The Last Ringbearer: Epilogue
May. 27th, 2024 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
masterghandalfThis is a crosspost from Das_Sporking2. Previous installments of this spork may be found here.
Warning: This post contains elements that touch on aspects of real world history and culture; reminding everyone to be cautious and respectful in the comments.
MG: Well, everyone, it’s time to continue our journey through Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer! Last time… whew. The White Council showed up again for the first time since the start of the fic, Saruman showed back up for the first time since the start of the fic and took the White Council back over, Haladdin and Tzerlag made it to Mount Doom off-page, Saruman tried to talk Haladdin out of his mission by casting doubts of Sharya-Rana’s theories and bringing up a prophecy that had never been mentioned before, it was all for nothing as Haladdin ended up destroying the Palantir to save Tzerlag anyway, Lorien got nuked, the magic went away, the surviving elves just… stopped being elves, and we had our “happy” ending. Yikes. Today… we’re done with the actual story part of the fic, but the epilogue will give a historical survey of events following The Last Ringbearer, which will mostly serve to vindicate Haladdin and make it clear that Middle-earth’s history totally follows from TLR, not LotR. Joining us once again will be Havaktri!
Before we start the epilogue, there’s something I’d like to note about it. Namely, that you’d think Yeskov would be interested in exploring the appendices. After all, while we’ll get a bit more to what the Red Book of Westmarch (Tolkien’s “source” for LotR, going by the conceit that the Legendarium is a set of ancient texts “discovered” and “translated” by Professor Tolkien) actually is later on, the appendices actually are in-universe academic texts, “official histories” if you will (most obviously, “Annals of the Kings and Rulers,” “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” and “The Tale of Years,” which collectively make up LotR’s Appendix I and II). I know Yeskov’s read the appendices, because he talks about things like Castamir and the Kin-Strife, and you’d think that he’d be especially motivated to deconstruct them, since the whole premise of this fic is, supposedly, that LotR represents history as written by the “winning” side and he wants to show the story from the “losing” side’s perspective. You would be wrong. Yeskov ignores the appendices entirely, to the point that Middle-earth’s history in the Fourth Age seems to go in a completely different direction from what they indicate, and the fates of multiple characters are radically different from what they were in the source material, with not the slightest effort made to explain why. Yay. But we’re automatically getting five points in two counters just for this.
Mixed-up Mythos: 229
Take That, Tolkien!: 69
Epilogue
“What will History say?” “History, sir, will lie – as always.” Bernard Shaw
Havaktri: Well, that seems rather cynical, though perhaps not untrue… although, if “history” is to lie, would that not also imply that Last Ringbearer is a lie as well? I mean, it is a history – not an official history, but a history nonetheless! And that quote does not make any such distinction…
Dare to err and to dream. Friedrich Schiller
Havaktri: I can certainly say that a great many errors have been made here! But I would kindly ask that dreams be left out of this, please… for personal reasons…
MG: Per the endnotes: “The format of this chapter, written from the standpoint of an imaginary modern Gondorian revisionist historian, is intended to cast the entire work as an alternative history written in the real Arda, where The Lord of the Rings is the accepted “mainstream” version of actual historical events. See Appendix II for more details.” Appendix II being Yeskov’s account of why he wrote TLR, keep a pin in that for later. As for the rest… keep it in mind as we read the epilogue. The endnotes also note that the Shaw quote is from The Devil’s Apprentice and the Schiller quote is from Thekla. Why these attributions weren’t made in the quotes themselves, I couldn’t tell you.
Our narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag’s detailed tales, however incomplete, that are preserved by his clan as an oral tradition.
Havaktri: I beg your pardon? Tzerlag has been our narrator this entire time? But… but… there were large stretches of the story he wasn’t even present for! How did he know about things that happened in Umbar or Lorien, or anything else he wasn’t there for? Why did he care about historical surveys or Mordor’s weather patterns or what the Umbaran secret service was called? How does this make sense?
MG: So… yeah. I know most of you commenting have been running with the idea that Haladdin is our narrator. And I haven’t corrected you because, well… he does make the most sense! He’s the main character, he’s an academic… compiling his own history of the War as he experienced it would indeed be the logical choice! But nope, it’s Tzerlag! Who, as Havaktri notes, was barely in the story for some long, very important stretches! And has no way to know most of it, know reason to care about most of it, and the story is written in a completely different style from what you’d expect from something preserved in oral tradition! But that’s what we’re going with nonetheless. Aren’t you so surprised?
It should be stressed that we have no documents that might attest to their veracity.
Havaktri: Which would seem to be quite a mark against their veracity, if every other account of the war is completely different!
The person who might have been expected to leave the most thorough account – Haladdin – had recorded not a word on the subject; the other participants in the hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror – Tangorn and Kumai – remained silent for obvious reasons.
Havaktri: The hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror? Beg pardon, but everyone knew exactly where the Mirror was, and they weren’t trying to take it, they were trying to get a Palantir to it so they could both be destroyed! Which also makes me think… Lorien was destroyed, entirely. How, then, did anyone have access to information on Kumai’s fate, or accounts of the Star Council’s meetings in its last days? *whispering* I think someone may have been making things up…
Therefore, whoever would like to declare the whole thing to be the old- age demented ravings of an Orc who wanted to recast the finale of the War of the Ring is free to do so with clear conscience. After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans turn their losses into victories after the fact.
Havaktri: That seems like a very narrow definition of “memoir!” What about memoirs that weren’t written by veterans, or aren’t about defeats? I think this person needs to be more open minded!
MG: And, as for leaving the audience free to make up their own minds… well, our nameless narrator is about to give us an exhaustive rundown about why we should believe this account, so methinks they protest too much. And strap in.
On the other hand, those who consider this story to be, if not a true, then at least a plausible version of history, might be interested in certain events outside its immediate time frame.
Havaktri: Aha! I am beginning to think our narrator wants to take sides without admitting they’re taking sides! *beat* I don’t think it’s working…
Tzerlag related that he had accompanied Haladdin from Orodruin to Ithilien; the doctor seemed very ill and didn’t say ten words in a row throughout the journey. On one of their stops the sergeant fell in a sleep so deep that he woke up only by next evening, nauseous and with a monster headache. Instead of his comrade he found the mithril mail by his side, with a farewell letter wrapped in it. Haladdin wrote that Middle Earth was now free from the Elvish menace and that in his capacity as the commanding officer of the operation he thanked the sergeant for excellent service and awarded him the precious armor.
MG: You know, Frodo and Sam’s final parting in the last chapter of LotR is such an incredibly powerful, bittersweet moment, one that almost always manages to make me tear up a little bit. An incredibly poignant end to the story, and to the relationship between the two characters. Haladdin and Tzerlag’s final parting… takes place off-page and is related to us secondhand. But TLR is totally the deeper, more complex, and more emotionally real version of the story, everyone!
Elven Brutality: 233
As for the doctor himself, regretfully he had “paid such a price for victory as to see no place for himself among people.” Those words led the scout to fear the worst, but fortunately, the hunch did not pan out: judging by his tracks, Haladdin had simply reached the Ithilien highway and took it to points south.
MG: And here we have yet another point in the idea that Haladdin is meant to parallel Frodo. Except, you know, Tolkien went out of his way to show us Frodo’s trauma building over the course of LotR, and we actually got to see Frodo trying – and failing – to return to his old life after returning to the Shire. Seeing Haladdin’s similar reaction just summarized in a paragraph like this… need I even say that it’s not even a fraction as effective?
Interestingly, a few years ago a certain light-minded doctoral student at the Umbar University’s Medieval History Department took this legend at face value and invested the effort to comb the account books of several Eastern monasteries, which have been keeping records for the last fifteen hundred years with an unnatural meticulousness. Guess what – the smart aleck did unearth a very curious coincidence: in January 3020 (by the then current calendar) an Umbarian-looking man did join the Gurwan Aren cave monastery in the mountains of North Vendotenia.
Havaktri: Excuse me, but didn’t we previously establish that Umbar is a melting pot? So how does “an Umbaran looking man” actually count as a meaningful description?
MG: No idea, but that Haladdin looks Umbaran is one of the only things we ever learn about his appearance, so clearly it means something even if we have no idea what. Maybe he just dresses and acts like a stereotypical pirate all the time, a detail our “revisionist historian” left out because he felt it might lower the dignity of the work.
The new monk took an oath of silence and donated an inoceramium ring to the monastery. This led the student to make (to quote the minutes of the departmental meeting) “a hasty, unfounded, and completely unscientific claim of identity of the said monk and the legendary Haladdin.” Naturally, the doctoral committee administered a proper tongue-lashing to the wannabe ghost-hunter, so that the young man forswore departures from his approved dissertation topic and has been dutifully dusting clay fragments from the garbage piles of Khand’s Seventh Dynasty ever since.
MG: *flatly* Because academia exists solely to support the status quo and goes out of its way to bury anyone who tries to tell the truth. Ha. Ha. Aren’t we all laughing so hard? But I do have to wonder… what was this guy’s dissertation supposed to be on? A doctoral dissertation is a full-length book. If literally all he had to say was “a monk thousands(?) of years ago allegedly had an inoceramium ring and therefore must have been the same person as Haladdin” and nothing else – that’s not dissertation material! It’s barely term paper material! No wonder his committee wasn’t happy with him!
As for the real Haladdin, his name can be found in any university course on history of science – as an example of the dangers of sudden leaps forward – rather than physiology, his life’s work. His brilliant studies of nerve tissue function had been so far ahead of his time as to fall out of scientific context and be forgotten. Only three centuries later did the medics of the Ithilien School come across his works accidentally while searching for ancient antidote recipes. It became clear then that Haladdin had beaten the famous Vespuno by more than a hundred years; not only did he prove experimentally the electric nature of axon stimulation, but he also predicted the existence of neurotransmitters, and even modeled how they should work. Unfortunately, only historians are interested in the ‘who was there first’ kind of things; the scientific community has no use for this information. In any event Haladdin’s last known work is dated year 3016 of the Third Age and the official version is that he perished during the War of the Ring.
Havaktri: Well, that is… marginally interesting, but I’m unsure what purpose it serves, save to prove that, in Yeskov’s view, Haladdin was a man so far ahead of his time none of his contemporaries could possibly appreciate him? That seems rather excessive… nor does it seem quite right that the “scientific community” has no use for this knowledge, but then, I am but a simple monk and not a scientist…
The Dung Ages: 96
Let’s go back to Tzerlag, whose historicity is beyond doubt. As is known, the occupation of Mordor ended suddenly and inexplicably by the winter of 3020, and life there started slowly getting back to normal. The city population had suffered tremendous losses (strictly speaking, the Mordorian civilization had not fully recovered since then), but the nomads have mostly avoided those tribulations.
MG: The “occupation of Mordor” which did not happen (at least not as Yeskov describes it) in canon, and which we were introduced to in this fic specifically involving the massacre of a nomad camp? But surely, the nomads didn’t really suffer – they were just being brutally murdered and raped as part of an attempted genocide, but they got over it! /s But, as we’ll see here, the epilogue may be presented as a “work of revisionist history” for taking TLR’s account seriously… but it also acts like a bunch of TLR’s basic premises, including the historical existence of its major characters, are established fact, so… yeah, it’s hard not to see Yeskov stacking the deck here.
The sergeant used to say that a real man whose hands are attached properly (rather than to his butt) will come out on top whatever the situation, and proved this maxim with his entire life.
