J.R.R. Tolkien believed that myth is inherently true and material progress inherently evil. You could call that radical, reactionary or romantic, but it’s a distinctively modern phenomenon. Modernity and the Enlightenment notion of progress have to exist before you can reject them, and once again we see that “The Lord of the Rings,” for all the magic it employs to repopulate England with its ancient wraiths and spirits, belongs finally to the 20th century.
This is partly made clear by the presence of hobbits, those sensible if small-minded late-Victorian villagers, and partly by the “applicability” (the word Tolkien preferred to “allegory”) of the War of the Ring to various events of the modern age, from the battle against Nazism to the Cold War and the atomic bomb to the Industrial Revolution and the backlash against it. (As I have already suggested, I find this latter parallel the most convincing of the three.) But Tolkien’s modernity lies most clearly in his anti-modernism. To borrow a concept, perhaps outrageously, from German philosopher T.W. Adorno — who might be considered a kindred spirit from a vastly different tradition — Tolkien issued his own Great Refusal to the myth of Enlightenment, preferring the enlightenment of myth.
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In a lengthy and inadvertently hilarious screed published in the wake of the Channel 4/Waterstone’s poll (whose result she called a “bad dream”), Germaine Greer defines the central characteristic of Tolkienian literature as “flight from reality.” This is true enough if you understand the ideological content of her terms, so that “flight” means “thoroughgoing rejection” and “reality” means “the accepted liberal narrative of material and political progress.” Although educated in terms that modernist critics and authors had to respect, Tolkien attracted a readership of millions with a disreputable genre and the message that almost everything valued by the modernists was empty and evil. Dear oh dear indeed.
T.A. Shippey is actually brave enough to compare this quintessentially anti-modern writer to the avatar of literary modernism himself, James Joyce. If Shippey is not quite as solid a literary critic as he is a philologist — his claim that “the dominant literary mode of the 20th century has been the fantastic” is daring, if overstated — here he strikes a telling blow. First there are the coincidences: Joyce and Tolkien were close contemporaries from neighboring nations, had similar class and religious backgrounds and are best known for one work, highly original, immensely influential and encyclopedic in scale (“Ulysses” and “The Lord of the Rings,” respectively). Moreover, both labored long and hard over a successor work, written in still more inscrutable language, which proved impenetrable to all but their most devoted fans (“Finnegans Wake” and “The Silmarillion”).
There are deeper correspondences, and here Shippey could have gone further and included Vladimir Nabokov as well. All three, you might say, have strong qualities of boyishness; they are precocious and erudite, lost in their own worlds. All are obsessively interested in language and indeed in linguistics. (Joyce, as my father could have told you in considerable detail, was something of an amateur philologist.) Each, in Shippey’s phrase, “engaged in deep negotiation with the ancient genres of epic and romance” (see “Ulysses” and “Lolita”). Each was fascinated by puzzles, games and systems of taxonomy, and employed them as matters of both form and content. Yet the differences, says Shippey, are more instructive than the similarities:
Tolkien’s approach to the ideas or the devices accepted as modernist is radically different because they are on principle not literary. He used “mythical method” not because it was an interesting method but because he believed that the myths were true. He showed his characters wandering in the wilderness and entirely mistaken in their guesses not because he wanted to shatter the “realist illusion” of fiction, but because he thought all our views of reality were illusions … He experimented with language not to see what interesting effects could be produced but because he thought all forms of human language were already an experiment. One might almost say that he took the ideals of modernism seriously instead of playing around with them.
All right, but one might also say that with the 20th century in the rearview mirror and the boundaries of high and low culture virtually dissolved, Tolkien’s outsider status isn’t what it used to be. For all its idiosyncrasy, “The Lord of the Rings” looks more and more as if it might belong to two distinct but interconnected literary traditions. One of these reflects the growing literary respectability of science fiction and fantasy, and would include Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany and various others. (Tolkien has a legion of imitators and emulators, but that is a separate phenomenon.)
The second category is really the leading offshoot of modernism itself, and might be dubbed Great Weird Boy Books, meaning weighty tomes that mix realism and fantasy along with various forms of language and discourse, much of it technical or abstruse, while aspiring to a mythic dimension. Such a list would include “Ulysses” and “Lolita,” to be sure, but also “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “Catch-22″ and “Slaughterhouse Five.” You could add books by William Gaddis, Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace; you could reach outside the overeducated pale-male demographic for Ralph Ellison or A.S. Byatt or Delany or Margaret Atwood.
