#100 Fri (9/30/22) - Kirill Eskov and The Last Ringbearer

Why I reimagined "LOTR" from Mordor's perspective 

Kirill Yeskov explains what led him to write "The Last Ringbearer," his parallel version of Tolkien's classic

 It’s unlikely that anyone will devote any serious effort to analyzing the ecosystem of a barren desert populated by train-sized predatory worms that eat excavators and sweat psychedelics: fantasy is fantasy. Not so the Middle Earth; the developed perfection of Tolkien’s world quite impels one to conduct natural history studies of it, sometimes provocatively so. This invites another comparison, however strange at first blush, between Tolkien and Yefremov.

Tolkien was a practicing scientist, too, but a linguist rather than a natural scientist like Yefremov, so the foundation of professional knowledge he had used to erect Middle Earth was different. It is fairly obvious to me that the game the Oxford professor decided to play with nature began, in essence, with the creation of imaginary languages, with their own alphabets and grammar. Then he created the epic tales to match those languages, then the peoples who wrote those tales, and only then the steppes, mountains, and forests for those people to pasture their herds, build citadels, and battle the "Dark from the East." This, precisely, was the sequence: "In the beginning was the Word" – Ainur’s music, pure and simple. Truly an excellent model of the Act of Creation!

However, Tolkien the philologist had obviously had a very weak interest in this last, non-living component of Middle Earth – its physical geography – and created it only because he had to, with predictable results. It is a well-known fact that the Professor had painstakingly verified, to the day, the lunar phases during his heroes’ long quest. I believe that, but the problem is that he had overlooked some much more significant elements of the local natural history background.

The Middle Earth has several built-in physical defects, and there’s no getting away from that. In his well-known essay "Must Fantasy Be Stupid?" Pereslegin provides a detailed classification of errors commonly committed by fantasy authors. He uses Tolkien’s work as an example of one of them, an "irreversible professional error": "It occurs in a geologically unstable world. Tolkien, being a professor of English Literature, knew nothing of plate tectonics, while the topography of Beleriand and Eriador are highly important to the story; therefore, it seems impossible to fix the author’s mistake."

 ...

If Middle Earth is as real as our world, it must be as infinitely varied. It must have a myriad of aspects that Tolkien had not covered as not worthy of his attention. For example, any mention of economics is as missing from his romantic world as sex was supposedly missing in the USSR – but how likely is one to find any such mundane matters in the knightly romances of our world? It seems quite justified to me to assume that the Middle Earth population, aside from battling the Dark Lord and his minions, also plowed, reaped, traded, robbed, etc. The heroic hobbits on their quest did not subsist only on herbs, rabbits, and Elvish breads – they also drank beer in taverns, and one has to pay for beer. (I mean, one doesn’t have to, really, but that would make for a criminal rather than a knightly novel.) Trick question: what coin did they use? Right – the Professor made no mention of that.

This question regarding Middle Earth currency (which I often used to stump Tolkien experts) has served as the departure point for a whole series of conclusions. Take Rohan, for example: What was its population’s occupation? "The best horses in Middle Earth" are all nice and fine, but horse-breeding can in no way be the mainstay of an economy. Or take the Dark Lord’s countless hordes: What did they eat in the desert of Mordor – jackrabbits? We’ve all read Lev Gumilev and have some idea about the logistics of expansion. In general, how can there be a capital city smack in the middle of a desert? That just doesn’t happen… but actually, it does happen! Cities in the desert – that’s the perished city civilizations of Sahelian Africa. Once the "Atlantic optimum" was over, Sahara began encroaching on the savannah, and that was the end of them. Actually, sorry – this isn’t LOTR any more, but rather "The Last Ring-bearer"!

And if the world of Middle Earth is real, then so are its people. If all those Aragorns and Faramirs are not "dramatis personae" but real people who figure in the epochal tales of the North-western peoples (which tales Professor Tolkien had then collected and adapted), then there can be a variety of opinions concerning their deeds. This is something we’re quite familiar with in our own world: in alternative opinions Richard the III comes out a most noble man who had paid for his nobleness with both his crown, his head, and posthumous reputation to boot, whereas Joanne of Arc turns out to have been a sadistic psychopath who belonged on the auto-da-fe pyre like few others… 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…