Havaktri: A man whose hands are attached to his butt? *she gasps* How horrifying! One must wonder what sort of experiments with nerve tissue Doctor Haladdin was performing and Tzerlag was privy to… Also, alas, I must say that no matter how practical and resourceful you are, sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where you can’t win… that’s just how the world is, sometimes…
After returning to his home grounds, he ended up the founder of a large and powerful clan, which had preserved the tale of his journeys in its oral tradition, as is customary with nomadic peoples.
MG: So, see, it doesn’t matter that Tzerlag’s family were killed in the “mop-up” early on in the fic, because he just… went and founded a better family, apparently! And I still don’t think TLR reads like something that was initially translated through oral tradition. For one thing, it’s prose; works that were originally translated orally are often (though not always) in poetry (I’ve seen it theorized that poetry was originally invented for long-term oral transmission, since it’s easier to commit to memory than prose; certainly, some of the oldest surviving texts in the world are poems or songs that were originally transmitted orally before being written down much later). For another, I’m sure Tzerlag’s new clan just loved hearing about the technical details of how the Umbar secret service works, or Tangorn and Alviss’s relationship woes, or getting the minutes from Lorien’s Star Council meetings that Tzerlag knew about… somehow. And I’m still not sure how this puts Tzerlag’s “historicity beyond doubt.” The thing about oral traditions by their nature is that texts will almost certainly pass through the hands of many, many bards and storytellers before being eventually written down, still developing as it goes. Just because this saga is attributed to someone named “Tzerlag” doesn’t mean much; Homer probably wasn’t a real person, either (and there’s no reason to think he would have much resembled the traditions that sprang up around him even if he was).
Incidentally, the fate of the other sergeant, Runcorn, was almost the same as Tzerlag’s, aside from the fact that the ex-ranger lived on the other side of the Mountains of Shadow in the valley of the Otter Creek, rather than on the Morgai plateau. The hamlet he built under a strange name Lianica had grown into a regular village in only five years. When his little son found Ithilien’s first gold nugget in the creek’s gravel bed while fishing, the neighbors only shrugged: money always attracts money. Had he and the Orocuen met in their old age, undoubtedly they would have put their Mirkwood debates on the comparative advantages of dark beer and kumiss to a practical test, but it was not to be.
Havaktri: *blankly* Did… did we really need a whole paragraph on Runcorn’s fate? I mean, we only knew him for a couple of chapters, and he wasn’t very interesting… but of course, he happened to found his own village, and his son happened to find gold, so I suppose being a character in this story has its advantages?
Tzerlag had decided to return the mithril coat to Haladdin’s girl together with the tale of his vanished friend’s heroic achievement. But Kumai had perished, and the scout himself knew nothing of the girl beside the name Sonya (very common among Trolls) and vague knowledge of her participation in the Resistance, so all his efforts to locate her failed. The despairing Orocuen then decided that he and his clan were the keepers rather than the owners of the artifact; the nomads’ punctiliousness in such matters is truly without limit. The sergeant’s great-great-grandson ended up donating it (together with the associated headaches) to the Núrnen History Museum, where anyone can see it today together with the other relics of the mysterious Mordorian civilization.
Havaktri: But… we were just told that Mordor’s civilization survived, if reduced, to the present day, and the occupation lasted less than a year, so… what is so mysterious about it? Surely Tzerlag wasn’t the only person of that era to pass down his experiences, especially if the “Orocuen” escaped mostly intact? Does Mordor not have its own continuous traditions about its own history? How dreadful, if so!
At this point the apologist for the legend might say: “Aha! Isn’t the coat of mail proof enough for you?” The grave and absolutely correct answer would be that the coat proves nothing even within Tzerlag’s narrative, since Haladdin had obtained it before receiving the nazgúl’s ring.
MG: Well, again, from an out-of-universe perspective, Yeskov has clearly established that a bunch of people he made up are historically documented figures in this version of Middle-earth, and that events seem to have been broadly agreed to take place the way TLR said they did…
By the way, concerning mithril … There is a total of four such coats of mail in the museums of Arda, but the technology of their manufacture remains a mystery. If you want your metallurgist friend to throw something heavy at your head, ask him about this alloy. It’s been analyzed to death: 86% silver, 12% nickel, plus trace amounts of nine rare metals from vanadium to niobium; they can measure these proportions to the ninth digit after the decimal, X-ray its structure, and do a myriad other things, except reproduce it. Some say (not without a trace of mockery) that the old masters would supposedly forever invest a fraction of their souls in each batch of mithril, and since today there are no souls, but only the ‘objective reality perceived by our senses,’ by definition we have no chance to obtain true mithril.
Havaktri: “The objective reality perceived by our senses?” What a dour and disturbing notion! And an arrogant one, to presume that human senses alone are capable of encompassing all that exists in the vast cosmos; as a writer from your world once observed, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!
MG: Per the endnotes, it’s “a Marxist definition of matter.” Which apparently made it into Middle-earth, despite a distinct lack of Marx, but whatever (and no, this isn’t an invitation to discuss Marx himself or the validity of his theories in the comments, if you were tempted). More to the point, canon has a perfectly reasonable explanation for mithril’s rarity. There’s only one place in Middle-earth it could be mined, and that was Moria. And sleeping at the bottom of the mithril vein was a freaking balrog, who, when he woke up, drove the dwarves out of Moria! Even the orcs who moved in later didn’t dare mine more mithril, though they gathered up all the mithril the dwarves had already mined to sell it to Mordor. Moria would supposedly be resettled by dwarves under Durin VII, according to in-universe prophecy, but that hadn’t happened yet so far as the canonical timeline goes. Per some of Tolkien’s other writings, there may have also been mithril veins in Numenor and Aman, but those were obviously not accessible to the people of Middle-earth as of the late Third and early Fourth Ages. So, nothing to do with souls, mithril ore is just rare, naturally.
Age of Anachronisms: 182 (why is a scholar in Middle-earth quoting a Marxist theory?)
Mixed-up Mythos: 230
The most recent attempt at a solution had been undertaken by the smart guys at the Arnor Center for High Technologies with a special grant from Angmar Aerospace. It all came to naught: the grantor was presented with a plate of some alloy two millimeters thick (86.12% silver, 11.96% nickel, and so forth) and told that this was real mithril and everything else was just legends. As usual, the smart guys then asked for another grant to study this creation of theirs. Without blinking an eye the boss of the rocket men produced a loaded museum crossbow from under his executive desk, aimed it at the project leader and suggested that he protect himself with his plate – if it holds, you get your money, if it doesn’t, you won’t need it. Unsurprisingly, that was the end of the project. I have no idea whether this actually happened, but those who know the CEO of Angmar Aerospace well insist that the joke would be quite in his taste – not for naught does he trace his lineage from the Witch-king.
Havaktri: *blankly* But… I thought this fic’s version of the Witch-king was a Mordorian general who doesn’t seem to have come from anywhere near Angmar? But now there’s an actual Witch-king? Did he somehow split in two, posthumously, and go back in time to create his own legend? Remarkable, if true!
MG: Beats me. I’m not sure if the Witch-king was a mythologized take on the Commander South (not sure where the Angmar connection for a Mordorian general came from, if so) or if he was an unrelated historical or legendary figure who later got combined with the Commander South (which, if true, considering the vast gulf in time and space between the two, seems a bit like if an official history of World War II had maintained that Erwin Rommel was actually an undead Hannibal Barca, resurrected by Nazi occultism and bound to serve the Third Reich – and people bought it and it became the accepted take). Also, I’ve now had to read the phrase “Angmar Aerospace” (I guess Angmar does still exist!) and now you have, too.
The deal with inoceramium that supposedly served to make the rings of the Nazgúl is much simpler, and the reason people don’t often see it is obvious. This metal of the platinum group is not only extremely rare in Arda’s crust (4 x 108 atoms; compare gold at 5 x 107 or iridium at 1 x 107 atoms) – unlike the other platinoids it is never found scattered, but only in large nuggets. You can figure out the probability of finding one such yourself. Actually, not too long ago a nugget weighing a fantastic 87 ounces was found in Kigvali mines in South Harad; the headline in the local paper was Find of the Century – Six Pounds of Inoceramium Would Make Enough Rings for a Platoon of Nazgúl. This metal has absolutely no unusual properties other than its density (higher than osmium).
But enough about metals.
Havaktri: Thank il-Yannah!
MG: Yeah, I really don’t see what’s gained from giving us the exact technical specs of various magical materials and people’s attempts to synthesize them. On the other hand, this seems to be the time to talk about something that’s going on in this epilogue, and why I think it undermines itself. As I’ve mentioned before, Tolkien always maintained that Arda was meant to be our earth in a distant, mythological past, so long ago it survives into our history only as distorted scraps of legend. Yeskov’s Arda, on the other hand, is a parallel version of Earth, with an entirely separate history and development. As we see here, Fourth Age Middle-earth in Yeskov’s take has developed into a “modern” technological society, parallel to our earth’s modern society. This obviously didn’t happen in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and indeed, Tolkien himself was said to have noted that our era is probably the Sixth Age, by Middle-earth’s calendar. I don’t know if Yeskov changed this deliberately, or if he just missed it, but either way, his Arda is a fundamentally different kind of thing from Tolkien’s, which makes it very hard for me to take it seriously as supposedly occupying the same universe, and a bit like if I stumbled onto an analysis of the Homeric epics in their historical context that described a history taking an entirely different course after the Trojan War than the one we know, perhaps culminating in offhandedly mentioning the Romans sending a mission to the Moon, all presented completely earnestly and as something everyone knows. Maybe this won’t bug other people as much as me… but it does bug me, a lot.
Mixed-up Mythos: 231
And speaking of things that bug me, it’s time to find out what became of Alviss and Tangorn’s kid! It’s… special.
Alviss never married. She dwelt in self-imposed isolation in her Jasper Street mansion, dedicating her life to raising the son she bore at the appropriate time after those events.
Havaktri: I’m glad she bore her son at the appropriate time. Imagine if she’d borne him at the inappropriate time! What a nightmare!
This boy grew up to be none other than Commodore Amengo – the one whose voyages are universally considered to have ushered in the era of great geographical discoveries. The Commodore had left behind the maps of the shore of a new continent that was to bear his name, wonderful (in a literary sense) travel notes, and a long train of broken hearts – none of which brought him any marital happiness. Aside from the great western continent (which was long believed to be the legendary Far West, with resultant attempts to discern Elvish features in its aborigines), Amengo’s list of discoveries includes a small tropical archipelago which he had deservedly named Paradise. The name was changed later by the Holy Church (the local girls looked like the living, breathing houranies as portrayed by the godawful Hakimian heresy), but the two biggest islands of the archipelago, whose shapes closely resemble the yin-yang symbol, have managed to keep the names given them by the discoverer: Alviss and Tangorn.
MG: So… yeah. First off, and by far the more minor issue, is that Yeskov seems to have located the Age of Discovery in Arda as taking place immediately after the War of the Ring. Which just adds to the feel that he was presenting Middle-earth as being a late medieval/early modern type setting, when canonically the late Third Age is more inspired by the early medieval period and some from the ancient world. And, with that out of the way… yeah. Tangorn and Alviss’s son is fantasy Christopher Columbus. Like… he couldn’t be more obviously an expy of Columbus (with a bit of Amerigo Vespucci mixed in). And, like the real Columbus, he seems to have ushered in a global wave of colonialism and conquest. This is presented entirely uncritically; with the native peoples he encountered existing solely to be exoticized and fetishized. Perhaps, from another author, I’d have let this slide… but I remember the depiction of the “savage” Haradrim. And the elves (whatever’s left of them seems to have entirely vanished from this “history” – perfect genocide, accomplished). And the basic premise that Mordor was a unique and special civilization that should have grown to dominate the world with its obviously superior culture before those damned elves and wizards messed everything up… yeah, I’m not inclined to cut Yeskov any slack here. And it certainly makes any claims that this work is in any way anti-imperialist ring hollow at best.