If we’ve gotten anything useful from postmodern literary theory (which is a debatable proposition), it’s the idea that a book always reveals and conceals things that neither the writer nor the reader can control. Tolkien may have intended “The Lord of the Rings” as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” as he once wrote, but relatively few readers since the 1950s have received it that way. As Shippey makes clear, Tolkien’s world is one of virtuous pre-Christian monotheism rather than paganism, and his “eucatastrophe” (Tolkien-C.S. Lewis parlance for a great moment of deliverance), when the One Ring is destroyed and Sauron’s works are unmade, carries faint but distinct pre-echoes of Christian salvation and resurrection. But to those who saw Tolkien as a liberatory spirit of the counterculture, a lover of trees and hater of machines, the Christian dimension was simply irrelevant.
Tolkien was indeed a lover of trees and hater of machines; he was also an unregenerate Tory, even a monarchist, who distrusted modern notions of democracy and equality and resented the increasing dominance of the left in intellectual life. Those who embraced Tolkien from the ’60s onward had of course not seen his letters of the 1940s, in which he praises Francisco Franco, suggests that it may not matter whether Adolf Hitler or the forces of “Americo-cosmopolitanism” emerge victorious from World War II and even remarks, “There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the ‘Germanic’ ideal.”
Although Tolkien’s defenders have done their utmost to rationalize and contextualize it, there is a troubling fixation on racial and ancestral purity in “The Lord of the Rings.” Aragorn (usually described as “Aragorn son of Arathorn”), the returned king who assumes his rightful throne by epic’s end, is descended from the Númenorean line of Elendil, which confers fair skin, great height and beauty, exceedingly long life, valor in battle and healing powers. The further away from this ideal ancestry Tolkien’s humans get, the darker, cruder and less reliable they become.
In fairness, Tolkien never suggests that racial purity makes a decisive difference between good and evil; the Woses are noble savages who value freedom, while the sinister Lord of the Nazgûl is a great king of Númenorean descent who was twisted to the will of Sauron. (Further philology: Tolkien’s English word for the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, was aptly chosen, since “wraith” is related to “writhe” and “wreath,” and carries the meaning of a bent and twisted spirit.) Even the dark-complexioned Southrons and Easterlings who fight for Sauron’s armies are seen as valiant but deluded, and those who surrender to Aragorn’s forces are shown mercy.
But there is no mercy for the Orcs, a subhuman race bred by Morgoth and/or Sauron (although not created by them) that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death. They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organization and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil. In short, they are by design and intention a northern European’s paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about, far away to the east and south. In a letter to a potential film producer, Tolkien explains them as “degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” As a representation of the Other, to use contemporary critical terms, they could hardly be more revealing.
And yet, and yet. If Tolkien’s racial typing is dismaying, it is also the product of his background and era, like most of our inescapable prejudices. At the level of conscious intention, he was not a racist or an anti-Semite. In his letters, he decries the racial situation in his birthplace of South Africa, and he knew and liked several Jewish academics; when someone wrote to ask whether his last name was of Jewish origin, he replied that he “should consider it an honor if it were.”
Furthermore, like “The Lord of the Rings” itself, Tolkien’s political and social views were so peculiar that he can genuinely be claimed by renegades and revolutionaries almost as easily as by Jesuits and aristocrats. In 1943 he wrote to his son Christopher, “My political beliefs lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy … Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers.”
It was the entire terrain in between anarchy and monarchy — the so-called rational forms of government, from socialism to liberal democracy to fascism — that he disliked. (The Shire had virtually no government or police force before the arrival of Saruman.) He loved England but not Great Britain and still less its empire; he had little preference between the American and Soviet behemoths, but once said he suspected the Russians were “not quite so dismal.” He was a hardcore Luddite who would no doubt have been horrified by the Internet; he gave up driving in 1939 after seeing what cars and road building had done to his beloved English countryside, and even in later years when he had become rich he never owned a television set or a washing machine.
“The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets,” he wrote to Christopher in another wartime letter. “It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be.”
This I think is the Tolkien who survives, the cantankerous, politically unclassifiable, anti-globalization Tolkien who is clearly our contemporary — jibes against feminism included. In trying to return a lost sense of myth and mystery to his little corner of the world, he also sought to make the globe as a whole less small, dull and flat. He lived in a provincial suburb for virtually his entire adult life — he was a Christian after all, and accepted that this is a fallen world — but fought against the spreading ideology of suburbanism more fiercely than any black-clad rioter smashing a Starbucks window. “There is only one bright spot,” he added in the “Anarchy and Monarchy” letter, “and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations … But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.”
