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Middle-earth according to Mordor - The Lord of the Rings retold
- Scriptor 16y agoI really need to get around to reading this. The original LOTR did have a rather "western" bent to it. Looking at things in another way would be pretty fun. Also related: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html, if Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn watched The Fellowship of the Ring.
- hnhg 16y agoBeing non-white myself, I like to jokingly explain to anyone who will listen about how LOTR is all about racial purity and the perils of rampant immigration of brown folk. I certainly can't think of anyone good in it who is 'non-white'. I grew up on the books and I still have a soft spot for them, but I do like to make fun of this aspect of them. My other hobby is outlining the racial stereotypes in sci-fi shows/movies...
- Tycho 16y agoBut the bad guys aren't 'non-white' in any meaningful sense either, are they?
- patrickgzill 16y agoSo blacks and Indians (from India) are orcs? Who's the racist again?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nostromo 16y agoNo, not Orcs. There are men who are allied with Mordor in the books. Specifically "Haradrim", who are described as black-skinned men from the south that rode elephants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southrons#Haradrim http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southrons#Haradrim), and Easterlings, men who are described as swarthy, dark-haired, and dark-eyed from the east (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlings). I'm not saying the books are racists, but it's not a stretch to think of these people as indian and black respectively given the book's description.
- albertsun 16y agoThere's a deaded comment by nostromo here that I thought was good and don't see why it was killed. The interpretation of LotR as a book about the domination of non-white peoples is really not that much of a stretch. -- No, not Orcs. There are men who are allied with Mordor in the books. Specifically "Haradrim", men who are described as black-skinned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southrons#Haradrim http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southrons#Haradrim), and Easterlings, men who are described as swarthy, dark-haired, and dark-eyed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlings). I'm not saying the books are racists, but it's not a stretch to think of these people as indian and black respectively given the book's description.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>I'm not saying the books are racists, but it's not a stretch to think of these people as indian and black respectively given the book's description. It's a stretch because Indians and other people live on this Earth and not in some fantasy reality created by an author. Sure if you want to imagine that one species/race in the book is visually akin to a race/group/country of real humans that's fine, why would it matter. This sort of argument to me is like saying that the books stereotype elephants because the great war beast Mamulik (sp?) are elephantine. In short I think you're over analysing it, it's just a yarn.
- knowledgesale 16y agoInteresting. As an alien to English culture, I always wondered why LOTR is so popular amongst all sorts of non-conformists and bohemians. I had an impression that the essence of the book is racism and classism: how good a person is, is pretty much determined by his birthplace and pedigree. I realize that it is written in the Norse epic style, and Norse mythology is naturally pretty racist, but it still escapes me why an academic linguistic experiment got such a wide audience. Another motif, about a small guy doing things greater than himself, is nice though.
- gwern 16y ago> As an alien to English culture, I always wondered why LOTR is so popular amongst all sorts of non-conformists and bohemians. I had an impression that the essence of the book is racism and classism: how good a person is, is pretty much determined by his birthplace and pedigree. It's not just LOTR & fantasy; SF has problems of its own. I mean, there's obviously _The Iron Swastika_, which everyone knows was written explicitly as a parody. But Frank Herbert says over and over again in interviews and whatever* that in _Dune_, Paul was a terrible horrible no good thing to happen to the human race and we were not supposed to be rooting for him - but fans do anyway. Paul is supposed to be a deconstruction of the superhero myth, but instead, even the fans swallow it hook line & sinker. It's no surprise that _Dune Messiah_, which really rubs our nose in this, is one of the least popular Dune books. * He says this explicitly in 2 or 3 interviews, and repeats himself in the mini-essays on the backs of the vinyl LPs of him reading excerpts from the Dune books (which I saw today in the SF public library)
- jbm 16y agoI just finished reading the original Dune two weeks ago, so allow me to digress for a moment... How is it possible that someone could have rooted for any character /other/ than Paul in the original Dune novel? The Harkonnens were portrayed as selfish plotters who nearly bankrupted themselves to murder Paul's father. The Space Guild was mysterious and were shown as being utterly dependent on their prescience. The Bene Gesserit were complete manipulators, to the point where they created religions across the galaxy to further their political points. House Corrino was scheming with the Harkonnens. It's nice that Paul was depicted as being flawed in Dune Messiah, but his being an evil character does not follow from the original Dune, unless you take extreme care to see certain changes in his character (such as the aside about him being worried about spice equipment and ornithopters). Was someone seriously supposed to root for Duncan Idaho or the Mentats? Or the Queen/Concubine? Or were we "supposed to" wash our hands of the book and leave saying "They were all scum"?