Not So Magnificent: 51
By my lights the famous seafarer had immortalized his parents’ names in the best possible way.
Havaktri: Hmmm; I somehow doubt whoever lived on or near those islands before, and doubtless had their own names for them, much appreciated his gesture…
Nevertheless, the love story of the Umbarian courtesan and the Gondorian aristocrat had been a favorite topic of writers ever since. For some reason these people either turn the protagonists into disembodied romantic ghosts or else reduce everything to primitive erotica. Alas, the recent Amengian screen version – The Spy and The Whore – is no exception: it was rightfully rated XXX in Gondorian theaters and banned outright in puritanical Angmar. The movie’s artistic merits are scant, but it’s totally politically correct: Alviss is black (excuse me – Haradi-Amengian), and the relationship between Tangorn and Grager has distinct gay overtones. The critics predicted as one man that the judges of the Silver Harbors Film Festival would protect themselves from the charges of racism, sexism, and other horrible ‘isms’ by throwing every conceivable award at it, which is exactly what happened. In any event, the inimitable Gunun-Tua’s Golden Elanor for Best Actress was well-deserved.
Havaktri: …what. I just… I can make no sense of this!
MG: I can, sort of. For one, do note the completely-out-of-left-field swipe at “political correctness.” It has absolutely nothing to do with anything the story, or the epilogue, is about, but Yeskov clearly felt the need to work it in somewhere, and it doesn’t help the impression I’ve gotten throughout this book of being written by a ranting internet dudebro with opinions. And of course, even if our “historian” praises the actress’s performance (uh, I think) he still takes a swipe at casting a black actress as Alviss – because we mustn’t forget that even though she’s Umbaran and Yeskov’s Umbar is a racially diverse melting pot, he still went out of his way to make sure we all knew Tangorn’s love interest was a blonde, blue-eyed white woman. And I have my doubts about this movie sweeping the awards, however “politically correct” it may be (and XXX rated “primitive erotica” titled The Spy and the Whore doesn’t sound like something that would be considered very “politically correct” in any case). I’m reminded of an observation I’ve seen in various places about the Caligula movie – that it tried to be both a serious sword-and-sandal historical epic and a porno, and ended up failing to appeal to anyone because it had too much historical drama for people who were there for porn, and too much porn for people who were there for history. I somehow expect that this movie had a similar problem. And the bit about Tangorn and Grager feels like a swipe at slash fic, too. Maybe, if Tangorn and Grager and their relationship were developed enough to feel like they’d merit shipping, I might actually care.
Almandin and Yakudze were hanged in the courtyard of the Ar-Horan prison on one of the exhaustingly muggy August nights of 3019; along with them were executed Flag Captain Makarioni and seven other naval officers that had led the ‘Admiral Carnero’s mutiny.’ That was the post factum description of Operation Sirocco, during which the admiral first destroyed the entire Gondorian invasion fleet right at the piers in a pre-emptive strike, and then landed a raiding party which burned Pelargir shipyards to the ground. To save face, Aragorn had to sign the Dol Amroth Compact. By its terms Umbar did acknowledge itself “an inseparable part of the Reunited Kingdom,” but got itself permanent free city status in return. Its Senate was renamed to ‘magistrate council’ and its army to ‘garrison;’ Special Envoy Alkabir, who represented the Republic, even managed to wangle a special provision banning His Majesty’s Secret Guard from operating in its territory. To the mutual satisfaction of the king of Gondor and Umbarian senators, Admiral Carnero’s raid was declared to have been a banal pirate foray, its participants deserters and traitors who had forsaken their military oath and officer’s honor.
Havaktri: Oh, the two people whose names I could barely keep straight and whose personalities felt entirely interchangeable died! *beat* How terrible! …I think!
MG: Yeah, wasn’t it just so worth it to follow their misadventures chasing Tangorn down across a whole Part, only for it to fail to amount to anything and then they got a bridge dropped on them in the epilogue? For some context, the endnotes have this to say: ““Operation Sirocco … destroyed the entire Gondorian invasion fleet right at the piers” – a reference to Sir Walter Raleigh’s raid on the Second Spanish Armada at Cadiz.” But I have to say, speaking as an American, the idea of a major power heading off a theorized attack from another major power by launching a surprise attack on a naval base intended to preemptively destroy their fleet brings a rather different event to mind… a day that will live in infamy, if you will. And that incident didn’t, in fact, work to the advantage of the country that launched the attack… perhaps something Umbar should have considered…
Of course, the people viewed Carnero’s co-conspirators (the admiral avoided court- martial by getting himself killed at Pelargir) as heroes who had saved their Motherland from foreign enslavement, but the fact remained that they had gone against orders. The Republic’s Prosecutor General Almaran had a simple solution to this ethical dilemma: “Winners are always right, you say? Like hell! Either law exists and is the same for everybody, or there’s no law at all.” The pathos of his prosecutor’s speech (quoted in whole or in part in every modern law textbook) can be summed up exhaustively by its historic concluding statement: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” Be that as it may, the executed officials of the Umbarian secret service should have known better than anyone else that motherland’s gratitude usually takes strange forms …
Havaktri: Hmmm; a noble sentiment, perhaps, except that here it seems to be mostly invoked so the Umbaran government can cover their own involvement in this… I’m really not sure that would work…
MG: And, per the endnotes, ““Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” – the Anglicized version of Friedrich I’s “pereat mundus et fiat justitia.””
Sonya never found out about Haladdin’s mission (as we already know, this had been his special concern) and remained certain that he and Kumai had perished on the Pelennor Fields. But time is merciful, so once those wounds had healed she fulfilled her life’s destiny by becoming a loving wife and wonderful mother, having married a worthy man whose name is absolutely irrelevant to our story.
Havaktri: It being entirely irrelevant to the story certainly hasn’t stopped you from talking about other things – I think I’d rather hear about Sonya’s happy ending than Runcorn’s backstory, or the exact composition of mithril! *beat* And, beg pardon, but if even Tzerlag couldn’t track down the right Sonya… how did the author of this historical commentary find her?
In my opinion, royal personages are of much lesser interest, since their fates are well- known. For those too lazy to pick up a book or at least review their sixth-grade history lessons, let me remind you that Aragorn’s reign was one of the most magnificent in Middle Earth history and one of the watershed events separating the Middle Ages (the Third Age) from modernity.
MG: Huh; something that’s actually accurate to Tolkien’s Middle-earth (aside from the association of the Fourth Age with “modernity,” since modernity as we know it – and apparently as our nameless author knows it – should still be a long ways off)! On the other hand, it’s kind of ironic that Yeskov (or the nameless “revisionist historian”) mentions how the fates of royal personages are already well-known… and then proceeds to completely change them from what they were in the source material, so strap in!
The usurper did not try to win the affections of the Gondorian aristocracy (such a project would have been dead on arrival), instead betting correctly on the third estate, which cared for things like tax rates and safety of trade routes, rather than dynastic rights and other such phantoms. Since His Majesty had effectively burned all bridges with the aristocracy, paradoxically this gave him freedom to implement radical agrarian reform, drastically curtailing the rights of landlords in favor of freeholders. These factors were the basis for the famous ‘Gondorian economic miracle’ and the colonial expansion that soon followed, while the representative legislative bodies Aragorn had created to counterbalance the aristocracy have survived to our day almost unchanged, earning the Reunited Kingdom its well-deserved title of Middle Earth’s oldest democracy.
MG: On the one hand… we know Gondor traditionally had a Grand Council, we know Aragorn reinstated and expanded it during his reign (including giving no less than three seats for the hobbits – for the Thain, the Mayor, and the Master of Buckland, respectively). While canonically the Council, from what little we see of it, seems to be subordinate to the throne in most circumstances (whether said throne is currently occupied by the Kings or the Stewards) I could see it evolving into something more democratic, given time and the right conditions. On the other hand… that still wouldn’t make the Reunited Kingdom Middle-earth’s oldest democracy. What is? The Shire! So, history lesson time – the Shire was originally a province of Arthedain but was largely depopulated by the wars with Agnmar. Eventually, the king gave the hobbits of Bree right to settle there, so long as they acknowledged the king’s authority, which they did. The Shire survived the collapse of Arthedain and became independent, and to replace the vanished king, the hobbits chose one of their own leaders, the patriarch of the Oldbuck family, to become the “Thain” – the thains remained the Shire’s official heads of state, though the title eventually passed to the Tooks. But the Thain has little real power – the actual Shire government (such as it is) is run by the Mayor, who is, in fact, elected by popular vote every seven years. The Shire isn’t a republic (it has a hereditary monarchy, albeit a pretty toothless one, which a republic, by definition, generally can’t) but it is by most definitions a democracy! And while hobbits don’t exist in TLR, the Shire does. And while the Shire was technically considered part of the Reunited Kingdom, Aragorn guaranteed them the right to continued self-governance – including keeping the Mayor. So there. I give you, Middle-earth’s oldest (known) democracy.
As for Yeskov’s own (re)invented civilizations, I assume Mordor doesn’t count despite having a parliamentary system because that government was destroyed, and though Umbar’s a republic, I have a sneaking suspicion from what we see of it that it’s an oligarchy, not a democracy.
Mixed-up Mythos: 232
It is common knowledge that the king promoted and supported science, crafts, and sea-faring ventures, appointed talented men to important state positions without regard to their lineage, and was sincerely loved by his subjects. The only dark stain on Elessar Elfstone’s reputation is the early period of his reign, when his Secret Guard (admittedly a really scary outfit) had to protect the throne from the feudal lords with an iron hand; actually, most of today’s experts believe that the scale of terror had been greatly magnified by the nobility’s historians. Aragorn’s famously beautiful wife Arwen (Elven-born, according to legend) played no role in matters of state and only imparted a certain mysterious luster to his court. They had no children, so the Elfstone dynasty ended with its founder, the throne reverting to the Prince of Ithilien – in other words, things went back to the way they were.
MG: And here, we have issues. A whole bunch of issues. First off, it turns out in the grand scheme of things, Aragorn was a great guy after all! Aren’t you so glad we had all those scenes establishing him as a total bastard who got where he did exclusively through threats, blackmail, and necromancy, and happily tossed anyone he didn’t need anymore under the bus? Guess all it took was getting those damned elves out of the picture and he became a stand-up guy! Blagh (and speaking of elves, apparently poor Arwen still had to stay married to him for his whole reign, existing as nothing but a sort of movable ornament. The only bright side I can see in this is that she was apparently never forced to bear any of Aragorn’s kids… though part of me wonders if that’s because elves and humans are just biologically incompatible in TLR verse, or she was taking contraceptives…). This does make him one of the only characters in TLR who Yeskov actually managed to write with some degree of moral ambiguity, but it’s hard to appreciate because of how awkwardly it’s handled, making it feel more like Yeskov just couldn’t commit to a consistent direction for the character than anything. And, of course, the “scale of the terror was greatly exaggerated.” This is a weird bit, because canonically, there was no “terror” and Aragorn seems to have been broadly popular from the get-go. Yeskov is the one who made Aragorn a villain… and now he’s also the one arguing that Aragorn was never really a villain and was just slandered by the nobility he supplanted! So Yeskov, instead of debunking Tolkien… is now debunking himself. What. Also, per the endnotes: ““… the scale of terror had been greatly magnified by the nobility’s historians” – a dig at official historians, who had changed the estimates of the number of victims of Ivan the Terrible, Richard the IIIrd, the French Revolution, etc. many times to conform to official propaganda.”
