give makes sure the vassal houses don't completely unbalance the game, they still make things a lot more unpredictable. I would definitely recommend using the vassal house rules, and I liked the addition of House Arryn.

I'm glad we played, but the last few turns were so grueling that I think we have to consider making the next one a two-day event. And holding it next year. At the earliest.

Let's Read Tolkien 90: The King and the Steward 20-22

Ithilien, Emyn Arnen 

May 3, 3019 

“What time is it?” Éowyn asked sleepily.

In this, the second part of The Last Ringbearer, the point-of-view character is Faramir. We've heard about him before: he was handily indisposed when Gandalf took over in Minas Tirith, and Tangorn mentions his forced retirement to Ithilien. That's where we find him now.

**

There's a little introduction where Faramir and Éowyn are being cute, and then we take a flashback to the battle of the Pelennor. As in the Lord of the Rings, he's shot with a poisoned arrow, but here it's very strongly implied that the shot came from his own side. He's then taken to a hospital in Minas Tirith, paralyzed by the poison, and Aragorn eventually comes to see him and monologues at him like a B-movie villain.

The upshot is that Faramir is sent into exile to Ithilien. Éowyn is in love with Aragorn, but he has her care for Faramir and sends her off to Ithilien with him. There Faramir supposedly rules as the Prince of Ithilien, but is actually held hostage in the fort of Emyn Arnen by Beregond and the soldiers of the White Company.

Eventually it dawns on Éowyn that Aragorn has discarded her, and she hears about his marriage to Arwen. So then when an envoy arrives to summon her to Minas Tirith, she refuses to go. Faramir is already in love with her, and soon she reciprocates.

However, Faramir suspects that Aragorn won't leave them in peace, and starts plotting. It turns out he has the palantír that was in Minas Tirith. In this story, anyone involved in the murder of Denethor who looks into it only sees his burning hands. Thinking the stone useless, Aragorn and his co-conspirators let Faramir take it with him. Faramir now uses it to test Beregond's loyalty, and once he determines Beregond wasn't involved in the murder, they start intriguing.

**

As ever with Yeskov, the prose is clunky at best, but his strength is in writing an adventure story, and once we get past Aragorn's monologue, that's what we get. On the other hand, Yeskov is at his worst when he's trying to write something clever, and Aragorn's monologue is just bad. His portrayals of Faramir and Éowyn are humane, though, and we're definitely rooting for them. Hopefully the story keeps rolling along with a minimum of metaphysics and clever politicking.

**

Next time: trolls.

Let's Read Tolkien 89: Vae Victis 17-19

Silence fell.

Haladdin has just received his mission to save Middle-earth, and he's still talking to the Nazgúl Sharya-Rana about it. I swear this is a four-chapter infodump. In these chapters, the Nazgúl is giving Haladdin information about how to destroy the Mirror, without telling him how to destroy the Mirror. Because of what Sharya-Rana obscurely calls "the rules of the game", he can't tell Haladdin what to do, but he has to lead him on until he supoosedly figures it out on his own. It's never explained why this has to be done, and frankly, it's tiresome.

It doesn't help that both the things they talk about and the language they use are relentlessly anachronistic. For instance, Haladdin at one point nonchalantly sums up the palantír and magic mirror as a "two-key system", as if it was obvious that a medic in the Mordorian army would know what it was. At first, I quite liked the idea of an alternative take on the Nazgûl, but again the strongest impression these chapters convey is that the author was very impressed with how clever he was being. For my part, I honestly cannot be bothered to sum it all up. The end result is that the "Nazgúl" tells Haladdin that the Mirror is in Lórien, there is a palantír in Dol Guldur, and Haladdin has to use the palantír and the volcano of Orodruin to destroy the Mirror. He could literally just have said that. There's no point in spinning it out into a huge, annoying didactic dialogue. Sharya-Rana then gives Haladdin his ring, and dies. Haladdin is now a Nazgúl, I guess, except with no magical abilities whatsoever.

Haladdin's companions now wake up, and he tells them what happened. Chapter 19 consists entirely of their discussion, and Haladdin trying to come up with a plan. There are several problems: getting into Lórien seems impossible, and the Mirror is too heavy to move. Eventually, Haladdin hits on an idea: based on what Sharya-Rana told him, they can use a palantír to transmit the fire of Orodruin to the Mirror. Again, the Nazgúl practically told him to do this, but for some reason we're never given, supposedly couldn't tell him this. It's stupid.

Anyway, now they have a plan, sort of, and they head for Ithilien, where Tangorn intends to introduce them to Faramir.

**

Next time: part 2!

Let's Read Tolkien 88: Vae Victis 15-16

The Nazgúl!