Although the subject of sex in Tolkien deserves its own article — he is writhing in his grave, a tormented wraith, as I write this — it is one of the key contradictory elements in his work and requires a brief visit. Despite what some critics have suggested, I see no homosexual element in “The Lord of the Rings”; rather, it is a “homosocial” realm of intimate, affectionate relationships among men, of a kind that has virtually vanished from modern life. From his school days in Birmingham onward, Tolkien spent his intellectual life in just such a realm, sharing his innermost thoughts and visions with Lewis and other friends around firesides and in Oxford pubs. Frodo and his courageous servant Sam — who indeed saves the entire quest from disaster — undoubtedly love each other, and their love is both physical and emotional, in fact platonic in the truest sense. Tolkien intended to reflect the complex cross-class relationships between man and officer, servant and master, that he had encountered as a World War I lieutenant.
That doesn’t mean, on the other hand, that “The Lord of the Rings” is ever fully comfortable with heterosexuality. Its female characters are little more than idealized figures of inspiration or decoration; Eowyn, the warrior-princess of Rohan, is the only real exception. (Was her original a female graduate student who braved the pipe smoke and postprandial glasses of port?) Her courtship by Faramir of Gondor is stylized and awkward but at least has the flavor of real emotion. If you still believe that the book has no more explicit depiction of heterosexual activity than that, however, I suggest you take another look at the disturbing encounter between Sam and Shelob, the huge and evil female spider, at the end of Book Four.
But I am mainly here to praise Tolkien, not to bury him, and one bizarrely sexualized scene between hobbit and arachnid does not spoil my enjoyment of “The Lord of the Rings.” It is a book too long for some of its purposes and too short for others; its highfalutin language gets more archaic as it goes along, and it never quite lives up to the menace and tension of the journey from the Shire to Rivendell in Book One (a judgment with which Tolkien apparently agreed). I don’t believe for a moment that it is the best book of the 20th century, or even that such comparisons are meaningful. But it is a distinctive, even definitive, modern work of rebellion against modernity and, in the words of Tolkien’s publisher and friend, Rayner Unwin, “a very great book in its own curious way.”
It is not merely the scale of mythic invention or the grand storytelling that distinguishes it but also its tragic vision, the profound melancholy mentioned by Lewis. Few if any heroic quests have ever had such a sense of human frailty and weakness; although Frodo brings the Ring all the way to the Cracks of Doom where Sauron forged it, in the end he is overcome by temptation and claims it for his own. He is redeemed only by chance, or by divine grace, which in Tolkien’s world comes to the same thing. He has shown mercy to the treacherous and miserable Gollum, who becomes the accidental agent of Frodo’s and the world’s salvation. But Frodo, the book’s ostensible hero, fails in his quest and is left, like the knight who guards the Holy Grail, with a grievous wound that can never heal (an Arthurian parallel Shippey has not noticed).
Even the victory wrought by the Ring’s destruction is a sad affair, in many respects closer to defeat. Much of the magic and mystery drains out of Middle-earth after Sauron’s fall, leaving behind an ordinary, only slightly prehistoric realm dominated by human beings. Tolkien’s most beloved characters — Gandalf, the High-Elves Elrond and Galadriel and the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, both of them indelibly marked by the Ring — depart over the western seas to a paradisiacal nowhere that none of us on this shore will ever see.
Tolkien liked to present himself to friends and readers as a contented fireside hobbit, fond of tobacco, simple food and late mornings in bed, and there can be no doubt, reading his letters, that he was immensely gratified by the outpouring of love and enthusiasm his work engendered. (And immensely irritated by some of it; when a woman wanted to name her Siamese cats after his characters, he replied that they were “the fauna of Mordor.”) But in reality he was a strange and complicated man who wrote a strange and sad book, whose complex of meanings we will likely never determine.
I think the best answer to the dear-oh-dear, flight-from-reality crowd is to point out that Tolkien’s Middle-earth is not an imaginary world but an imaginary history of our own world. For all its fantastic and immortal creatures it is after all a vale of tears, and “The Lord of the Rings” is not a triumphalist fantasy but a lamentation and farewell for all that is past or passing. Tolkien should of course have the last word on this. Less than a third of the way through his epic he sounds a melancholic note that reverberates throughout his story and prefigures its ending. It is perhaps the loveliest piece of prose in all his work, and it reminds us that he understood myth not only in terms of philology or sacred truth but also as writing of tremendous clarity and affective power.
Frodo and his companions depart by boat from Lórien, the enchanted forest of Galadriel — a sort of earthly paradise, which Shippey thinks Tolkien may have borrowed from the medieval poem “Pearl” — near the end of Book Two. But it seems to be Lórien that is slipping away from them,
like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world.
Even as they gazed, the Silverlode passed out into the currents of the Great River, and their boats turned and began to speed southward. Soon the white form of the Lady was small and distant. She shone like a window of glass upon a far hill in the westering sun, or as a remote lake seen from a mountain: a crystal fallen in the lap of the land. Then it seemed to Frodo that she lifted her arms in a final farewell, and far but piercing-clear on the following wind came the sound of her voice singing. But now she sang in the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea, and he did not understand the words: fair was the music, but it did not comfort him.