Beyond that… we have a major change from canon. Canonically, Aragorn and Arwen had multiple children, including at least one son, Eldarion (the name of the dynasty, it should be noted, is “Telcontar,” not “Elfstone”). So far as we know, they continued ruling for the next several generations (though Tolkien noted in his letters that it wouldn’t take long before all was not well in Gondor, and the historical figure Aragorn is sometimes considered to resemble, Charlemagne, did not create a lasting unified empire…). That’s what the “official histories” say. Except… we learn here that in this version, Aragorn had no kids, and the throne soon reverted to Faramir’s line (possibly Faramir himself; canonically, Faramir predeceased Aragorn, but it would hardly be Yeskov’s worst offense against Tolkien to swap that around). From which I can only conclude that Faramir’s descendants were complicit in writing themselves out of history (unless another, pro-Aragorn dynasty took power later and did it… but if so, we have no indication of that). What the hells is going on here, Yeskov?
Elven Brutality: 234
Mixed-up Mythos: 236
It is rather hard to analyze the reign of the first Princes of Ithilien, Faramir and Éowyn, in political or economical terms – it appears that they had neither politics nor economics over there, but only a never-ending romantic ballad.
Havaktri: Am… am I the only one who thinks that would get rather dull after a while?
Nearly all the contemporary poets and painters must have contributed to the creation of the captivating image of the Fairy of the Ithilien Woods (weird, isn’t it – Ithilien, the industrial heart of Middle Earth, had forests once!), since Faramir’s modest court had become a sort of a holy shrine to them, and not making a pilgrimage there was the height of bad taste. But even correcting for the unavoidable idealization, one has to admit that Éowyn must have been an exceptionally pure soul.
MG: “The Fairy of the Ithilien Woods” and “an exceptionally pure soul” – yes, I’m sure that’s exactly how Eowyn would want to be remembered, not for anything she did, just for being “pure.” Of course, someone wrote the heroic deed that set her name “among the queens of renown” out of the story and turned it into a punchline, Yeskov. But on another note – Tolkien wrote at length about the natural beauty of Ithilien, and how even when most of it fell under the dominion of Sauron, it nonetheless retained “a disheveled dryad loveliness.” He also wasn’t fond of the destruction of nature to make way for industry, to put it very mildly. So, whether it was intentional or not (and I somehow suspect it was), having Ithilien get paved over to become the “industrial heart of Middle-earth” just feels in incredible poor taste. But hey, Faramir’s descendants apparently managed to do something even Sauron never did and destroyed the beauty of Ithilien! Hope they’re proud of themselves!
Take That, Tolkien!: 70
Thanks to that army of artists we have several portraits of Prince Faramir, too; the best one I know of is reproduced in a monograph entitled Philosophical Agnosticism and its Early Adepts recently printed by the Amon Súl Tower Publishers in Annúminas.
MG: This one is minor, and I might let it slide under other circumstances, but there’s still something weird about taking Faramir, the character the devoutly Catholic Tolkien at least sometimes used as his mouthpiece… and turning him into a notable agnostic. Like making him a Mordor-phile, it just feels like Yeskov is trying to appropriate Tolkien’s mouthpiece for himself, which is weird and feels rather mean-spirited.
Take That, Tolkien!: 71
In any event, none of those images have anything in common with the brass profile gracing the cockades on the mustard-colored berets worn by the commandos of the Ithilien Paratrooper Regiment. By the way, the famous ‘mongooses’ – a special anti-terrorist unit whose soldiers were on every TV screen in Arda recently when they brilliantly freed the passengers of a Vendotenian airliner captured in Minas Tirith airport by the Hannani fanatics from the Northern Mingad Liberation Front – are part of that regiment, as well.
Havaktri: …huh. I can make neither heads nor tails of that. I suppose its inclusion must be important, or else why include it at all, but I just don’t see why…
Faramir had committed exactly one act of foreign policy during his entire reign
Havaktri: Otherwise, he just sat in his study all day and pretended the rest of the world didn’t exist! Quite a foolish thing to do, except the rest of the world played along and pretended he didn’t exist, so it all worked out, really!
– he approved Baron Grager’s request to send him south of the Harnen River to conduct a series of intelligence and sabotage operations he had devised: “… by all indications the fate of Middle Earth will be decided, and soon, in Near Harad.”
MG… right, because we still have to deal with the godawful and horrifically racist “the black people are invading!” plotline. Prepare to be underwhelmed.
Strangely, the subsequent fate of Grager of Aran (often called, not without justification, the savior of Western civilization)
MG: *growls angrily*
remains the stuff of unverified legends and anecdotes. The only thing that is known is the end result of his efforts – the massive rebellion of nomadic Aranians against their Haradi masters, which had led, domino-fashion, to the fall of the entire ominous Harad Empire and its fracturing into an ineffective bunch of warring tribes.
MG: And that’s that. Faramir’s favorite spy brought down the entire Haradrim empire that Yeskov wasted several very racist chapters hyping up as the greatest threat to the world, singlehandedly, in a single paragraph, related secondhand. Welp, so much for that subplot! Sure hope you thought it was worth your time, Yeskov, because I sure didn’t!
Spies Like Us: 301
Nobody knows how this adventurous intellectual had earned his iron-clad authority among the fierce savages of the Harnen savannah. The fairy tale of him accidentally ransoming a son of an Aranian chieftain at a slave market in Khand appears entirely unreliable; the suggestion that his path to power lay through chief priestess Svantatra’s bed is cute and romantic, but people familiar with the realities of the South can only laugh at it.
Havaktri: Oh, but of course! Because surely the idea that a woman might hold the real power, and a man need to secure her favor to get it, is a ludicrous one! *she sighs* Why do I keep feeling offended by this story?
Spies Like Us: 302
Even the manner of the baron’s death is uncertain: either he perished in a lion hunt, or was killed accidentally while mediating a conflict over summer watering-hole rights between two small Aranian clans.
MG: Seriously, what is it with Yeskov and hunting lions? We also have a couple of bits from the endnotes that may (or may not) shed some light on things. “Grager of Aran – a clear and unambiguous reference to Lawrence of Arabia.” Not especially surprising. “Priestess Svantatra – the author’s joke; Svantatra was the name of a right-wing party in India of the 1960’s.” *blankly* Ha ha? Maybe if I knew anything about that priestess and her politics, I might get the joke?
But the fate of Éomer is so incredible that some researchers are still trying to prove that he was a legend rather than a real person.
Havaktri: Perhaps he was a real legend? It’s more likely than you think!
MG: Canonically, I’ll note, Eomer died of old age after a long and successful reign (the second-longest of any king of Rohan, in fact) and passed his throne peacefully to his son, Elfwine. Yeskov has… different plans for him.
Having ascended to the throne of the Mark of Rohan after the Mordorian campaign, he had discovered – to his surprise and acute displeasure – that there was no one left to fight any more, at least in the near Middle Earth. For some time the famed warrior had tried to amuse himself with tournaments, hunts, and amorous adventures, but quickly tired of it all and fell into depression. (Historical veracity impels me to admit that on the battlefields of love this chevalier sans per et sans rеproche was characterized by a total lack of taste combined with a fantastic appetite, so much so that Edoras wags suggested that their monarch’s motto should have been ‘king size fits all.’)
Havaktri: That’s… interesting. *she makes a face* But I wish I hadn’t learned it, even so?
That was when the involuntarily idle king remembered a certain marvelous eastern faith that had led him to victory on the Field of Pelennor.
MG: Ah, yes, the one thing that can reinvigorate a king succumbing to ennui – the prospect of lots of heavenly sex in the afterlife! Because that was just such a wonderful plot point that we just had to revisit!
Havaktri: One would think after all he’d apparently been doing lately, he might be feeling rather… spent. But apparently not!
At first Éomer wanted to make Hakima the state religion of Rohan, but then he came up with a more interesting plan.
At that time the Khand Caliphate was in the middle of an anemic religious war between two sects of Hakimians. It is still uncertain how Éomer decided which one of those was the one true faith. Personally, I suspect that he flipped a coin – the actual dogmatic differences thereof were and are a fertile field for scores of Doctors of Divinity.
Havaktri: Well, I suspect the differences between the sects were likely of great importance to them! Otherwise, why would they be fighting? Perhaps someone close to Eomer wrote down his reasoning, and you might be able to check?
MG: Maybe it’s just me, but there’s just something smug about the way this is phrased, like the sects couldn’t possibly have been fighting over anything important, and Eomer couldn’t possibly have had a genuine reason for picking one over the other!
Be that as it may, he converted his entire Royal Guard, bored silly and ready to fight anyone at all, to that true faith (legend has it that one of Éomer’s knights, when asked how he felt on the path of True Faith, responded guilelessly: “Not bad, praise Tulkas – my boots aren’t leaking”)
Havaktri: *confused* But it’s not that kind of path…
and went South. The king left his cousin-twice-removed as regent in Edoras; sure enough, this plunged the country into dynastic struggles that lasted almost a century and culminated in the War of Nine Castles, which wiped out the entire knighthood of Rohan.
MG: So… are we to take it that Eomer didn’t marry Princess Lothiriel of Dol Amroth and sire a son named Elfwine who succeeded him in TLR-verse, then? I guess the “official histories” just… invented them, and completely rewrote the post-War of the Ring history of Rohan. Just because.
Mixed-up Mythos: 238
To the total astonishment of his companions, once in Khand Éomer actually did renounce his previous life as sinful, gave all his possessions but the sword to the poor, and joined the order of Hannanites (warrior dervishes). Utilizing his commander’s talent in the service of his chosen sect, he crushed the opposition in three decisive battles, ending the twenty-six-year ‘holy war’ in only six months; the faithful Hakimians deservedly dubbed him The Prophet’s Sword, while the schismatics called him God’s Wrath.
MG: …and of course, it took a (white) foreigner showing up out of the blue to do all that, because Eru forbid the Khandians actually produce any competent commanders of their own, right?
At the end of the third battle, when the heretics’ imminent defeat was beyond doubt, Éomer was killed by a stone from an enemy catapult – truly the best death a genuine warrior may wish for.
Havaktri: …no? I mean, personally, I would rather live to a ripe old age, and many of the warriors of my acquaintance would like to do the same… but if one must die in battle, isn’t it better to do down fighting against an actual enemy, rather than being incidentally killed by an impersonal war machine you can’t do anything against? It seems that way to me, at least.
Mixed-up Mythos: 239
The Hakimians promptly canonized him as a holy martyr, so he should have no problems obtaining the companionship of houranies.