No, we still can't have more than one kind of diacritic. The person Haladdin finds sitting by the fire is, indeed, a Nazgûl. He introduces himself as Sharya-Rana, a famous mathematician and theologian from ages past, who is now a ring-wraith. Of course, on this Middle-earth, that means something entirely different: these "Nazgúl" are protectors of the scientific civilization of Mordor. This Nazgûl interrogates Haladdin about some of the choices he's made, during the war and before it, and tells him that he's the perfect person for their plans because he's so completely irrational that the enemy won't be able to predict his actions.

That's chapter 15; chapter 16 is a huge infodump on how magic works in Middle-earth, and frankly, it's boring. The gist of it is that there are two parallel universes, a magical one and a mundane one. The two worlds are connected, and anyone from Middle-earth who's been to the magic world is a wizard. The Nazgúl are one bunch of wizards and the White Council another. The Mirror (as in of Galadriel) connects the two worlds. The elves are trying to turn Middle-earth into another magical world, where nothing ever changes. This is why they had to destroy the scientific civilization of Mordor. The White wizards have given the Mirror to the elves, so now Haladdin has to save Middle-earth by destroying the Mirror.

**

So the central idea here is that Haladdin is the right guy for the job because he's so impossibly irrational. I'm now going to complain, because this annoys me. The idea that someone being so irrational and unpredictable is a strength is an ancient trope, and it's almost always a really stupid one.

It's used succesfully several times in the original Star Trek - mostly on machines, where the specific premise is that they can't handle human irrationality, or on half-Vulcan chess players who one suspects are more invested in demonstrating their superior logic than actually being good at the game. The most satisfying chess experience of my life was against an engineering student who insisted that their superior grasp of mathematics and logic meant they must be much better than me at chess. They walked into a variant of the fool's mate because they didn't actually know how to play chess.

When it comes to more complicated human endeavours, the idea that sheer unpredictability is an asset becomes a whole lot more difficult. As a strategy, it isn't great. So-called madman theory has been tried and the results aren't exactly overwhelming. Even in poker, the idea that it's good to be unpredictable has certain limits. Yes, you want to play poker in a way where your opponents find you difficult to read. If you play 100% consistently, you'll never win any money because no-one will ever bet against you. But if you constantly play irrationally, you'll inevitably lose money in the long run because you're playing against the odds. The rational approach to something like poker or indeed strategy is to use your resources in the way that gets you the best return on your investment. It's worth investing some resources in confusing your opponent occasionally by doing some irrational things, but too much will bankrupt the whole operation. If sheer unpredictability was a virtue, armies would have officers rolling dice and reading tea leaves as standard procedure. Most of the time, going about a task irrationally and unpredictably is just going to mean doing it badly.

As a military strategy, it reminds one of the adage apparently contained in the Mordor field manual: never do what the enemy expects. This is trite at the best of times, and at worst turns into an endless spiral of second-guessing: what if the enemy expects you to do what they don't expect? This was put forward as a strategy by British self-appointed great military thinker B.H. Liddell Hart as "the strategy of indirect approach", which has been criticized on exactly the same grounds: if you always take the indirect way, it then becomes the direct way. An example of Liddell Hart's indirect approach is the allied Mediterranean offensive in the Second World War, which was a gigantic waste of time, resources and lives to strike at the "soft underbelly" of the Axis, and ended up achieving pretty much nothing in terms of the actual war against Germany. And this, in the end, is the main point: it's never enough to be unpredictable. You also have to be able to do something effective that your enemy can't easily counter.

The other problem with this scenario is that none of the "totally irrational" things Haladdin does are really particularly irrational at all. He makes wartime decisions that are less than totally cold-blooded; he joins the military during a war due to peer pressure and to impress his fiance. If this is hopelessly irrational, I don't know whose behavior the "Nazgúl" model of rationality can expect to predict.

If you want a fictional example of doing something that the enemy would think is so insane it never even occurs to them someone would try it, and that they therefore don't take effective action to stop, what comes to mind is sending a hobbit to throw the enemy's ring of power into a volcano. So I don't know, this feels the same as the author's very clever socio-economic reimagining of the War of the Ring that actually makes no sense whatsoever: it's like he's trying so hard to be very clever and subvert Tolkien's story, and he ends up with basically the same thing but worse.

However! The plot is advancing, and for that we are grateful.

**

Next time: more wraith-exposition.

Let's Read Tolkien 87: Vae Victis 12-14

The fire was almost out by then, but the fight went on in the dark.

With the elven officer dead, Tzerlag makes short work of the remaining Easterling mercenaries. Baron Tangorn, however, is badly wounded and can't walk. This is a problem, because some of the Easterlings got away, and they'll be back with reinforcements. Tangorn's solution is simple: he asks the two Mordorians to kill him rather than leave him to the mercy of the elves. Tzerlag informs him that the field regulations prohibit him from doing so until the last possible moment.

A search of the campsite reveals all kinds of useful things, like some wine and an elven medical kit. At Tangorn's insistence, the Mordorians re-examine the dead elf, and find a mithril-coat hidden beneath his leather armor. This not only explains the trick he pulled on Tangorn, but also makes doubly sure that a sizable search party will be coming. In despair, Haladdin flips out at Tzerlag and wishes the earth would swallow up the "Elvish bastard" and all his kind. This gives Tzerlag an idea.