Ser Jorah’s face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. “When I first went into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If you had asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have no trouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki.”
“But if I asked you now?”
“Now,” the knight said, “I am less certain.”
– George R.R. Martin, “A Game of Thrones”
Epic fantasy — sprawling stories full of swords, castles, magic, kings and lots and lots of white people – is slowly finding its way into America’s cultural mainstream. In the age of the anemic box office, Peter Jackson’s films of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy remain a gold standard of blockbusterdom – and his forthcoming version of “The Hobbit” will almost certainly follow suit. Newer writers like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss have sold hundreds of thousands of their “door-stopper” tomes of wizardry and courtly intrigue. And tonight, countless viewers will be glued to their sets for the return of what is arguably the hottest show on television, “Game of Thrones,” HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels.
This is all a bit odd for those of us who grew up with – maybe even got beaten up for – an obsession with these sorts of books. Accustomed to being mocked for our profoundly uncool fixations, many fantasy nerds, myself among them, have an almost nurtured notion that our love of the fantastic and the pseudo-medieval is something that the rest of the world Just. Doesn’t. Get.
But now, as our beloved genre finds its way into “normal” people’s hearts and minds, fantasy fans are increasingly confronted with an inversion of this notion – a question that I, as an Arab-American fantasy fanatic, have been wrangling with for years: If the mainstream doesn’t get fantasy, just how well does epic fantasy, with its lily-white heroes, get the multicultural real world of 21st-century America? As some of the most popular works in the genre’s history – works that shed any pretension of being children’s fare – A Song of Ice and Fire and its wonderful TV spawn are particularly useful springboards for this question.
When it comes to inherited conventions regarding race in epic fantasy, “Game of Thrones” is, in a sense, standing on the shoulders of dwarfs. The Lord of the Rings is the most obvious predecessor to Martin’s work, and it’s not hard to find subtle rhetorical responses to Tolkien in his books. When Time magazine dubbed Martin “the American Tolkien,” it highlighted not only Martin’s rather astonishing genius in world-building and narrative scope, but also the ideological baggage that all of us writing in the genre have inherited from our shared progenitor.
And it’s heavy baggage indeed, however much we love Tolkien’s creation. His half-sublimated wranglings with race are more complex and fraught than either his shrillest detractors or his most fawning defenders would have us believe. But there is some irreducible ugliness in his masterpiece that really can’t be convincingly redeemed. The men of the global East and global South (“black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues”) are monstrous and evil, naturally and culturally inclined to bow to Sauron, and to make war on the good men of the North and West. The bestial visages of orcs bear a striking resemblance to racist caricatures of African and Asian facial features. Above all, to be dark-skinned in Middle Earth is to be part of a savage horde – whether orcish or human – rather than to be a true individual.
The savage hordes described by Tolkien have been imported by his dozens of imitators over the years, becoming a mainstay of fantasy in books, movies and video games. It’s a convention that Martin both takes up and departs from in depicting the Mongol-inspired Dothraki. As a people en masse, the Dothraki value only their horses, treating life cheaply, and reveling in violence:
Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, facedown, and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take their turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought the Lamb Men.
The HBO production – which has been so remarkable on so many fronts — has exacerbated this hard-R-rated cartoonishness, bringing out some of the novel’s more unfortunate tendencies. The show’s depiction of the Dothraki has been positively cringe-inducing. In the novels, Martin’s quasi-Mongol warrior culture is depicted in a problematically essentialist, but still complex fashion. But HBO has nudged Martin’s creation fully into racial caricature by casting a seemingly random variety of colored people, and apparently raiding productions of both “Hair” and “Braveheart” to clothe them.
Even so, by skillfully replicating the juxtapositions posed by Martin’s back-and-forth POV, the show has managed also to replicate his ultimate, rather un-Tolkienish subtext: There is nothing unique about the savage horde’s savagery. If Dothraki society is depicted as violently perverse, so is Westerosi (i.e., quasi-European) society, which bows to the whims of the Aryan-featured boy-monster King Joffrey, and which has knighted mass murderers and rapists like Ser Gregor Clegane, one of the most horrifying minor characters in all of fantasy. Every culture is savage in “Game of Thrones,” and that’s a very different view of the world than what Tolkien gave us.
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Sunday’s Season 2 premiere begins HBO’s adaptation of “A Clash of Kings,” the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire. Book II is even more wide-ranging in terms of setting and scope than Book I was, so viewers can expect brief glimpses of characters from other parts of the world, including the Summer Isles, Martin’s analogue for Africa.
Unfortunately, some of these depictions partake in some pretty familiar stereotypes about African sexuality. It will be interesting, for example, to see what the show does with Chataya, an associate of Tyrion’s from the Summer Isles, and an upscale brothel madam. Chataya blithely sends her own 16-year-old daughter into prostitution at her “pillow house.”