MG: So Eomer got his harem in the afterlife after all! *wipes their forehead in relief* Whew! I was worried for a while there, but I’m glad that subplot had a happy ending. /s By the way, we have a few more bits from the endnotes to wrap up this section. “The story of Éomer’s conversion echoes both the story of the sudden conversion of several Viking konungs to Christianity in order to rule Russia’s northern tibes, and the official story of Prince Vladimir the Baptist, who supposedly chose a monotheistic faith to convert his
country to after an open debate in Kiev between the preachers of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam.” Okay, not really seeing the connection beyond the general idea of a ruler converting to a new religion, but whatever. “The War of Nine Castles – a cross between the War of the Roses and the Battle of the Golden Spurs (fought at Courtraj on 7/11/1302 between a Flemish militia and a French mounted expeditionary force, the first battle in which infantry vanquished armored knights).” And finally, “
“the faithful Hakimians … the schismatics” – this mix of Islamic and Greek religious terms is yet another deliberate attempt to prevent a too-firm identification of any entity described in the book with any real-world one.” If that’s the case… I fear Yeskov and/or Markov overestimated their audience. I mean, when I hear the words “schism” and “schismatics,” “those have a Greek etymology” is hardly the first thing that comes to mind, nor would I associate those words with any particular religion. So, if that’s the intended connection… I really don’t think it’s an obvious one. And as for not making the Hakimians a stand-in for any particular real-world religion… with how they whole fic has characterized them as a caricature of Islam, I fear that ship sailed long ago!
This looks like a good place to stop …
Havaktri: It certainly is… but it seems like you’re going on for quite a while longer…
In conclusion, I would like to stress that I have filled the gaps in Tzerlag’s story at my own discretion.
MG: …what. Weren’t you at the beginning of this essay saying that the whole story was based on Tzerlag’s account? Now you’re admitting the whole thing is full of holes you had to fill? All right, new headcanon – our nameless historian found an old account of an orc scout and an Umbaran medic who travelled together for a while as they returned home after the War of the Ring. Being a pro-Mordor revisionist already, he used it as a springboard for this account of “the truth,” dragging in various other conspiracy theories and the names of some obscure historical figures from around the time of the War to make his point, and the actual narrative got buried. Anyone who is influenced by this book and looks up what’s actually in Tzerlag’s story is going to be in for a rude awakening, finding a rather mundane account showing that Tzerlag and Haladdin were tangential players in the War who just wanted to get home safely after their side lost, and almost everything they supposedly did was someone else’s invention.
The old soldier bears no responsibility for my inventions, especially since many will now passionately charge the storyteller – who else? – with deviating from the mainstream version of the events of the end of the Third Age.
Havaktri: Well, when the mainstream version of events do seem much more plausible…
One has to note that the public’s knowledge of those events is usually derived from the literary adaptation of the Western epos – The Lord of the Rings – at best, but often only from the Sword of Isildur TV series and the Galleries of Moria first-person shooter game. I might sonorously remind such critics that The Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors, who had a clear interest in presenting the vanquished in a certain way.
MG: Okay, I have some things to say here. First off… just what is the Red Book of Westmarch, ie, the supposed “source” for LotR, in Tolkien’s conception? It’s a collection of the accounts of the hobbits, mostly centered around their personal experiences of the War and the events that led up to it, and it’s mostly written by the hobbits. The Hobbit is supposed to be based on Bilbo’s earlier memoirs, Bilbo also wrote the first few chapters of what would become LotR, Frodo wrote the bulk of it, and Sam finished it, with some additions from Merry and Pippin. Some scholarly works of Bilbo (Translations from the Elvish, which most fans seem to consider to be the basis for The Silmarillion) were also included, as were some more contemporary histories (in the appendices). But the bulk of LotR is based on in-universe eyewitness accounts. For LotR to have diverged as far from the truth as Yeskov (speaking through this anonymous scholar) is implying, then either the Red Book was written by its stated authors, but they were liars… or it’s a forgery, and it was never what it claimed at all (meanwhile, once again, the part of it that is an actual in-universe history gets ignored entirely, which is a pretty glaring omission, in context). Either way, I think there’s quite a bit of difference between “the source material was biased” and “the source material is a pack of slanderous lies,” and I think Yeskov has crossed it. TLR and LotR simply cannot coexist in the same universe, because their depiction of… everything is too different. They’re not alternate interpretations of the same basic events; if one is true, then the other must be false. And I know which version I prefer…
Also… we don’t know how long it’s been between the War of the Ring and the “modern” period our scholar is writing it, but I’d assume centuries, if not millennia. And so, I’m left wondering at how likely it is that the events of the War would still be such a seemingly continuous presence in popular culture; the way Yeskov writes it, though, it seems to have about as much cultural presence as WWII – which is still in living memory – has in the modern IRL West! I mean, looking at some historical examples, the Greco-Persian Wars were era-defining for the ancient world, but just recently I’ve read a number of posts from historians of that era bemoaning how little modern cultural presence they have aside from Thermopylae (and people mostly know that one from 300, which… yeah). Or take the Punic Wars. If those ended differently, and Carthage, rather than Rome, becomes the dominant empire of the Mediterranean, history looks very different. They were so important to Roman national identity that Carthage-bashing remained a central facet of Roman literature as late as the Imperial period, long after the Carthaginian empire was ashes. But aside from people maybe knowing about Hannibal and that he had elephants, the Punic Wars have pretty much zero presence in modern pop culture. Certainly, neither of those is getting high-profile TV shows or popular video games based on them! Now, admittedly, as an American I might be biased – I know full well the US is often regarded as having a rather myopic view of history (how does that old joke go – a British person thinks a hundred miles is a long distance, and an American thinks a hundred years is a long time?) – but it just doesn’t seem quite convincing to me. Surely the War of the Ring would’ve been supplanted in the zeitgeist by later conflicts? *shrugs*
Mixed-up Mythos: 241
Take That, Tolkien!: 73
Had genocide taken place back then, after the Western victory (and where did those peoples vanish if it hadn’t?), then it’s doubly important to convince everybody, including oneself, that those had been orcs and trolls rather than people.
Havaktri: But I thought the trolls actually called themselves Trolls… or was I somehow mistaken?
MG: Oh, and don’t forget, if the enemy is elves rather than “people,” then their genocide is fine and dandy! But I think Yeskov is making a rather noticeable error, in that he’s conflating the categories of “nonhuman” with “subhuman.” Sure, the text of LotR describes the orcs and trolls as not human. The elves aren’t human either, nor are the dwarves, the ents, the Dunedain are part of the race of Man but clearly aren’t “human” the way we’d use the term, and, oh right, our actual main characters aren’t human either. And, of course, there are plenty of human peoples who fought for Sauron and/or Saruman, that LotR has no problem with portraying as human (as well as orcs who, though antagonistic, aren’t aligned with Mordor). I think Yeskov is angling for a worthwhile point- the role of propaganda in dehumanizing one’s enemies – but, in this specific context, he takes a swerve and misses it.
Oh, and, “where did all these peoples vanish?” Depends on who you’re asking. Per Tolkien, there’s no evidence of an organized “orcish genocide” following the collapse of Mordor. The implication I always got is that, in the long run, the orcs met the same general fate as all the other nonhuman races, including the elves and hobbits – they gradually faded during the Dominion of Men, until there was nothing left of them but scraps of legend. Per Yeskov… they didn’t. Based on this very epilogue, the occupation ended after less than a year, and though Mordor’s population took heavy casualties, in the long term its people survived (with the nomadic “Orocuen” who the orcs were supposedly primarily based on escaping mostly unscathed) and are described as still existing in the present. So, uh, I think our good “revisionist historian” can’t even keep his own story straight.
Mixed-up Mythos: 243
Take That, Tolkien!: 74
Or I could ask them: how often do we find in human history a ruler that would relinquish his power, for free, to some nobody from nowhere (pardon me – a Dúnadan from the North)?
MG: Need I remind you of how Aragorn had to cement himself as a beloved war hero and healer before anyone offered him the throne? And how particular the political situation in Gondor had to be for there to even be an opening (and remember, Aragorn’s ancestor Arvedui placed a claim on the throne of Gondor and was rejected, per the appendices). Don’t confuse LotR with other fantasy stories where some farmboy shows up and gets crowned because he happens to have the right bloodline; Aragorn worked his whole adult life for this!
Yet another subject of immodest curiosity might be the actual payment Elessar Elfstone had to make to the marvelous companions he had acquired on the Paths of the Dead.
Havaktri: Ah… he gave them their freedom and they happily faded away to the afterlife when their job was done, ending millennia of torment? Did they want something else?
Mixed-up Mythos: 244
I mean, summoning the powers of Absolute Evil (for a noble cause, of course) is totally commonplace, he’s neither the first nor the last; but for those powers to meekly revert back to nothingness after doing their job without asking anything in return sounds highly dubious. At least I’ve never heard of such a thing.
MG: Yeah, no. The Oathbreakers weren’t “evil,” absolute or otherwise. Per canon, when Isildur and Anarion founded Gondor, they made alliance with the King of the White Mountains, who promised to fight with them should they need it. When Sauron returned, the King, who feared him greatly, refused aid, and because he broke the terms of his oath Isildur was able to curse him and his soldiers to never rest until they fulfilled it. Aragorn, as Isildur’s heir, was the holder of the curse, and was able to use it to summon the Oathbreakers to fight against Mordor. Once they’d done so, he held their oath fulfilled and let them go. Havaktri is right, their “payment” was their freedom, and they neither needed nor wanted anything else. Nor did TLR!Aragorn make any “payment” of any sort to his Secret Guard – they were his slaves, nothing else, and they didn’t meekly fade away, they were destroyed when magic left Middle-earth. Despite his earlier words of praise for Aragorn, weirdly enough, it just feels like our “revisionist historian” is deliberately phrasing things to cast him in the worst light possible, no matter how little sense it makes.
Take That, Tolkien!: 75
Or I can … I can, but I won’t. Whatever for? I have no desire to engage in this sort of polemics.
Havaktri: *glancing back at the whole rest of the fic* Really? The evidence would seem to say otherwise… unless it’s a most clever diversion!
In other words, guys, live and let live. In our case it translates to this: you don’t have to listen to me spin tall tales if you don’t like them.
THE END
MG: And so, Yeskov ends The Last Ringbearer… with a variation of the old “don’t like, don’t read” chestnut. Except instead of posting it at the start of the fic… he posts it at the end, where you’d have to read the whole fic first to get to it! And I can’t get past the hypocrisy of “live and let live,” either, when Yeskov’s just devoted approximately 150,000 words to a glorified spitefic about a book he clearly didn’t like. I mean, it would clearly be hypocritical of me to denounce him for that on principle, considering what we do around here… but still, what’s fair is fair. If Yeskov can dedicate tens of thousands of words to tearing down Tolkien, he can hardly complain when I do the same to him.
Anyway, that is indeed the conclusion of the actual story of The Last Ringbearer. And, IMO, its biggest problem is that it proves the entire “moral dilemma” of the climax pointless. Haladdin destroyed the Palantir and removed magic from the world… and the world didn’t end. However long after TLR our “revisionist historian” is writing from, Arda is clearly still there. In fact, things progressed exactly as Sharya-Rana said they would, the elves are gone so thoroughly people seem to think they were a myth at best (the epilogue doesn’t even bother specifying their, or the wizards’, final fate), and even though Mordor was defeated, the ideas it ostensibly stood for still ended up triumphing across Middle-earth. The old world burned in the fires of industry… the forests fell. And based on our nameless historian’s references, all the major OCs Yeskov introduced went on to become well-known historical figures, and the events of the aftermath of the War of the Ring were completely rewritten to make sense with TLR and not LotR, even up to changing the fates of major personages to bring them more in line with how Yeskov characterized them. The whole thing just feels like it’s rubbing it in – you thought you won, but really we did, and you’re too stupid to even realize it. Not to mention the totally gratuitous swipes at aspects of modern culture Yeskov doesn’t like.
