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The Lord of the Rings

Tuesday, Feb 15, 2011 8:30 PM UTC

Middle-earth according to Mordor

A newly translated Russian novel retells Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" from the perspective of the bad guys

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Middle-earth according to Mordor

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.

Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Sunday, Apr 1, 2012 1:00 PM UTC

Is “Game of Thrones” too white?

Fantasy fiction might have racial problems, but they're just a reflection of America's broader battles

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Is Nonso Anozie, Lena Headey and Jason Momoa in "Game of Thrones"

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.

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Saladin Ahmed has been a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer. His fantasy novel "Throne of the Crescent Moon" was recently published to wide acclaim. More Saladin Ahmed.

Tuesday, Jul 5, 2011 9:06 PM UTC

Five pop culture items we missed

Today's catch: Broship of the Rings, discouraging drunk puppy purchases, and a Chumbawamba cover that doesn't suck

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Five pop culture items we missed"The Broship of the Ring" by Noelle Stevenson.

1. PSA of the day: Don’t drink and buy puppies! A pet store in Greenwich Village has banned boozy patrons from purchasing dogs. Finally, taking responsibility for a live animal requires the same amount of mental wherewithal as getting a tattoo.

2. Cover of the day: They Might Be Giants goes “Tubthumping” for The Onion’s A.V. Undercover series. “I get knocked down, and I get up again…”



They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba

3. Performance slide of the day: Grantland has declared Natalie Portman to be the actor who most “cuba’d” their Oscar cred in 2011. Thanks, “No Strings Attached.”

4. Saddest idiom of the day: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”… at least not in the case of Weston Cage, who was arrested with his wife on domestic battery charges over the weekend.  In April, father Nicolas Cage was taken in for a similar charge.

5. Tolkien dudes of the day: “Broship of the Rings,” an amazing series of illustrations by Noelle Stevenson. Did you know the Elvish language doesn’t even have a word for hipsters??

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Wednesday, Jun 29, 2011 10:01 PM UTC

Five pop culture items we missed

Today's catch includes Harrison Ford talking smack, Charlie Sheen's 'roid rage, and J.Lo's "American Idol" future

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Five pop culture items we missedCharlie Sheen on drugs.

1. Grizzled old man uttering profanities of the day:

Harrison Ford on Shia LaBeouf talking crap about the last “Indiana Jones” movie, “I think he was a fucking idiot.” Boom!

2. Major nerd accomplishment of the day:

Fifty thousand Lego pieces and a love of “Lord of the Rings” is what inspired Kevin Walter to create the world’s most complex model of the Dark Tower Barad-dûr. One block to rule them all?

3. Exposed Twitter (non)scandal of the day:

The reason for Lindsay’s sudden interest in the Federal Reserve? The Twitter blast was actually a sponsored message paid for by the National Inflation Association. Are there really so many people out there that look to Lindsay Lohan for financial advice? Wasn’t she just released from house arrest today for stealing a necklace?

4. American Idol holdout of the day:

What’s keeping Jennifer Lopez from re-upping her contract for Fox’s hit singing competition? I’m guessing the fear of sitting next to Skeletor Steven Tyler for another season.

5. Charlie Sheen of the day:

Sorry, folks, I know we had one of these yesterday, but Sheen just told the world he was on steroids during the filming of “Major League.” You know, that very realistic sports drama that required him to get fully in character as a drug-enhanced baseball player? Totally method, that guy.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Tuesday, Jun 14, 2011 7:15 PM UTC

“Game of Thrones” actors encounter real-life violence

Not content to keep the blood splattering on HBO, these warriors live in constant danger

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Sean Bean as Lord Eddard Stark in "Game of Thrones."

You have to be somewhat out of your mind to take on one of the bloodthirsty warmongers from HBO’s popular George R. R. Martin adaptation, “Game of Thrones.” After all, these guys wouldn’t think twice about putting their sabers between your ribs on TV, and in real life, actors like Sean Bean (who plays lead Lord Eddard Stark) and Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo) aren’t any less intimidating. So why are the actors constantly under attack?

The most recent injury occurred earlier this week when Bean was drinking at a pub in London. According to the Daily Mail, a drunk passing by made lewd comments toward the “Lord of the Rings” actor’s female drinking partner, and Bean stepped in to confront the man. Although he initially slinked away, the guy later returned and punched Bean in the face, then stabbed him in the arm with broken glass.

But because Bean is such a badass (and has his reputation to protect), the actor refused to go to a hospital, and instead ordered another round of beer. Another patron of the pub gave a quote when Bean and his lady-friend refused to comment:

“He came in with a cut on his arm and a bruise on his eyebrow. We saw to his injuries with the first aid kit. He seemed ok and wanted to have another drink.

This might be seen as an isolated incident — after all, Bean just kind of looks like a badass who could handle his way through more than a couple of drunken bar brawls — except for the fact that his costar Jason Momoa once had his face rearranged in a very similar incident back in 2008. During that November, Momoa, who at that point was best known for his roles on “Baywatch” and “Stargate: Atlantis,” was attacked by a fellow barfly in Hollywood and smashed in the face with a beer mug. Momoa required 140 stitches to repair his good looks during reconstructive surgery. (It seems to have worked, as Momoa will be playing the title role in the upcoming “Conan the Barbarian” film.)

The takeaway from all this? Maybe the fantasy warriors need to steer clear of the local drinking establishments for a while and get their daily fill of mead on-set only.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Tuesday, Jun 7, 2011 11:08 PM UTC

Five pop culture items we missed

Today's catch: Actors With Action Figures, Beyonce's new track, Pippa's triumphant return and more

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Five pop culture items we missedIan McKellen plays with dolls.

Even if you spend all day surfing the Internet, some stuff will invariably fall through the cracks. Here are five pieces of pop ephemera we managed to salvage before the day was over.

1. Song of the day: Beyoncé’s “4″ album leaked three weeks early, and our favorite track so far is “Party” with Outkast’s Andre 3000:

Beyonce – Party feat. Andre 3000 Vidéo MrMusic sélectionnée dans Musique

2. Creeping sense of your own mortality … of the day : Dakota Fanning graduates … high school.  I could have sworn she was already in college. Or was still in middle school. One of the two.

3. Tumblr of the Day: Actors With Action Figures

Stars holding a pint-size version of themselves. Both creepy and adorable.

4. New Jersey’s non-”Jersey Shore”-related item of the day: Kevin Smith is taping a reality show for AMC about his comic book store, and is looking for some new employees. Hey, they can’t be any worse actors than Randal from “Clerks.”

5. Royal news of the day: Pippa Middleton is back on the radar after getting some tea with Prince Harry. Yes! Called it!

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

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