The Orocuen sergeant's brainwave is to make it look like the elf wasn't killed, but escaped into the desert: this way, the searchers will go looking for him rather than try to track whoever killed the Easterlings. He quickly buries the elf-officer and arranges things so that it looks like one of the Easterlings was killed right on top of where the body is buried. Having kept the elf's shoes, Tzerlag then lays a false trail heading south.

Meanwhile, Haladdin and Tangorn on crutches have been making way toward a nearby ruins, where the enemy is likely to have their base. Because the field regulations tell them to do the opposite of what the enemy would expect, they're going to hide right under the enemy's nose. Tangorn is already doped up on elven painkillers, and now they all take cola nuts (also apparently a staple of elven medicine) for a desperate last dash to the ruins. They barely make it and hide in a ruined building literally inside the enemy camp.

The plan works: despite the enemy soldiers using a nearby wall as their latrine and illicitly brewing moonshine in literally the next room, the fugitives aren't discovered. They do run out of water, however, but are saved by a sandstorm; under the cover of the storm, Tzerlag can sneak out to the well for some water, and since there's no way the supposedly lost elf would have survived the storm, the search is called off and the troops leave.

We're told this in retrospect, as our protagonists are making their way west, toward the Morgai, where Tzerlag figures they should be able to find some Orocuen nomads. They've camped close to a small stream, and Haladdin volunteers to take first watch. He heads down to the stream to wash their cooking implements, when he suddenly realizes there's someone sitting by their fire.

**

The "field regulations" that keep getting quoted are a very modern anachronism: no army in the technological periods depicted here, at least so far, had any that were anything like the very 20th-century collection of regulations Tzerlag keeps quoting from. Soldiering didn't start being regulated like this until well after the advent of firearms. Tolkien did anachronisms too, and I'm not sure I always understand the point of them either, but in this case, half-expecting Tzerlag to actually at some point whip out Mordor FM 3-24 isn't helping my immersion in the story. The exhortation to always do the opposite of what the enemy expects is quite silly.

In general, quite a bit of the prose and especially the dialogue remains stilted and a little bit weird. But this is an adventure story again, and I'm enjoying it.

Next time: a wraith-talk.

Let's Read Tolkien 86: Vae Victis 10-11

Mordor, the Teshgol boundary 

April 9, 3019 

“So why not wait until nightfall?” Haladdin whispered.

As you may or may not recall, Orocuen Sergeant Tzerlag of the Cirith Ungol Rangers and Umbarian Field Medic Second Class Haladdin are in Mordor, trying to evade the enemy and make it back home. We find them eying a small nomad camp in a hollow, and Haladdin sweats it out while Tzerlag investigates. Sadly, he finds that all of the civilian inhabitants of the camp have been murdered by the Western occupation forces. As they're burying the dead, Tzerlag finds a man buried up to his head in the sand and left to die. Haladdin diagnoses only mild dehydration, and they pull him out.

To their shock, the man is a Gondorian officer. He introduces himself as Baron Tangorn, a lieutenant in the Ithilien Regiment. The baron had been part of a patrol of Easterling mercenaries led by an elven officer, Eloar of Lórien, which was engaged in counterinsurgency operations, i.e. massacring civilians. It's a little sad to think that back in 1999 when the Last Ringbearer was written, neither the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan nor the Vietnam War were inpossibly distant memories, and in both, counterinsurgency did tend to mean exactly that. The English translation was published in 2010, when the USians were right in the middle of the so-called War on Terror, which was largely fought by murdering civilians. When Tolkien started writing the Lord of the Rings in 1937 or thereabouts, they didn't call it counterinsurgency yet, but the Royal Air Force had only recently been busy bombing Iraq to put down a revolution, and the Italians were butchering Ethiopians to build Mussolini's empire. So very unfortunately, this is timeless stuff.

The baron, it turns out, had tried to stop the elf-led patrol from murdering the civilians, and for his pains he was left to die in the desert. As he explains it, he has nowhere left to go: a usurper has taken over his homeland, and if the elves find him, they'll kill him. This is what he has to say about events in Gondor:

“Denethor died a horrible death; supposedly he immolated himself on a funeral pyre. The very next day there was a ready claimant to the throne. You see, there’s an old legend, which no one had taken seriously before, that the ruling House of Húrin is only taking care of the throne for the descendants of the mythical Isildur. Such a descendant has shown up – one Aragorn, of the northern rangers. To prove his dynastic rights he produced a sword, supposedly the legendary Andúril, although who had ever seen this Andúril? He also performed several healings by laying of hands, although all those healed were from among his northern followers … Prince Faramir, the heir apparent, retired to Ithilien and is supposedly a prince there under the eye of Captain Beregond – the same one who testified to Denethor’s ‘self-immolation.’”