- wooster 16y agoYou're presupposing (jokingly, of course) allegorical meaning behind the work, which Tolkien explicitly rejected. Middle Earth was meant as a foundational myth of the British Isles. A sort of stand-in for the real history. A modern-day Beowulf. If you're looking for parallels with The Real World, you might be better off comparing the war in LoTR to WWI, in which Tolkien served in combat and witnessed some of the most horrific combat in human history, caused mostly by industrial advances. It's a lot easier to see why his nostalgia might be piqued when you think of most of his peers getting mustard gassed, shelled, shot, stabbed, or otherwise dying horrific deaths.
- loxs 16y agoExactly. Just compare the map of the Middle Earth to Europe and you will see how well it fits in WWI setup. Good Little Hobbits (Britain), some humans (France, Italy), a dwarf (maybe a Scandinavian?), some Elves (Russians?) form the Good Alliance (of Christianity?) and fight against the Evil (muslim?) Empire of Mordor (Ottoman Empire) and its allies (Germany and Austria = Saruman's army?) who are traitors. And also, the good Elves of Eastern Europe migrate to America after the war, because "the world has changed".
- Symmetry 16y agoI think its actually pretty clear, given the geography, that Mordor is Germany. Depictions of Germans in WWI propaganda posters are very similar to how orcs are described.
- gmac 16y agoInteresting analogies. I always thought the most obvious sermonising was about industrialisation and the loss of an innocent rural way of life (as described here, for example: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/influences.html#indust http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/influences....)
- wyclif 16y agoNo, no, no. JRRT completely rejected the charge that his work was an allegory. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-D65evOCX4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-D65evOCX4 LOTR and The Silmarillion were not about WWII, the Bomb, or "racial purity." You are reading allegory into the stories.
- neworbit 16y agoDavid Brin wrote an interesting piece on this a few years back. I think Salon picked it up then, too. http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/index.html http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/ind...
- ddlatham 16y agoThis is an example of creative, derived work that should be enriching the public commons, when the original is quite old, by a long dead author, yet is still troubled by potential copyright claims.
- tptacek 16y agoAnd it could have been written straightforwardly as a roman-a-clef without incurring copyright hazards. The reason it wasn't is probably the reason it's at risk: marketing. It might even make for a better book that way.
- Tycho 16y agoYes, like Coral Island vs Lord of the Flies. Although I'm not against the idea of people writing in other peoples' universes, ie. fan fiction. In fact I hate the snotty attitude (seemingly) almost everyone takes towards fan-fiction: it's a win for everyone, like the literary equivalent of forking open-source software, but it's never encouraged.
- tptacek 16y ago"Literal" retellings of stories can be jarring; everything needs to sync up or you get stuck on the details that are wrong (like, apparently, "no hobbits"). And, especially with nerd fiction, figuring out who the characters are can be fun.
- makmanalp 16y agoSlight tangent: Here's a secret about forking. When you fork a project, you anger the loyalists. A lot of large open source projects fork because of deep disagreements / polarization within the team. For minor stuff, it usually just gets settled internally. If the project does get forked, it usually ends with either the original project dying or the fork dying. I can't recall any projects off the top of my head that were forked and both the fork and original remained successful.
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- twp 16y agoThis is a really interesting idea but the text itself really needs to be adapted by a native English speaker. I really wanted to plunge into the book, but it's barely readable. Here are the first two sentences of the second paragraph, a typical example of the book's style: > It was at such a midnight hour that two men moved like gray shadows along the gravelly inner edge of a sickle-shaped gap between two low dunes, and the distance between them was exactly that prescribed by the Field Manual for such occasions. However, contrary to the rules, the one bearing the largest load was not the rear ‘main force’ private, but rather the ‘forward recon’ one, but there were good reasons for that. It's probably brilliant in Russian, but an English speaker has to unravel and reconstruct each sentence. It makes for heavy going. I say this not to negatively criticise, but simply to warn readers hoping to discover a fantastic interpretation of an epic tale. A future translation, I am sure, will make for brilliant reading.
- Swizec 16y agoThat reads a lot like a NaNoWriMo novel. Many many word padding and abuse of the 'the'. However, one should not that the original LOTR was written by a linguist. As such it tended to be pretty wordy and often full of horribly complex sentence structures. For example: > That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to silver and glass, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.
- jbri 16y agoThe difference is that Tolkein's words flow naturally, while the ones here are more forced - the translation appears to mangle the English to fit exactly what is said in the source text, leaving it feeling rather awkward. Tolkein's sentences, regardless of how complex, just "work" in English - A similar "transliteration" of Tolkein into Russian or whatever would likely feel as obtuse as this does.
- georgecmu 16y agoAbusing 'the' is a pretty typical Russian error. Russian has no articles, and rules for using them in English are hard to formalize.