Of course, we also have the in-universe “historian” admitting that his primary source was Tzerlag (who wasn’t present for, and had no way of knowing about, large chunks of the story) and everything Tzerlag didn’t include directly, our “historian” made up. Which just seems to underscore the idea that this isn’t actual history, it’s a historical conspiracy theory by a guy sore the side he liked lost… but Yeskov still seems to expect us to take this seriously. Ugh. What a mess. But we’re not done yet. First off, we still have the appendices to go, in which Yeskov will share with us his own thoughts on why he wrote TLR, as well as his opinions on Tolkien and the fantasy genre in general. Then it will be time for my final thoughts, which will get their own post. We’ll see you next time to get that started! Our final counts stand at:
Age of Anachronisms: 182
The Dung Ages: 96
Elven Brutality: 234
Linguistic Confusion: 75
Mixed-up Mythos: 245
Mordor the Magnificent: 115
Not So Magnificent: 51
Spies Like Us: 302
Take That, Tolkien!: 76
Warning: This post contains elements that touch on aspects of real world history and culture; reminding everyone to be cautious and respectful in the comments.
MG: Well, everyone, it’s time to continue our journey through Kirill Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer! Last time… whew. The White Council showed up again for the first time since the start of the fic, Saruman showed back up for the first time since the start of the fic and took the White Council back over, Haladdin and Tzerlag made it to Mount Doom off-page, Saruman tried to talk Haladdin out of his mission by casting doubts of Sharya-Rana’s theories and bringing up a prophecy that had never been mentioned before, it was all for nothing as Haladdin ended up destroying the Palantir to save Tzerlag anyway, Lorien got nuked, the magic went away, the surviving elves just… stopped being elves, and we had our “happy” ending. Yikes. Today… we’re done with the actual story part of the fic, but the epilogue will give a historical survey of events following The Last Ringbearer, which will mostly serve to vindicate Haladdin and make it clear that Middle-earth’s history totally follows from TLR, not LotR. Joining us once again will be Havaktri!
Before we start the epilogue, there’s something I’d like to note about it. Namely, that you’d think Yeskov would be interested in exploring the appendices. After all, while we’ll get a bit more to what the Red Book of Westmarch (Tolkien’s “source” for LotR, going by the conceit that the Legendarium is a set of ancient texts “discovered” and “translated” by Professor Tolkien) actually is later on, the appendices actually are in-universe academic texts, “official histories” if you will (most obviously, “Annals of the Kings and Rulers,” “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” and “The Tale of Years,” which collectively make up LotR’s Appendix I and II). I know Yeskov’s read the appendices, because he talks about things like Castamir and the Kin-Strife, and you’d think that he’d be especially motivated to deconstruct them, since the whole premise of this fic is, supposedly, that LotR represents history as written by the “winning” side and he wants to show the story from the “losing” side’s perspective. You would be wrong. Yeskov ignores the appendices entirely, to the point that Middle-earth’s history in the Fourth Age seems to go in a completely different direction from what they indicate, and the fates of multiple characters are radically different from what they were in the source material, with not the slightest effort made to explain why. Yay. But we’re automatically getting five points in two counters just for this.
Mixed-up Mythos: 229
Take That, Tolkien!: 69
Epilogue
“What will History say?” “History, sir, will lie – as always.” Bernard Shaw
Havaktri: Well, that seems rather cynical, though perhaps not untrue… although, if “history” is to lie, would that not also imply that Last Ringbearer is a lie as well? I mean, it is a history – not an official history, but a history nonetheless! And that quote does not make any such distinction…
Dare to err and to dream. Friedrich Schiller
Havaktri: I can certainly say that a great many errors have been made here! But I would kindly ask that dreams be left out of this, please… for personal reasons…
MG: Per the endnotes: “The format of this chapter, written from the standpoint of an imaginary modern Gondorian revisionist historian, is intended to cast the entire work as an alternative history written in the real Arda, where The Lord of the Rings is the accepted “mainstream” version of actual historical events. See Appendix II for more details.” Appendix II being Yeskov’s account of why he wrote TLR, keep a pin in that for later. As for the rest… keep it in mind as we read the epilogue. The endnotes also note that the Shaw quote is from The Devil’s Apprentice and the Schiller quote is from Thekla. Why these attributions weren’t made in the quotes themselves, I couldn’t tell you.
Our narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag’s detailed tales, however incomplete, that are preserved by his clan as an oral tradition.
Havaktri: I beg your pardon? Tzerlag has been our narrator this entire time? But… but… there were large stretches of the story he wasn’t even present for! How did he know about things that happened in Umbar or Lorien, or anything else he wasn’t there for? Why did he care about historical surveys or Mordor’s weather patterns or what the Umbaran secret service was called? How does this make sense?
MG: So… yeah. I know most of you commenting have been running with the idea that Haladdin is our narrator. And I haven’t corrected you because, well… he does make the most sense! He’s the main character, he’s an academic… compiling his own history of the War as he experienced it would indeed be the logical choice! But nope, it’s Tzerlag! Who, as Havaktri notes, was barely in the story for some long, very important stretches! And has no way to know most of it, know reason to care about most of it, and the story is written in a completely different style from what you’d expect from something preserved in oral tradition! But that’s what we’re going with nonetheless. Aren’t you so surprised?
It should be stressed that we have no documents that might attest to their veracity.
Havaktri: Which would seem to be quite a mark against their veracity, if every other account of the war is completely different!
The person who might have been expected to leave the most thorough account – Haladdin – had recorded not a word on the subject; the other participants in the hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror – Tangorn and Kumai – remained silent for obvious reasons.
Havaktri: The hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror? Beg pardon, but everyone knew exactly where the Mirror was, and they weren’t trying to take it, they were trying to get a Palantir to it so they could both be destroyed! Which also makes me think… Lorien was destroyed, entirely. How, then, did anyone have access to information on Kumai’s fate, or accounts of the Star Council’s meetings in its last days? *whispering* I think someone may have been making things up…
Therefore, whoever would like to declare the whole thing to be the old- age demented ravings of an Orc who wanted to recast the finale of the War of the Ring is free to do so with clear conscience. After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans turn their losses into victories after the fact.
Havaktri: That seems like a very narrow definition of “memoir!” What about memoirs that weren’t written by veterans, or aren’t about defeats? I think this person needs to be more open minded!
MG: And, as for leaving the audience free to make up their own minds… well, our nameless narrator is about to give us an exhaustive rundown about why we should believe this account, so methinks they protest too much. And strap in.
On the other hand, those who consider this story to be, if not a true, then at least a plausible version of history, might be interested in certain events outside its immediate time frame.
Havaktri: Aha! I am beginning to think our narrator wants to take sides without admitting they’re taking sides! *beat* I don’t think it’s working…
Tzerlag related that he had accompanied Haladdin from Orodruin to Ithilien; the doctor seemed very ill and didn’t say ten words in a row throughout the journey. On one of their stops the sergeant fell in a sleep so deep that he woke up only by next evening, nauseous and with a monster headache. Instead of his comrade he found the mithril mail by his side, with a farewell letter wrapped in it. Haladdin wrote that Middle Earth was now free from the Elvish menace and that in his capacity as the commanding officer of the operation he thanked the sergeant for excellent service and awarded him the precious armor.
MG: You know, Frodo and Sam’s final parting in the last chapter of LotR is such an incredibly powerful, bittersweet moment, one that almost always manages to make me tear up a little bit. An incredibly poignant end to the story, and to the relationship between the two characters. Haladdin and Tzerlag’s final parting… takes place off-page and is related to us secondhand. But TLR is totally the deeper, more complex, and more emotionally real version of the story, everyone!
Elven Brutality: 233
As for the doctor himself, regretfully he had “paid such a price for victory as to see no place for himself among people.” Those words led the scout to fear the worst, but fortunately, the hunch did not pan out: judging by his tracks, Haladdin had simply reached the Ithilien highway and took it to points south.
MG: And here we have yet another point in the idea that Haladdin is meant to parallel Frodo. Except, you know, Tolkien went out of his way to show us Frodo’s trauma building over the course of LotR, and we actually got to see Frodo trying – and failing – to return to his old life after returning to the Shire. Seeing Haladdin’s similar reaction just summarized in a paragraph like this… need I even say that it’s not even a fraction as effective?
Interestingly, a few years ago a certain light-minded doctoral student at the Umbar University’s Medieval History Department took this legend at face value and invested the effort to comb the account books of several Eastern monasteries, which have been keeping records for the last fifteen hundred years with an unnatural meticulousness. Guess what – the smart aleck did unearth a very curious coincidence: in January 3020 (by the then current calendar) an Umbarian-looking man did join the Gurwan Aren cave monastery in the mountains of North Vendotenia.
Havaktri: Excuse me, but didn’t we previously establish that Umbar is a melting pot? So how does “an Umbaran looking man” actually count as a meaningful description?
MG: No idea, but that Haladdin looks Umbaran is one of the only things we ever learn about his appearance, so clearly it means something even if we have no idea what. Maybe he just dresses and acts like a stereotypical pirate all the time, a detail our “revisionist historian” left out because he felt it might lower the dignity of the work.
The new monk took an oath of silence and donated an inoceramium ring to the monastery. This led the student to make (to quote the minutes of the departmental meeting) “a hasty, unfounded, and completely unscientific claim of identity of the said monk and the legendary Haladdin.” Naturally, the doctoral committee administered a proper tongue-lashing to the wannabe ghost-hunter, so that the young man forswore departures from his approved dissertation topic and has been dutifully dusting clay fragments from the garbage piles of Khand’s Seventh Dynasty ever since.
MG: *flatly* Because academia exists solely to support the status quo and goes out of its way to bury anyone who tries to tell the truth. Ha. Ha. Aren’t we all laughing so hard? But I do have to wonder… what was this guy’s dissertation supposed to be on? A doctoral dissertation is a full-length book. If literally all he had to say was “a monk thousands(?) of years ago allegedly had an inoceramium ring and therefore must have been the same person as Haladdin” and nothing else – that’s not dissertation material! It’s barely term paper material! No wonder his committee wasn’t happy with him!
As for the real Haladdin, his name can be found in any university course on history of science – as an example of the dangers of sudden leaps forward – rather than physiology, his life’s work. His brilliant studies of nerve tissue function had been so far ahead of his time as to fall out of scientific context and be forgotten. Only three centuries later did the medics of the Ithilien School come across his works accidentally while searching for ancient antidote recipes. It became clear then that Haladdin had beaten the famous Vespuno by more than a hundred years; not only did he prove experimentally the electric nature of axon stimulation, but he also predicted the existence of neurotransmitters, and even modeled how they should work. Unfortunately, only historians are interested in the ‘who was there first’ kind of things; the scientific community has no use for this information. In any event Haladdin’s last known work is dated year 3016 of the Third Age and the official version is that he perished during the War of the Ring.
Havaktri: Well, that is… marginally interesting, but I’m unsure what purpose it serves, save to prove that, in Yeskov’s view, Haladdin was a man so far ahead of his time none of his contemporaries could possibly appreciate him? That seems rather excessive… nor does it seem quite right that the “scientific community” has no use for this knowledge, but then, I am but a simple monk and not a scientist…
The Dung Ages: 96
Let’s go back to Tzerlag, whose historicity is beyond doubt. As is known, the occupation of Mordor ended suddenly and inexplicably by the winter of 3020, and life there started slowly getting back to normal. The city population had suffered tremendous losses (strictly speaking, the Mordorian civilization had not fully recovered since then), but the nomads have mostly avoided those tribulations.