Meanwhile, Aragorn's remaining undead keep everyone in line, and rumor has it that the real ruler is his elven-wife Arwen. In events closer to home for our protagonists, Barad-dûr has been razed and according to Tangorn, the elves are looking to "push your people back into the Stone Age." Another reference to the US military; the threat to bomb a country into the Stone Age is of Vietnam vintage, but the idea of occupying and "undeveloping" a country is reminiscent of the Morgenthau Plan, the US policy proposal that aimed at deindustrializing Germany after the Second World War.

So Tangorn doesn't have much of a home to go back to, and he asks if he can join the two Mordorians and get his revenge on the elf-officer. They agree, and the next chapter opens with Haladdin and Baron Tangorn discussing poetry as they prepare to attack the enemy camp.

First Tzerlag and Haladdin, serving as an archer, take out several sentries in a sequence straight out of Skyrim, and then Tzerlag and Tangorn storm the camp. Tzerlag accounts for several of the Easterling mercenaries, but he's outmatched by Eloar. Tangorn and the elf duel, and Tangorn is winning, until Eloar tricks him into into striking the elf's chest armor, which appears to be flimsy leather. Tangorn's sword, however, bounces off it, and Eloar gains the advantage, knocking Tangorn down. Haladdin, watching, decides there's nothing left to lose, and fires his arrow at the elf.

Remember that part about the Certain Someone I quoted at the end of the previous post? On this Middle-earth, divine grace is shooting an elf in the eye.

**

I'm delighted we've returned to the adventures of Haladdin and Tzerlag! The dialogue is still hokey, especially when they talk about poetry, but for the most part these chapters read like a proper adventure story. I hope there's more of this to come.

Next time: deliberations in the desert.

Let's Read Tolkien 85: Vae Victis 7-9

Gondor, the Pelennor Fields 

March 15, 3019 

The Mordorians only realized that they had been had when the brown splotch of Rohan’s army began spreading through the northern edge of the white fog blanketing the Pelennor Fields, while Gondor’s troops poured through the opened gates of Minas Tirith, quickly congealing into battle formations.

These chapters are quite short, so this time I'm doing three of them, because it means we can get through this military history fanfic and back to the actual story!

**

We left off last time with the Mordor army camped in front of Minas Tirith. Gandalf's coup bought just enough time for the cavalry of Rohan to get into position and charge the Mordorians. The battle goes poorly for them, however, until a mystery force of undead warriors lands to the south. The Dúnadan leading them tricks the commander of Mordor's South Army into fighting a chivalrous duel with him - only for one of the walking corpses to stab the Mordorian officer in the back. It's a very appropriately dastardly thing to do.

That was chapter 7. In the next one, the battle is still raging; the Mordorians have figured out that incendiaries can stop the undead, and most of Aragorn's walking corpses are toast. They did, however, succeed in drawing off Mordor's catapults from Minas Tirith.

Next, Éomer rallies the rohirrim cavalry with a frankly strange and cringy speech about martyrs getting to go to heaven and have sex. In the translation, he talks about "houranies", by which we assume he means houri. It's a weird and orientalist interlude, and I don't really get where it fits in with the maniacal allegorism, where previously the Free Peoples had stood for a barbaric west and Mordor represented an enlightened east. I don't know if he's trying to pawn off orientalist stereotypes of Muslims onto westerners or what the idea is. In any case, I can't help thinking he'd have been better off just having Gandalf offer everyone an indulgence.

The combination of the undead attack and Rohan cavalry charge decides the battle. Éomer and Aragorn meet on the battlefield, and it turns out that Éowyn has fought in disguise as one of the rohirrim. She acts like a willful child and proclaims her love for Aragorn, who returns it and sends her off to be treated for her wounds in Minas Tirith. This leads abruptly into a brief retelling of the Last Debate, where it turns out she's being held as a hostage to ensure Éomer's submission to Aragorn. The final assault on Mordor is then recounted sort of off-hand: there is terrible slaughter, King Sauron is killed in combat, everyone lies about it afterward.

**

So, whereas parts of the previous chapters read like badly written fan fiction, all of this does. The retelling of the battle of the Pelennor fields isn't really all that interesting, even when it isn't childish and orientalist. The first part really leans into Aragorn being an asshole and it works decently, but then the Last Debate fanfic very clumsily underlines how he's an asshole, and we got it the first time around. If the next chapters were more inept quasi-military history, I think I'd quit. But I don't have to. At the end of chapter 9:

However, the wizards of the White Council had somehow forgotten one factor: namely, that there is a certain Someone in the world Who rather abhors complete victories and assorted ‘final solutions,’ and is capable of showing His displeasure with same in the most improbable ways. Even now, that Someone was dispassionately surveying the vanquished – all that flotsam cast ashore by the passed storm – when suddenly He rested His gaze upon a couple of soldiers of the extinct South Army lost among the dunes of the desert of Mordor.