Chataya continued, “My people hold that there is no shame to be found in the pillow house. In the Summer Isles, those who are skilled at giving pleasure are greatly esteemed. Many highborn youths and maidens serve for a few years after their flowerings, to honor the gods.”
“What do the gods have to do with it?”
“The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.”
“Remind me to tell the High Septon,” said Tyrion. “If I could pray with my cock, I’d be much more religious.”
Again, an entire nonwhite culture is presented as holding skewed values. But this wince-inducing depiction is tempered by some interesting implied questions about sex and commerce and spirituality and culture and power. Here’s hoping there’s a hint of this in the show’s version of things as well.
Part of the challenge of adapting Martin’s novels for television has to do with honoring his skill in constructing jaw-droppingly epic sweeps of plot and setting from beautifully rendered small details. If there’s a saving grace for the racial imagery in A Song of Ice and Fire, it’s in some of these little glimpses and hints that appear throughout – skillful deployment of which on”Game of Thrones” could help make an already good show great.
As an example, the only black character in the first novel is the barely mentioned, but deeply intriguing Jalabhar Xho, “an exile prince from the Summer Isles who wore a cape of green and scarlet feathers over skin as dark as night.” In the first novel, Xho’s most notable act is to frighten one of Sansa Stark’s fellow court ladies with his exotic appearance. So the first black guy to show up in A Song of Ice and Fire basically scares a white girl and then disappears. (He also ties for second place in an archery competition.) Not exactly marquee stuff, but – if online reader reactions are any measure – tantalizing. Yet the character didn’t appear at all in Season 1 of “Game of Thrones” – an understandable enough choice, given that Xho is essentially court furniture, but still a disappointing one for those of us who notice such things.
Another minor character who might have been used a bit more effectively to add a smidge of color to the screen in Season 1 is Syrio Forel, Arya Stark’s vaguely Mediterranean “dancing master” (a gender-acceptable euphemism for “sword-fighting teacher”). Forel is a fan favorite among readers, much more than one might guess from his brief appearances. The show could certainly have added a scene or two more of the wonderful actor Miltos Yeromelou, giving us just a bit more of his character training Arya in the deft swordsmanship of the East. All the more so because Arya’s POV on the show has thus far felt a bit diminished from the books. One supposes training flashbacks are always possible …
Of necessity, turning 1,000 pages of prose into a relatively few hours of screen time involves dropping, combining and retooling elements of a novel. “Game of Thrones” has already taken a few liberties with Martin’s books – cutting minor scenes, combining some characters and eliminating others, and (most notoriously) signposting plot points and character motivations through clumsy new “sexposition” scenes. It would be nice if, moving forward, the writers and producers chose as well to keep an eye on these sorts of promising moments of cultural variety and — dare I say it? — color in Westeros. But, given the contempt our culture currently holds for anything smacking of the much maligned (if chimerical) “political correctness,” I’m not holding my breath.
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As an Arab-American writing fantasy fiction, I’ve been asked more than once whether fantasy’s race problem is in a better place now in the Age of Martin than it was in the Age of Tolkien. My short answer is yes, but honestly, I think such questions are almost beside the point.
Ultimately, A Song of Ice and Fire, like the Lord of the Rings, is the work of a brilliant and conscientious writer who is nonetheless writing in his own time and place. The United States in 2012 is, far too often, and even with a black president, still a culture rich in racist stereotypes and xenophobic fear-mongering. Expecting a writer to remain entirely unstained by this is expecting a person to live underwater without getting wet. If we still find troubling racial assumptions and caricatures in fantasy – whether on the page, or on the big or small screen — this probably tells us more about our culture-wide problems than it does about a single writer’s, or a single show’s issues. A Song of Ice and Fire is indeed our American Lord of the Rings, and if Westeros has its race problems, they are simply a powerful reflection of America’s.
Looking at the most visible exemplars of epic fantasy — from J.R.R. Tolkien to such bestselling authors as George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan — a casual observer might assume that big, continent-spanning sagas with magic in them are always set in some imaginary variation on Medieval Britain. There may be swords and talismans of power and wizards and the occasional dragon, but there often aren’t any black- or brown-skinned people, and those who do appear are decidedly peripheral; in “The Lord of the Rings,” they all seem to work for the bad guys.
Our hypothetical casual observer might therefore also conclude that epic fantasy — one of today’s most popular genres — would hold little interest for African-American readers and even less for African-American writers. But that observer would be dead wrong. One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy is N.K. Jemisin, whose debut novel, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms,” won the Locus Award for best first novel and nominations for seemingly every other speculative fiction prize under the sun. Another is David Anthony Durham, whose Acacia Trilogy has landed on countless best-of lists. Both authors recently published the concluding books in their trilogies.