MG: The “occupation of Mordor” which did not happen (at least not as Yeskov describes it) in canon, and which we were introduced to in this fic specifically involving the massacre of a nomad camp? But surely, the nomads didn’t really suffer – they were just being brutally murdered and raped as part of an attempted genocide, but they got over it! /s But, as we’ll see here, the epilogue may be presented as a “work of revisionist history” for taking TLR’s account seriously… but it also acts like a bunch of TLR’s basic premises, including the historical existence of its major characters, are established fact, so… yeah, it’s hard not to see Yeskov stacking the deck here.
The sergeant used to say that a real man whose hands are attached properly (rather than to his butt) will come out on top whatever the situation, and proved this maxim with his entire life.
Havaktri: A man whose hands are attached to his butt? *she gasps* How horrifying! One must wonder what sort of experiments with nerve tissue Doctor Haladdin was performing and Tzerlag was privy to… Also, alas, I must say that no matter how practical and resourceful you are, sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where you can’t win… that’s just how the world is, sometimes…
After returning to his home grounds, he ended up the founder of a large and powerful clan, which had preserved the tale of his journeys in its oral tradition, as is customary with nomadic peoples.
MG: So, see, it doesn’t matter that Tzerlag’s family were killed in the “mop-up” early on in the fic, because he just… went and founded a better family, apparently! And I still don’t think TLR reads like something that was initially translated through oral tradition. For one thing, it’s prose; works that were originally translated orally are often (though not always) in poetry (I’ve seen it theorized that poetry was originally invented for long-term oral transmission, since it’s easier to commit to memory than prose; certainly, some of the oldest surviving texts in the world are poems or songs that were originally transmitted orally before being written down much later). For another, I’m sure Tzerlag’s new clan just loved hearing about the technical details of how the Umbar secret service works, or Tangorn and Alviss’s relationship woes, or getting the minutes from Lorien’s Star Council meetings that Tzerlag knew about… somehow. And I’m still not sure how this puts Tzerlag’s “historicity beyond doubt.” The thing about oral traditions by their nature is that texts will almost certainly pass through the hands of many, many bards and storytellers before being eventually written down, still developing as it goes. Just because this saga is attributed to someone named “Tzerlag” doesn’t mean much; Homer probably wasn’t a real person, either (and there’s no reason to think he would have much resembled the traditions that sprang up around him even if he was).
Incidentally, the fate of the other sergeant, Runcorn, was almost the same as Tzerlag’s, aside from the fact that the ex-ranger lived on the other side of the Mountains of Shadow in the valley of the Otter Creek, rather than on the Morgai plateau. The hamlet he built under a strange name Lianica had grown into a regular village in only five years. When his little son found Ithilien’s first gold nugget in the creek’s gravel bed while fishing, the neighbors only shrugged: money always attracts money. Had he and the Orocuen met in their old age, undoubtedly they would have put their Mirkwood debates on the comparative advantages of dark beer and kumiss to a practical test, but it was not to be.
Havaktri: *blankly* Did… did we really need a whole paragraph on Runcorn’s fate? I mean, we only knew him for a couple of chapters, and he wasn’t very interesting… but of course, he happened to found his own village, and his son happened to find gold, so I suppose being a character in this story has its advantages?
Tzerlag had decided to return the mithril coat to Haladdin’s girl together with the tale of his vanished friend’s heroic achievement. But Kumai had perished, and the scout himself knew nothing of the girl beside the name Sonya (very common among Trolls) and vague knowledge of her participation in the Resistance, so all his efforts to locate her failed. The despairing Orocuen then decided that he and his clan were the keepers rather than the owners of the artifact; the nomads’ punctiliousness in such matters is truly without limit. The sergeant’s great-great-grandson ended up donating it (together with the associated headaches) to the Núrnen History Museum, where anyone can see it today together with the other relics of the mysterious Mordorian civilization.
Havaktri: But… we were just told that Mordor’s civilization survived, if reduced, to the present day, and the occupation lasted less than a year, so… what is so mysterious about it? Surely Tzerlag wasn’t the only person of that era to pass down his experiences, especially if the “Orocuen” escaped mostly intact? Does Mordor not have its own continuous traditions about its own history? How dreadful, if so!
At this point the apologist for the legend might say: “Aha! Isn’t the coat of mail proof enough for you?” The grave and absolutely correct answer would be that the coat proves nothing even within Tzerlag’s narrative, since Haladdin had obtained it before receiving the nazgúl’s ring.
MG: Well, again, from an out-of-universe perspective, Yeskov has clearly established that a bunch of people he made up are historically documented figures in this version of Middle-earth, and that events seem to have been broadly agreed to take place the way TLR said they did…
By the way, concerning mithril … There is a total of four such coats of mail in the museums of Arda, but the technology of their manufacture remains a mystery. If you want your metallurgist friend to throw something heavy at your head, ask him about this alloy. It’s been analyzed to death: 86% silver, 12% nickel, plus trace amounts of nine rare metals from vanadium to niobium; they can measure these proportions to the ninth digit after the decimal, X-ray its structure, and do a myriad other things, except reproduce it. Some say (not without a trace of mockery) that the old masters would supposedly forever invest a fraction of their souls in each batch of mithril, and since today there are no souls, but only the ‘objective reality perceived by our senses,’ by definition we have no chance to obtain true mithril.
Havaktri: “The objective reality perceived by our senses?” What a dour and disturbing notion! And an arrogant one, to presume that human senses alone are capable of encompassing all that exists in the vast cosmos; as a writer from your world once observed, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy!
MG: Per the endnotes, it’s “a Marxist definition of matter.” Which apparently made it into Middle-earth, despite a distinct lack of Marx, but whatever (and no, this isn’t an invitation to discuss Marx himself or the validity of his theories in the comments, if you were tempted). More to the point, canon has a perfectly reasonable explanation for mithril’s rarity. There’s only one place in Middle-earth it could be mined, and that was Moria. And sleeping at the bottom of the mithril vein was a freaking balrog, who, when he woke up, drove the dwarves out of Moria! Even the orcs who moved in later didn’t dare mine more mithril, though they gathered up all the mithril the dwarves had already mined to sell it to Mordor. Moria would supposedly be resettled by dwarves under Durin VII, according to in-universe prophecy, but that hadn’t happened yet so far as the canonical timeline goes. Per some of Tolkien’s other writings, there may have also been mithril veins in Numenor and Aman, but those were obviously not accessible to the people of Middle-earth as of the late Third and early Fourth Ages. So, nothing to do with souls, mithril ore is just rare, naturally.
Age of Anachronisms: 182 (why is a scholar in Middle-earth quoting a Marxist theory?)
Mixed-up Mythos: 230
The most recent attempt at a solution had been undertaken by the smart guys at the Arnor Center for High Technologies with a special grant from Angmar Aerospace. It all came to naught: the grantor was presented with a plate of some alloy two millimeters thick (86.12% silver, 11.96% nickel, and so forth) and told that this was real mithril and everything else was just legends. As usual, the smart guys then asked for another grant to study this creation of theirs. Without blinking an eye the boss of the rocket men produced a loaded museum crossbow from under his executive desk, aimed it at the project leader and suggested that he protect himself with his plate – if it holds, you get your money, if it doesn’t, you won’t need it. Unsurprisingly, that was the end of the project. I have no idea whether this actually happened, but those who know the CEO of Angmar Aerospace well insist that the joke would be quite in his taste – not for naught does he trace his lineage from the Witch-king.
Havaktri: *blankly* But… I thought this fic’s version of the Witch-king was a Mordorian general who doesn’t seem to have come from anywhere near Angmar? But now there’s an actual Witch-king? Did he somehow split in two, posthumously, and go back in time to create his own legend? Remarkable, if true!
MG: Beats me. I’m not sure if the Witch-king was a mythologized take on the Commander South (not sure where the Angmar connection for a Mordorian general came from, if so) or if he was an unrelated historical or legendary figure who later got combined with the Commander South (which, if true, considering the vast gulf in time and space between the two, seems a bit like if an official history of World War II had maintained that Erwin Rommel was actually an undead Hannibal Barca, resurrected by Nazi occultism and bound to serve the Third Reich – and people bought it and it became the accepted take). Also, I’ve now had to read the phrase “Angmar Aerospace” (I guess Angmar does still exist!) and now you have, too.
The deal with inoceramium that supposedly served to make the rings of the Nazgúl is much simpler, and the reason people don’t often see it is obvious. This metal of the platinum group is not only extremely rare in Arda’s crust (4 x 108 atoms; compare gold at 5 x 107 or iridium at 1 x 107 atoms) – unlike the other platinoids it is never found scattered, but only in large nuggets. You can figure out the probability of finding one such yourself. Actually, not too long ago a nugget weighing a fantastic 87 ounces was found in Kigvali mines in South Harad; the headline in the local paper was Find of the Century – Six Pounds of Inoceramium Would Make Enough Rings for a Platoon of Nazgúl. This metal has absolutely no unusual properties other than its density (higher than osmium).
But enough about metals.
Havaktri: Thank il-Yannah!
MG: Yeah, I really don’t see what’s gained from giving us the exact technical specs of various magical materials and people’s attempts to synthesize them. On the other hand, this seems to be the time to talk about something that’s going on in this epilogue, and why I think it undermines itself. As I’ve mentioned before, Tolkien always maintained that Arda was meant to be our earth in a distant, mythological past, so long ago it survives into our history only as distorted scraps of legend. Yeskov’s Arda, on the other hand, is a parallel version of Earth, with an entirely separate history and development. As we see here, Fourth Age Middle-earth in Yeskov’s take has developed into a “modern” technological society, parallel to our earth’s modern society. This obviously didn’t happen in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and indeed, Tolkien himself was said to have noted that our era is probably the Sixth Age, by Middle-earth’s calendar. I don’t know if Yeskov changed this deliberately, or if he just missed it, but either way, his Arda is a fundamentally different kind of thing from Tolkien’s, which makes it very hard for me to take it seriously as supposedly occupying the same universe, and a bit like if I stumbled onto an analysis of the Homeric epics in their historical context that described a history taking an entirely different course after the Trojan War than the one we know, perhaps culminating in offhandedly mentioning the Romans sending a mission to the Moon, all presented completely earnestly and as something everyone knows. Maybe this won’t bug other people as much as me… but it does bug me, a lot.
Mixed-up Mythos: 231
And speaking of things that bug me, it’s time to find out what became of Alviss and Tangorn’s kid! It’s… special.
Alviss never married. She dwelt in self-imposed isolation in her Jasper Street mansion, dedicating her life to raising the son she bore at the appropriate time after those events.
Havaktri: I’m glad she bore her son at the appropriate time. Imagine if she’d borne him at the inappropriate time! What a nightmare!
This boy grew up to be none other than Commodore Amengo – the one whose voyages are universally considered to have ushered in the era of great geographical discoveries. The Commodore had left behind the maps of the shore of a new continent that was to bear his name, wonderful (in a literary sense) travel notes, and a long train of broken hearts – none of which brought him any marital happiness. Aside from the great western continent (which was long believed to be the legendary Far West, with resultant attempts to discern Elvish features in its aborigines), Amengo’s list of discoveries includes a small tropical archipelago which he had deservedly named Paradise. The name was changed later by the Holy Church (the local girls looked like the living, breathing houranies as portrayed by the godawful Hakimian heresy), but the two biggest islands of the archipelago, whose shapes closely resemble the yin-yang symbol, have managed to keep the names given them by the discoverer: Alviss and Tangorn.