Next time: believe it or not, Haladdin and Tzerlag.

Let's Read Tolkien 84: Vae Victis 5-6

Middle Earth, the War of the Ring 

Historical brief 

Should our reader be minimally acquainted with analysis of major military campaigns and examine the map of Middle Earth, he would easily ascertain that all actions of both new coalitions (Mordor-Isengard and Gondor-Rohan) were dictated by merciless strategic logic, undergirded by Mordor’s dread of being cut off from its food sources.

Chapter 5 starts the alternative history of the War of the Ring. Yeskov's comments on military history and strategy really reinforce the feeling from the previous chapters that he isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is, but luckily the meat of these chapters is the diplomatic warfare leading up to the War of the Ring, and I like it.

After the White Council has decided on war, Saruman goes on diplomatic maneuvers. He assures both Théoden and Denethor, in this story the King of Gondor, that Mordor and Isengard only want peace, and teaches Denethor and Sauron how to use their palantírs to stay in touch. Gandalf, however, is also working: Théoden's son and heir is mysteriously killed, supposedly fighting orcs, and Éomer, prominent in the "war party" in Rohan, becomes the new heir. In a counterstroke, Isengard's accredited ambassador to Rohan, Gríma (missing his accent) arranges for some of Éomer's less cautious talk about the imminent succession to come to Théoden's ears, and Éomer is disgraced. Saruman's agents also arrange for King Denethor's truculent heir, Prince Boromir, to be sent on some fool's errand to the north. Much of this actually plays out a lot like the early game in War of the Ring, with Gondor and Rohan moving back and forth on the political track, which is a nice bonus; Yeskov's story predates the board game.

Things are going badly for Gandalf, so he raises the stakes: mysterious rangers from the north ambush several Mordor-bound caravans in Ithilien, and the parliament of Mordor, uncharitably described as "fear-crazed storekeepers" votes to send the army into Ithilien. Gondor responds by mobilizing and occupying Osgiliath.

Mordor then attempts to change the strategic balance by covertly sending four battalions of troops across northern Rohan to Isengard, to form a strike force to deter Rohan from going on the offensive. Unfortunately, the ploy is detected through the Mirror, and Gandalf informs Éomer, who takes advantage of Théoden's illness and his personal popularity among the troops to lead a cavalry force to rout the Mordorian troops.

As the Mordorian survivors withdraw to Fangorn, they "fell to the poisoned arrows of the Elvish bowmen in their tree perches". I can't pass this by without noting that this is a possible reference to Finland. One of the oddities of Stalin's invasion of Finland, i.e. the 1939-40 Winter War, is that for decades afterward, Soviet veterans would insist that Finnish snipers fired on them from trees, while the Finnish army maintains they never stationed snipers in trees. A treetop would be a terrible firing position anyway, and I can't think of any reason the Finnish military would lie about this, so it's a genuine mystery where this idea came from. This has been your random Second World War trivia of the day.

Anyway Gandalf succeeds: Éomer is hailed as a conquering hero, and Théoden has no choice but to go along. Soon enough, Éomer is clamoring to attack Isengard.

It's a plot point here, then, that food is imported into Mordor by caravans through Ithilien. Because the Ithilien crossroads are specifically mentioned several times, the caravans are presumably coming up the Harad road into Ithilien. I'm going to repeat myself, but this is flatly impossible, and also makes no sense at all. With the technology available in Middle-earth, it just isn't possible to transport sufficient amounts of food to feed entire cities by land over these kinds of distances. The amount of food needed to feed the animals doing the hauling would be so prohibitive that the logistics just cannot be done.

Also, we were told that the food comes from Khand and Umbar. Umbar is a seaport. It would be complete lunacy to haul anything by land from Umbar to Ithilien when you can get on a boat and sail up the Anduin. Even then, there's no way to get the food to Barad-dûr, but if the plot point was that food is shipped up from Umbar to Minas Morgul, that at least might make an ounce of sense.

There's a double irony here. It's not just the air of superiority which Yeskov has assumed over Tolkien and the didactic tone of his work, both entirely based on the idea that Tolkien hasn't bothered to think about the practicalities of the world he set his stories in - only for him to completely fuck up a key plot point in his story. But what's worse is that if Yeskov had realized that the food needs to be moved by water, it would have made the diplomatic maneuvering much more interesting. If the food was loaded onto ships at Umbar, the logical place to offload it would have been at Osgiliath - meaning Gondor would have been making good money out of the trade. Unfortunately this opportunity was lost.

If I was to write a sequel or response to the Last Ringbearer, I'd insist that it's flatly impossible for the Mordor described in the work to exist where it did, because the logistics are totally implausible. Mordor and Barad-dur must have actually been somewhere else, and the story was later transposed to Gorgoroth. Isn't it actually much more believable that "Barad-dur" was actually, say, Minas Tirith?