Although they came to the genre from different paths, both Jemisin and Durham have used it to wrench historical and cultural themes out of their familiar settings and hold them up in a different light. “I never felt that fantasy needed to be an escape from reality,” Durham told me. “I wanted it to be a different sort of engagement with reality, and one that benefits from having magic and mayhem in it as well.”
In Durham’s trilogy, four royal siblings are deposed and then fight their way back to the throne in an empire presided over by the island city of Acacia. Their dynasty’s power resides in a Faustian bargain made with a league of maritime merchants: the League supplies a rabble-soothing drug in exchange for a quota of the empire’s children, who are sent off across the sea to meet an unknown fate. As promised, “Acacia” is a sweeping yarn filled with adventure, intrigue, sorcery and battles.
“There’s a little bit of the Atlantic slave trade in there, and there’s a bit of the Opium Wars and quite a bit of Halliburton,” Durham said. When set in the real world, such topics come “weighted with particular agendas and political orientations.” Readers often approach them with established opinions — or are so convinced they already know what the author is going to say that they never bother to approach them at all. When similar themes arise in an imaginary world, said Durham, “I have some readers who are quite liberal and some that are more conservative than I am, but they still engage with the book that I wrote, with all the components that are at play in it, in a way that I think they wouldn’t if they perceived me to have a political agenda right from the start.”
While Durham came to writing epic fantasy after publishing two literary novels (he has an MFA from the University of Maryland) and a historical novel about Hannibal’s march on ancient Rome, Jemisin has been a self-identified “black geek” since childhood. She started out reading science fiction, deeming fantasy to be insufficiently “real,” a notion she now considers “bizarre.” Furthermore, “I was reading almost exclusively male writers.” Her youthful attempts at writing her own stories hit a snag when her father prompted her to create a black female character, and she found she couldn’t do it. “I really didn’t know how to write from the female perspective, even though I was female.” An active search for more innovative science fiction led her to the work of Octavia Butler, “and my consciousness was utterly changed.”
Perhaps because the notion of envisioning a different future is baked into the form, science fiction is known for fostering such groundbreaking black authors as Butler and Samuel Delany. (Although, Jemisin pointed out, the first book she read by Butler featured no author photo and a cover illustration of white women, a practice known as “whitewashing.”) Much of epic fantasy — usually set in a preindustrial world — is more conservative. For example, the genre’s founding author, Tolkien, expressed a keen nostalgia for Anglo-Saxon rural life in the feudal past.
Still, some authors have tried to expand the genre’s borders. Both Jemisin and Durham cite Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books as an important influence. Le Guin, the daughter of a pioneering anthropologist, set her young-adult series in an archipelago of islands, and based its culture and religion on Asian and Native American models. Her primary characters in those novels were people of color.
Nevertheless, when Jemisin decided to write her own epic fantasy in grad school, she found herself abiding by some of the genre’s most shopworn conventions. Her main character was a man. “I was thinking it had to have a quest in it, with a MacGuffin of Power being brought to a Place of Significance,” she said. The book didn’t quite work, so she set it aside, and when she returned to it a few years later, she decided to start over. She made the main character a woman and, in an even more marked departure from the norm, she decided to have that character narrate the book in the first person. “I knew that what I was writing was inherently defiant of the tropes of epic fantasy,” Jemisin said, “and I wasn’t sure it would be accepted.”
Jemisin’s series, too, is set in the capital of an empire that has been run by an aristocratic clan for generations. The power of the Arameri family, however, resides in the gods — specifically a pantheon of deities whom they have imprisoned and enslaved. The narrator of “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” is the daughter of a renegade member of the clan who ran off with a foreigner. Raised in a remote kingdom with its own fiercely independent customs, she returns to the capital seeking information about her mother and, once there, becomes embroiled in vicious palace intrigues.
When Durham decided to write an epic fantasy, he set out to recapture the enchantment he felt as a 12-year-old, discovering Tolkien at his father’s house in Trinidad, while “brushfires and buzzards” ranged over the neighboring hills. Jemisin, on the other hand, based her trilogy on “the old-school epics: not Tolkien, but Gilgamesh.” The gods in her imaginary world evoke the squabbling divine families of the world’s great myths: “The ancient tales of mortals putting up with gods and trying to outsmart gods, of trickster gods outsmarting other gods: That’s the basis of my work.”