- georgecmu 16y agoFor whatever reason, Tolkien had a huge following in Russia. At least one fantasy writer [1] made a career writing LOTR sequels. Eskov himself is actively blogging on Livejournal [2]. [1] http://www.perumov.com/books/ [2] http://afranius.livejournal.com/132382.html
- ringm 16y agoOne of the most important factors in popularity of a foreign work in Russia is a good translation which does not try to be too literal. Muraviev and Kistyakovsky did a great job with LOTR. Another reason is that this translation was published in late 80s, when the Russian public was particularly receptive to anything spiritual and/or capable of carrying them away from the grim reality of a collapsing country.
- fedd 16y agoPerumov also was one of the first who tried to depict orcs in a more human way, and elves were mostly arrogant high-class snobs. really like during perestroika when the "free Western nations" suddenly learned that Russians love their children too
- Flemlord 16y agoHarry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has been mentioned many times on HN but is worth mentioning again. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
- kmfrk 16y agoAnd again, and again, and again. You don't have to be a Harry Potter nor science and philosophy geek; it's accessible and thrilling to everyone.
- AdamTReineke 16y agoAnd if you read it a while ago, there is a good chance the author has added more chapters!
- klbarry 16y agoThe problem with this book, of course, is that it ignores the lore Tolkien shares in the Silmarillion, his letters, and other books regarding the origin of Sauron and Orcs.
- rsaarelm 16y agoMaybe the idea of the new book was to point out that you can read LotR and Silmarillion as myths and histories written in-universe, instead of an objective and reliable narrative. Suddenly all sorts of things might be slanted to make the winners of the war look good and noble and paint those who opposed them as beastly savages.
- michaeldhopkins 16y agoThis sort of thing is fun, but it sounds more simplistic than Tolkien's universe and philosophies. I will read it with interest. Can someone comment as to the quality of the Russian version?
- ak1394 16y agoIt's absolutely brilliant. I especially like that it doesn't try to simply re-tell the LOTR from a different point of view, but changes aesthetics of the story as well. While LOTR is 'an epic saga', 'The Last Ringbearer' reads more like an historical account. BTW, the russian text is freely available as well: http://lib.ru/PROZA/ESKOV_K/last.txt http://lib.ru/PROZA/ESKOV_K/last.txt
- Semiapies 16y agoSo, instead of a bourgeois tale of an epic fight against evil forces threatening a dubiously idealized analogue of a society that no longer exists, it's a socialist tale of an epic fight against evil forces threatening a dubiously idealized analogue of a society that no longer exists?
- DTrejo 16y agoLink to download the book: http://www.sendspace.com/file/a75r7u http://www.sendspace.com/file/a75r7u
- DjDarkman 16y agoJust like hearing the story of World War [1-2] from different sides.
- fedd 16y agojust like hearing the story of the Cold War from different sides
- regehr 16y agoIf you can forget the silly musical, _Wicked_ was a pretty awesome book along these same lines.
- rapicastillo 16y agocool. This is like the Middle Earth's Der Untergang (The Downfall)
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoIf you enjoy the retelling of popular stories from a different perspective, one of the best I've read is Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar. Superman lands in the USSR, is raised as a communist, becomes the villain, Lex Luthor is the hero in America trying to outwit the communist supervillian, Batman is a freedom fighter... I shall say no more, but check it out if you're a nerd like me.
- indrax 16y agoYou may also enjoy: The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster http://cheeseburgerbrown.com/Darth_Vader/ http://cheeseburgerbrown.com/Darth_Vader/
- dawson 16y agoThis kind of opportunity doesn't come around often on HN, so for the sake of karma, I have two big Tolkien related sites http://planet-tolkien.com http://planet-tolkien.com and http://the-hobbit-movie.com/ http://the-hobbit-movie.com/ for anyone interested :)
- wooster 16y agoIt's unlikely they'd infringe on Tolkien's copyrights, at least in the US: Tolkien was re-editing because in that year, Ace Books in the United States published an unauthorised edition. The Fellowship came out in May 1965, the other two volumes in July. 150,000 copies were printed of each volume! The main text was reset, and introduced new errors, but the appendices were reproduced photographically, and thus contained only the errors already there. Ace Books were exploiting a copyright loophole which meant they did not have to pay Tolkien or his publishers any royalties. Houghton Mifflin appears to have imported too many copies, and the notice they contain, 'Printed in Great Britain' meant that the texts were deemed to be in the public domain in the United States. http://www.tolkiensociety.com/tolkien/tale.html http://www.tolkiensociety.com/tolkien/tale.html
- Graham24 16y agoAnyone read Bored of the Rings?
- bane 16y agoSounds like what Grendel is to Beowulf, which is a good thing.