Since a Middle-earth Fomenko was already mentioned, I have to say that I finally feel like I'm living up to my potential as a student of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Helsinki, which I still technically am, by setting up as a Middle-earth Patricia Crone.

**

Meanwhile, the armies of Mordor and Gondor are facing each other across the Anduin in what Yeskov terms a "phony war". I don't quite know what to make of the constant anachronistic allusions to the Second World War, but to be honest by this point I'm getting kind of tired of them. If the idea here is that Tolkien's world is great, can it have an existence of its own instead of being a constant foil for analogies to ours? In other words, if Tolkien protested too much that nothing in Middle-earth was an analogy to anything, Yeskov damn near does the opposite.

Anyway this all changes with the loss of the four battalions sent to Isengard - we'll call them task force Grishnákh. We're told that even before the task force was dispatched, Mordor and Isengard were seriously outnumbered. Now, after the Battle of Fangorn, Mordor's forces are so depleted that they can no longer hold Ithilien and ensure the passage of the impossible food caravans. This means Mordor needs to drastically change their strategy and attack before Rohan conquers Isengard and the combined Gondor-Rohan forces take Ithilien.

Yeskov said earlier, of task force Grishnákh: "as it always is with strategic decisions, that could only be judged post factum: had the move worked, as it had every chance of doing, it would no doubt have been recorded as brilliant". He's trying to be very clever again, but this is flat out wrong. If the loss of task force Grishnákh invalidates Mordor's entire strategy and forces them into a desperate offensive, then the risk was far too great, and sending the task force was a mistake a priori.

Mordor's plan now is to gather as large an army as possible, and defeat Gondor quickly, before the Rohirrim can successfully besiege Isengard. This initially seems like a good plan, but the elves solve the Isengard problem: to the horror of Gandalf and the Rohirrim, they destroy the dams on the Isen, drowning the entire city of Isengard overnight. Worse, Mordor knows nothing of it, because Gríma has defected and taken Saruman's palantír with him.

The offensive by Mordor's South Army is still a success: they cross the Anduin, breach the Pelennor walls and besiege Minas Tirith. When Sauron offers Gondor peace in return for the right to occupy Ithilien, King Denethor agrees immediately. Before the agreement can be finalized, Denethor mysteriously falls ill, and with his heir, Prince Faramir, also indisposed, a figure in a white cloak takes over the negotiations as the military commandant of Minas Tirith. He insists that the peace treaty will be signed, everyone just has to wait a bit for the king to recover.

This is really almost lampshaded in the Siege of Gondor, when one of Denethor's servants asks Pippin: "Who is the master of Minas Tirith? The lord Denethor or the Grey Wanderer?" Pippin's reply, "The Grey Wanderer or no one, it would seem", verges on smart-alecky, and to be honest, what Gandalf does in the Lord of the Rings damn near amounts to a coup.

So, the South Army camps out around defeated Minas Tirith. What could possibly go wrong?

**

We're six chapters into the Last Ringbearer; let's take stock.

As a general writing tip, I would reconmend not starting a chapter with condescending nonsense about being "minimally acquainted with analysis of major military campaigns" and then completely fuck up the most elementary logistics of your grand war narrative, while also dropping snide remarks on strategy that are just rubbish.

So yeah, I have to admit that Yeskov's arrogance is really starting to grate on me. At best, it comes across as smart-alecky, at worst as sneering condescension; both combine poorly with the fact that he is a total dilettante when it comes to anything to do with the military. I really hope there's an actual story at some point, because while I like some of this stuff, I'm also reaching my limit on poorly written "ha ha look how much smarter than Tolkien I am" fanfic. If there isn't, I will just give up on this.

Next time: war.

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.

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?

Let's Read Tolkien 81: The Grey Havens

The clearing up certainly needed a lot of work, but it took less time than Sam had feared.

The victorious hobbits liberate Sharkey's prisoners, including Lobelia and Fredegar Bolger, and get to work fixing the Shire. All of the horrible modern buildings are destroyed, and Sam puts Galadriel's gift to use replanting trees. Everything is great, there's a bumper crop at the next harvest, Sam gets married and everything. Frodo, though, still suffers from his wounds, and eventually the time comes: Frodo and Sam ride out to meet Elrond, Galadriel and Bilbo, on their way to the Grey Havens. There, Frodo and Bilbo get on a boat with the elves and Gandalf. Merry and Pippin show up just in time to say goodbye, and the ship sets sail over the Sea to Valinor. The three hobbits left behind head back home, and the novel ends with Sam arriving home to his family.

**

So, Sharkey is gone, and the Shire can be restored to how it was always meant to be. You might think this would be a moment for some reflection on how things work there, given that an enterprising tobacco merchant managed to accidentally transform it from a minarchist utopia to Mordor on the Brandywine in what, two years, but no, everything will go back to exactly how it was. Remember, making things better is Sarumanism.