Despite such differences, what’s most striking about the fictional worlds Durham and Jemisin have created is how cosmopolitan they are. Their cities are populated by people of different races and religions, mixing together and comparing their respective values. They bridle at the limitations of class. Economics drive many of their actions, and the conflicts that inevitably arise can’t be easily parsed. “The strange thing about some of [the most popular epic] fantasy worlds,” Durham said, “is that it does seem that the entire world is northern Europe. That’s all there is. It’s always easy for me to engage with that, but then a part of my mind is also wondering, ‘What happened if you spin the globe?’ What are the people doing there? How is their history been shaped by the magic of that world? There’s something exciting about acknowledging that everybody is not the same and that affects their struggles.”
Jemisin finds deeper problems in “certain expectations of the genre that are rooted in Western cultural assumptions that are not necessarily true. For example: the whole good-versus-evil focus, the binary. You see that in so much of epic fantasy. The Dark Lord is really bad, we know this. Because he’s dark. Well, did you do something to him? Doesn’t matter, he’s dark. That’s why he’s bad and that’s why you’ve got to go kill him. That kind of thinking I inherently do not trust.”
If these writers can bring fresh perspectives to the genre, the genre reciprocates by bringing them new and more varied readers. Durham’s second book, a literary novel titled “Walk Through Darkness,” about an escaped slave and the man tracking him, “never made it to the front of the store, really, because it was immediately shelved as an ‘African-American novel.’” Now, “my stuff is being read by more and a wider range of people than it was in the early days.”
Jemisin has been annoyed to learn that her first novel sometimes gets shelved in the same section, which means that readers searching the science fiction and fantasy area can’t find it. “The inherent danger of that section,” she said, “are the ideas that, a) only African-Americans would be interested in it, and b) African-Americans are interested solely because there is something African-American associated with it — usually the writer. I don’t see the novels of white authors who write black characters getting shoved into that section.” This is all the more irksome when, as was the case with her first novel, people assume her narrator is black; Jemisin envisioned the character and her people as similar to the Incas. “Just because I am black,” she said, “does not mean I am always going to write about black characters.”
In fact, the epic fantasy genre makes an imaginative departure from the contemporary (or historical) African-American experience feel less politically charged. Although one of Durham’s royal siblings comes of age amid a dark-skinned people living on a savannah, the siblings themselves are brown with straight black hair. (He describes them as “sort of Mediterranean.”) Because slavery in Acacia isn’t tied to race, he can explore its consequences, as well as the effects of colonialism, apart from the issue of skin color.
“The genre can go many, many more places than it has gone,” said Jemisin. “Fantasy’s job is kind of to look back, just as science fiction’s job is to look forward. But fantasy doesn’t always just have to look back to one spot, or to one time. There’s so much rich, fascinating, interesting, really cool history that we haven’t touched in the genre: countries whose mythology is elaborate and fascinating, cultures whose stories we just haven’t even tried to retell.”
As bad lots go, you can’t get much worse than the hordes of Mordor from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Led by an utterly evil disembodied entity who manifests himself as a gigantic, flaming, pitiless eye, and composed of loathsome orcs (or goblins), trolls and foreigners, Mordor’s armies are ultimately defeated and wiped out by the virtuous and noble elves, dwarfs, ents and human beings — aka the “free peoples” — of Middle-earth. No one sheds a tear over Mordor’s downfall, although the hobbit Sam Gamgee does spare a moment to wonder if a dead enemy soldier is truly evil or has simply been misguided or coerced into serving the dark lord Sauron.
Well, there’s two sides to every story, or to quote a less banal maxim, history is written by the winners. That’s the philosophy behind “The Last Ringbearer,” a novel set during and after the end of the War of the Ring (the climactic battle at the end of “The Lord of the Rings”) and told from the point of view of the losers. The novel was written by Kirill Yeskov, a Russian paleontologist, and published to acclaim in his homeland in 1999. Translations of the book have also appeared in other European nations, but fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English.
That changed late last year when one Yisroel Markov posted his English translation of “The Last Ringbearer” as a free download. Less polished translations of brief passages from the book had been posted earlier on other sites, but Markov’s is the “official” version, produced with the cooperation and approval of Yeskov himself. Although the new translation’s status as a potential infringement of the Tolkien copyright remains ambiguous, it may be less vulnerable to legal action since no one is seeking to profit from it.
The novel still has some rough edges — most notably, a confused switching back and forth between past and present tense in the early chapters — and some readers may be put off by Yeskov’s (classically Russian) habit of dropping info-dumps of military and political history into the narrative here and there. For the most part, though, “The Last Ringbearer” is a well-written, energetic adventure yarn that offers an intriguing gloss on what some critics have described as the overly simplistic morality of Tolkien’s masterpiece.
In Yeskov’s retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science “destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!” He’s in cahoots with the elves, who aim to become “masters of the world,” and turn Middle-earth into a “bad copy” of their magical homeland across the sea. Barad-dur, also known as the Dark Tower and Sauron’s citadel, is, by contrast, described as “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.”