The restoration of the Shire is maybe where the analogy to the world wars is clearest. Tolkien finished the Lord of the Rings after the war, and after Labour won the 1945 elections with a landslide, getting a clear mandate to build a new society. It wasn't just Britain; we now know that the time after the Second World War would become the Great Acceleration, ushering in the most profound period of change in the history of mankind. So there's a sense, at least looking back, in which the rebuilding of the Shire is a fantasy alternative to what actually happened after the Second World War: in reality, the factories, airbases and hospitals weren't knocked down and replaced with an agrarian utopia, but it's easy to believe that Tolkien wished they had been.

The Shire, of course, was never a utopia for everyone. This time, it's Frodo who doesn't fit in, underlined by one of Tolkien's most direct biblical references: "Frodo dropped quietly out of all the doings of the Shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own country."

But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.
- Mark 6:4

Apart from prophethood, Frodo is troubled by his wounds, especially the Morgul-knife at Weathertop, but also by the after-effects of the Ring. You'll need to read the appendices to find this out, but in fact, even Sam doesn't live happily ever after in the Shire: eventually he, too, takes to the Havens as the last Ringbearer. The last event in the history of the Fellowship is when Legolas and Gimli eventually cross the Sundering Seas to arrive in Valinor, presumably to be greeted by "Legolas what the fuck" when the dwarf disembarks. Somehow it makes me happy that the end of the story is three hobbits and a dwarf hanging out in elf Valhalla.

**

So, here we are: I started this whole thing in November 2013, made it as far as the Lord of the Rings in May 2016, and now it's finished. It's been quite a project. I'd like to thank my three regular readers and especially my regular commentator! The first offline consequence of all this will hopefully be a lecture on Tolkien and the heresies of the early church, to be delivered at the Helsinki Adult Education Center when circumstances permit. I might also try to publish a little something; we'll see. But it's been a real pleasure doing this.

Do I have some kind of final verdict on the Lord of the Rings? I don't know. It's still almost certainly one of the best-selling novels of all time, and the horrible movies supposedly based on it have cemented its status in popular culture to such an extent that it feels like it doesn't matter what I think of it. I hope I've been succesful in demonstrating that the Lord of the Rings is more complicated and more interesting than the strawman it's so often made into, and how understanding at least a little bit about Tolkien's theology sheds some light on quite a few things about it that I feel are otherwise misunderstood.

Other than that, I don't really have any grand conclusions to offer. Personally, I think the theology is complete nonsense, and some parts of the Lord of the Rings quite objectionable on many grounds. I also first read it at a sensitive age, and while I could certainly do without some of it, the world Tolkien created, and the compelling story he set in it, have been a major inspiration in my life and continue to be. I use that inspiration to try to do my part to make the world a better place for everyone. Sarumanism, Tolkien would say, which is frankly reactionary garbage. Tolkien's stories inspire me to do work which is directly contrary to the ideals he held. Make of that what you will, I guess.

Next time: well, let's see. I'm taking a break for a bit, but I think I might then do something completely different.

Thank you for reading!

Let's Read Tolkien 80: The Scouring of the Shire

It was after nightfall when, wet and tired, the travellers came at last to the Brandywine, and they found the way barred.

The four hobbit heroes arrive at the Brandywine bridge, where they find hobbit shiriffs guarding the gate, with instructions to not let anyone in. When Merry and Pippin break in anyway, they meet none other than Bill Ferny of Bree, now stationed at the gate as a sort of duty thug. They drive him off, but it turns out that the whole Shire is now under new management: there are ugly new brick buildings, rules and regulations and Men bullying hobbits under the direction of the mysterious "Sharkey". Sure enough, a larger party of shiriffs shows up the next morning to arrest Frodo and company and take them to Hobbiton. Since it's where they were going anyway, the four hobbits set off.

Frodo and company proceed to defy the Men, mobilize hundreds of armed hobbits into an insurrection by basically just showing up, and then Merry leads an ambush and pitched battle against Sharkey's men. It's a little bit like one of those computer role-playing games where everyone was apparently just standing around doing nothing until the player character shows up and says a couple of fairly anodyne things, and all of a sudden everything changes.

After the battle, the hobbits advance on Sharkey's lair in Bag End, and find him to be none other than Saruman, with Gríma still at his heels. Saruman more or less admits to having fucked up the Shire out of spite, and Frodo tells him to piss off. As Saruman is leaving, he tries to stab Frodo, and then humiliates Gríma Wormtongue badly enough that Wormtongue murders him, and is shot by the hobbits.

**

I always thought Frodo's sudden sense of revelation at meeting Saruman ("A sudden light broke on Frodo. "Sharkey!" he cried.") was odd; earlier, it's Frodo who explains to the others that Lotho isn't behind the evil in the Shire, but a victim of Saruman - and just a few pages later, he's shocked to meet the same Saruman. Christopher Tolkien's History of the Lord of the Rings sheds some light on this: in the original conception of the chapter, Sharkey wasn't Saruman at all, but rather a more anodyne chief ruffian (Christopher Tolkien, The History of the Lord of the Rings, part 4: Sauron Defeated, HarperCollins 2002, p. 94). In this context, Frodo's surprise is understandable: he was expecting another footpad from Isengard.

The trouble is, though, that once the narrative was changed so that Sharkey is Saruman, the hobbits' encounter with him in Many Partings becomes strongly foreshadowing, and it's no longer at all clear why Frodo, having divined that Lotho was in trouble rather than making it, should ever have expected Sharkey to be anyone else. I mean Gandalf pretty much tells them outright in the previous chapter that it's Saruman.

As a whole, the Scouring of the Shire is one of the parts of the book most open to interpretation through what Tolkien's presumed political views are. In my opinion, we should start with his theology: machines and technology are bad. Letters, 75:

There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and this cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil. So we come inevitably from Daedalus and Icarus to the Giant Bomber. It is not an advance in wisdom!

This is what I described a long time ago as Tolkien's conservative anarchism: 

Letters, 66:

Life in camp seems not to have changed at all, and what makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its worse features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as "planners" refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by "organization". [...] However it is, humans being what they are, quite inevitable, and the only cure (short of universal Conversion) is not to have wars - nor planning, nor organization, nor regimentation.

If only Tolkien had dedicated at least a little bit of effort into imagining what a fantasy society without planning and organization would be like, we'd remember him as one of the great anarchist authors of all time. Alas, his anarchism is like the faux libertarianism of 21st-century conservatives: I must be "free" to keep my privilege and property. Somehow, Aragorn's monarchy doesn't represent regimentation, but gatherers and sharers do; Sharkey's rules and notices get cheerfully torn down, but not King Elessar's. What's supposedly a rebellion against authority is really a royalist rising; the hobbits invoke the king several times.

Apart from rules and regulations, the other great offense of Sharkey is industrialization, mostly described in bleak terms as shoddily constructed buildings, littering and just random, pointless vandalism.

The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow.

First of all, I'm not even sure what the "new mill" is; based on Tom Cotton's description, it's a mill in the sense of grinding grain, but somehow it apparently produces water pollution. I don't know how you make it do that. But if you think about how central the Industrial Revolution is to British and English nationalism, this is Tolkien being a political radical: industry and what's ordinarily thought of as progress is, in fact, bad. The trouble is that he can't actually bring himself to make an argument about this, or even demonstrate any kind of logic for why this would be. The trouble with Sharkey's dudes isn't so much that they build things, it's that they seem to do everything maliciously and badly.

The only real way Saruman's despoiling of the Shire makes any sense is if it was originally part of his imitation of Mordor; he, too, wanted a subject realm to make into a miserable hell like Mordor, which then only accelerates when it turns into vengeance against Frodo and company. But then that undermines the industrialization/socialism analogy.

So if you take Tolkien at his word, the Scouring represents modernity and "progress" in general, and how it inevitably turns into destructive Sarumanism because a lady ate a fruit once. If you look at what he's actually written, the only kind of social change that's bad is one that threatens middle-class comforts. In Tolkien's world, descent from a strange lady born in Doriath is a valid basis for a system of government. "He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare raise our hands against," says Frodo of Saruman, after the latter stabbed him. This, and the royalism, is the closest Tolkien comes to the kind of authoritarianism many of his critics associate him with.

To sum up, then, the Scouring isn't an analogy of socialism or Britain's post-war Labour government -- directly; it's ludicrous to pretend that the Gatherers and Sharers aren't a swipe at the left -- or for that matter an analogy of how terrible industrialization was. It's a theological exposition of how fallen humanity can't improve its lot. Whether that makes any sense or is at all succesful is left to the reader.

Another interesting divide is made between Bilbo and Frodo, who are fabulously wealthy by Shire standards, and Lotho Baggins. Bilbo made his money adventuring, and apparently that's just fine by everyone. Lotho, however, makes it by selling pipeweed to Saruman for a profit. He then invests those profits into buying properties and businesses, which is apparently bad, and eventually leads to Men coming around and taking over the Shire, not to mention Lotho's murder. So I guess the question is whether the problem was Lotho acquiring his wealth by despicable commercial means, or investing it. Maybe it was both.

Overall, I feel like the Scouring is a sort of microcosm of Tolkien's work. Yes, the Shire is a minarchist rural utopia, now threatened by a caricature of modernizing socialists - and it isn't. The four hobbits are heroes returning from great deeds abroad who will now set things right in their own country - and they're not, because one of them is now a devoted pacifist who left his wargear behind on the slopes of Mount Doom. It's a very Boy's Own Adventure lark, where even the mean old lady gets a round of applause for having been mean to the bad guys, and at the same time it's a tragedy. I still feel that this creative tension is key to Tolkien's success, and it's definitely present here.

**

Next time: a boat trip.