Because Gandalf refers to Mordor as the “Evil Empire” and is accused of crafting a “Final Solution to the Mordorian problem” by rival wizard Saruman, he obviously serves as an avatar for Russia’s 20th-century foes. But the juxtaposition of the willfully feudal and backward “West,” happy with “picking lice in its log ‘castles’” while Mordor cultivates learning and embraces change, also recalls the clash between Europe in the early Middle Ages and the more sophisticated and learned Muslim empires to the east and south. Sauron passes a “universal literacy law,” while the shield maiden Eowyn has been raised illiterate, “like most of Rohan’s elite” — good guys Tolkien based on his beloved Anglo-Saxons.
The protagonist of “The Last Ringbearer” is a field medic from Umbar (a southern land), who is ably assisted by an Orocuen — that is, orc — scout, who is not a demonic creature like the orcs in “The Lord of the Rings,” but an ordinary man. They’re given the task of destroying a mirror in the elf stronghold of Lorien before the elves can further use it to infect Middle-earth with their alien magic. Meanwhile, the remnants of Mordor’s civilization fight a rear-guard guerrilla campaign to sustain the “green shoots of reason and progress,” in opposition to the “static” and “tidy” pseudo-paradise of Middle-earth under the elven regime.
Some of the supporting characters from “The Lord of the Rings” — such as Faramir and Eowyn — get more attention and and even a bit more respect in “The Last Ringbearer.” Others, like Aragorn — depicted by Yeskov as a ruthless Machiavellian schemer who is ultimately the puppet of his wife, the elf Arwen — have been completely transformed. (Still others, like the hobbits, don’t even exist.) Nevertheless, the primary characters are entirely Yeskov’s inventions, presented in a radically rethought version of Tolkien’s world. The novel is clearly dependent on Tolkien’s creation, but it’s also original and ingenious.
Some Tolkien fans have dismissed “The Last Ringbearer” as nothing more than fan fiction, although it certainly doesn’t conform to the stereotype of fan fiction as fantasies of unlikely romantic pairings among “canonical” characters as imagined by teenage girls. What the novel most closely resembles is “Wind Done Gone” by Alice Randall, a retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” from the perspective of a slave born on Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation. “Wind Done Gone” was published in 2001, prompting a copyright infringement suit from Mitchell’s estate. Randall, who is African-American, and her publisher mounted a defense resting in part on the argument that “Wind Done Gone” is a “parody,” intended to highlight the retrograde racial attitudes and historical distortions in Mitchell’s misty-eyed depiction of the Old South.
It should be said on behalf of “The Last Ringbearer” that it is superior to “Wind Done Gone” as both literature and entertainment. The two books do, however, have similar agendas. In Yeskov’s scenario, “The Lord of the Rings” is a highly romanticized and mythologized version of the fall of Mordor, perhaps even outright propaganda; “The Last Ringbearer” is supposed to be the more complicated and less sentimental true story.
The inhuman nature of the orcs and Tolkien’s depiction of Mordor’s human allies as swarthy-skinned outsiders has prompted complaints that his book obscures the moral conundrums of warfare and dabbles in racial demonization. The American critic Edmund Wilson described “The Lord of the Rings” as a children’s book that had “somehow got out of hand” and “juvenile trash,” in large part for such reasons. Others, like the novelist Michael Moorcock, have attacked Middle-earth as a childishly rose-tinted vision of the Merrie Olde England that never was, as well as willfully blind to the hardships and injustice of preindustrial and feudal societies.
“The Lord of the Rings” wouldn’t be as popular as it is if the pastoral idyll of the Shire and the sureties of a virtuous, mystically ordained monarchy as embodied in Aragorn didn’t speak to widespread longing for a simpler way of life. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying such narratives — we’d be obliged to jettison the entire Arthurian mythos and huge chunks of American popular culture if there were — but it never hurts to remind ourselves that it’s not just their magical motifs that makes them fantasies.
Yeskov’s “parody” — for “The Last Ringbearer,” with its often sardonic twists on familiar Tolkien characters and events, comes a lot closer to being a parody than “Wind Done Gone” ever did — is just such a reminder. If it is fan fiction (and I’m not sure I’m in a position to pronounce on that), then it may be the most persuasive example yet of the artistic potential of the form.
Nonso Anozie, Lena Headey and Jason Momoa in "Game of Thrones" 
N.K. Jemisin (left) and David Anthony Durham 
"Here the gumdrop hammer-stroke will fall hardest." 
LONDON - OCTOBER 17: (UK TABLOID NEWSPAPERS OUT) Actor Martin Freeman attends The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival opening night gala screening of "Eastern Promises" at Odeon Leicester Square on October 17, 2007 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images)(Credit: Getty Images) 