MG: So… yeah. First off, and by far the more minor issue, is that Yeskov seems to have located the Age of Discovery in Arda as taking place immediately after the War of the Ring. Which just adds to the feel that he was presenting Middle-earth as being a late medieval/early modern type setting, when canonically the late Third Age is more inspired by the early medieval period and some from the ancient world. And, with that out of the way… yeah. Tangorn and Alviss’s son is fantasy Christopher Columbus. Like… he couldn’t be more obviously an expy of Columbus (with a bit of Amerigo Vespucci mixed in). And, like the real Columbus, he seems to have ushered in a global wave of colonialism and conquest. This is presented entirely uncritically; with the native peoples he encountered existing solely to be exoticized and fetishized. Perhaps, from another author, I’d have let this slide… but I remember the depiction of the “savage” Haradrim. And the elves (whatever’s left of them seems to have entirely vanished from this “history” – perfect genocide, accomplished). And the basic premise that Mordor was a unique and special civilization that should have grown to dominate the world with its obviously superior culture before those damned elves and wizards messed everything up… yeah, I’m not inclined to cut Yeskov any slack here. And it certainly makes any claims that this work is in any way anti-imperialist ring hollow at best.
Not So Magnificent: 51
By my lights the famous seafarer had immortalized his parents’ names in the best possible way.
Havaktri: Hmmm; I somehow doubt whoever lived on or near those islands before, and doubtless had their own names for them, much appreciated his gesture…
Nevertheless, the love story of the Umbarian courtesan and the Gondorian aristocrat had been a favorite topic of writers ever since. For some reason these people either turn the protagonists into disembodied romantic ghosts or else reduce everything to primitive erotica. Alas, the recent Amengian screen version – The Spy and The Whore – is no exception: it was rightfully rated XXX in Gondorian theaters and banned outright in puritanical Angmar. The movie’s artistic merits are scant, but it’s totally politically correct: Alviss is black (excuse me – Haradi-Amengian), and the relationship between Tangorn and Grager has distinct gay overtones. The critics predicted as one man that the judges of the Silver Harbors Film Festival would protect themselves from the charges of racism, sexism, and other horrible ‘isms’ by throwing every conceivable award at it, which is exactly what happened. In any event, the inimitable Gunun-Tua’s Golden Elanor for Best Actress was well-deserved.
Havaktri: …what. I just… I can make no sense of this!
MG: I can, sort of. For one, do note the completely-out-of-left-field swipe at “political correctness.” It has absolutely nothing to do with anything the story, or the epilogue, is about, but Yeskov clearly felt the need to work it in somewhere, and it doesn’t help the impression I’ve gotten throughout this book of being written by a ranting internet dudebro with opinions. And of course, even if our “historian” praises the actress’s performance (uh, I think) he still takes a swipe at casting a black actress as Alviss – because we mustn’t forget that even though she’s Umbaran and Yeskov’s Umbar is a racially diverse melting pot, he still went out of his way to make sure we all knew Tangorn’s love interest was a blonde, blue-eyed white woman. And I have my doubts about this movie sweeping the awards, however “politically correct” it may be (and XXX rated “primitive erotica” titled The Spy and the Whore doesn’t sound like something that would be considered very “politically correct” in any case). I’m reminded of an observation I’ve seen in various places about the Caligula movie – that it tried to be both a serious sword-and-sandal historical epic and a porno, and ended up failing to appeal to anyone because it had too much historical drama for people who were there for porn, and too much porn for people who were there for history. I somehow expect that this movie had a similar problem. And the bit about Tangorn and Grager feels like a swipe at slash fic, too. Maybe, if Tangorn and Grager and their relationship were developed enough to feel like they’d merit shipping, I might actually care.
Almandin and Yakudze were hanged in the courtyard of the Ar-Horan prison on one of the exhaustingly muggy August nights of 3019; along with them were executed Flag Captain Makarioni and seven other naval officers that had led the ‘Admiral Carnero’s mutiny.’ That was the post factum description of Operation Sirocco, during which the admiral first destroyed the entire Gondorian invasion fleet right at the piers in a pre-emptive strike, and then landed a raiding party which burned Pelargir shipyards to the ground. To save face, Aragorn had to sign the Dol Amroth Compact. By its terms Umbar did acknowledge itself “an inseparable part of the Reunited Kingdom,” but got itself permanent free city status in return. Its Senate was renamed to ‘magistrate council’ and its army to ‘garrison;’ Special Envoy Alkabir, who represented the Republic, even managed to wangle a special provision banning His Majesty’s Secret Guard from operating in its territory. To the mutual satisfaction of the king of Gondor and Umbarian senators, Admiral Carnero’s raid was declared to have been a banal pirate foray, its participants deserters and traitors who had forsaken their military oath and officer’s honor.
Havaktri: Oh, the two people whose names I could barely keep straight and whose personalities felt entirely interchangeable died! *beat* How terrible! …I think!
MG: Yeah, wasn’t it just so worth it to follow their misadventures chasing Tangorn down across a whole Part, only for it to fail to amount to anything and then they got a bridge dropped on them in the epilogue? For some context, the endnotes have this to say: ““Operation Sirocco … destroyed the entire Gondorian invasion fleet right at the piers” – a reference to Sir Walter Raleigh’s raid on the Second Spanish Armada at Cadiz.” But I have to say, speaking as an American, the idea of a major power heading off a theorized attack from another major power by launching a surprise attack on a naval base intended to preemptively destroy their fleet brings a rather different event to mind… a day that will live in infamy, if you will. And that incident didn’t, in fact, work to the advantage of the country that launched the attack… perhaps something Umbar should have considered…
Of course, the people viewed Carnero’s co-conspirators (the admiral avoided court- martial by getting himself killed at Pelargir) as heroes who had saved their Motherland from foreign enslavement, but the fact remained that they had gone against orders. The Republic’s Prosecutor General Almaran had a simple solution to this ethical dilemma: “Winners are always right, you say? Like hell! Either law exists and is the same for everybody, or there’s no law at all.” The pathos of his prosecutor’s speech (quoted in whole or in part in every modern law textbook) can be summed up exhaustively by its historic concluding statement: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” Be that as it may, the executed officials of the Umbarian secret service should have known better than anyone else that motherland’s gratitude usually takes strange forms …
Havaktri: Hmmm; a noble sentiment, perhaps, except that here it seems to be mostly invoked so the Umbaran government can cover their own involvement in this… I’m really not sure that would work…
MG: And, per the endnotes, ““Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” – the Anglicized version of Friedrich I’s “pereat mundus et fiat justitia.””
Sonya never found out about Haladdin’s mission (as we already know, this had been his special concern) and remained certain that he and Kumai had perished on the Pelennor Fields. But time is merciful, so once those wounds had healed she fulfilled her life’s destiny by becoming a loving wife and wonderful mother, having married a worthy man whose name is absolutely irrelevant to our story.
Havaktri: It being entirely irrelevant to the story certainly hasn’t stopped you from talking about other things – I think I’d rather hear about Sonya’s happy ending than Runcorn’s backstory, or the exact composition of mithril! *beat* And, beg pardon, but if even Tzerlag couldn’t track down the right Sonya… how did the author of this historical commentary find her?
In my opinion, royal personages are of much lesser interest, since their fates are well- known. For those too lazy to pick up a book or at least review their sixth-grade history lessons, let me remind you that Aragorn’s reign was one of the most magnificent in Middle Earth history and one of the watershed events separating the Middle Ages (the Third Age) from modernity.
MG: Huh; something that’s actually accurate to Tolkien’s Middle-earth (aside from the association of the Fourth Age with “modernity,” since modernity as we know it – and apparently as our nameless author knows it – should still be a long ways off)! On the other hand, it’s kind of ironic that Yeskov (or the nameless “revisionist historian”) mentions how the fates of royal personages are already well-known… and then proceeds to completely change them from what they were in the source material, so strap in!
The usurper did not try to win the affections of the Gondorian aristocracy (such a project would have been dead on arrival), instead betting correctly on the third estate, which cared for things like tax rates and safety of trade routes, rather than dynastic rights and other such phantoms. Since His Majesty had effectively burned all bridges with the aristocracy, paradoxically this gave him freedom to implement radical agrarian reform, drastically curtailing the rights of landlords in favor of freeholders. These factors were the basis for the famous ‘Gondorian economic miracle’ and the colonial expansion that soon followed, while the representative legislative bodies Aragorn had created to counterbalance the aristocracy have survived to our day almost unchanged, earning the Reunited Kingdom its well-deserved title of Middle Earth’s oldest democracy.
MG: On the one hand… we know Gondor traditionally had a Grand Council, we know Aragorn reinstated and expanded it during his reign (including giving no less than three seats for the hobbits – for the Thain, the Mayor, and the Master of Buckland, respectively). While canonically the Council, from what little we see of it, seems to be subordinate to the throne in most circumstances (whether said throne is currently occupied by the Kings or the Stewards) I could see it evolving into something more democratic, given time and the right conditions. On the other hand… that still wouldn’t make the Reunited Kingdom Middle-earth’s oldest democracy. What is? The Shire! So, history lesson time – the Shire was originally a province of Arthedain but was largely depopulated by the wars with Agnmar. Eventually, the king gave the hobbits of Bree right to settle there, so long as they acknowledged the king’s authority, which they did. The Shire survived the collapse of Arthedain and became independent, and to replace the vanished king, the hobbits chose one of their own leaders, the patriarch of the Oldbuck family, to become the “Thain” – the thains remained the Shire’s official heads of state, though the title eventually passed to the Tooks. But the Thain has little real power – the actual Shire government (such as it is) is run by the Mayor, who is, in fact, elected by popular vote every seven years. The Shire isn’t a republic (it has a hereditary monarchy, albeit a pretty toothless one, which a republic, by definition, generally can’t) but it is by most definitions a democracy! And while hobbits don’t exist in TLR, the Shire does. And while the Shire was technically considered part of the Reunited Kingdom, Aragorn guaranteed them the right to continued self-governance – including keeping the Mayor. So there. I give you, Middle-earth’s oldest (known) democracy.
As for Yeskov’s own (re)invented civilizations, I assume Mordor doesn’t count despite having a parliamentary system because that government was destroyed, and though Umbar’s a republic, I have a sneaking suspicion from what we see of it that it’s an oligarchy, not a democracy.
Mixed-up Mythos: 232
It is common knowledge that the king promoted and supported science, crafts, and sea-faring ventures, appointed talented men to important state positions without regard to their lineage, and was sincerely loved by his subjects. The only dark stain on Elessar Elfstone’s reputation is the early period of his reign, when his Secret Guard (admittedly a really scary outfit) had to protect the throne from the feudal lords with an iron hand; actually, most of today’s experts believe that the scale of terror had been greatly magnified by the nobility’s historians. Aragorn’s famously beautiful wife Arwen (Elven-born, according to legend) played no role in matters of state and only imparted a certain mysterious luster to his court. They had no children, so the Elfstone dynasty ended with its founder, the throne reverting to the Prince of Ithilien – in other words, things went back to the way they were.
MG: And here, we have issues. A whole bunch of issues. First off, it turns out in the grand scheme of things, Aragorn was a great guy after all! Aren’t you so glad we had all those scenes establishing him as a total bastard who got where he did exclusively through threats, blackmail, and necromancy, and happily tossed anyone he didn’t need anymore under the bus? Guess all it took was getting those damned elves out of the picture and he became a stand-up guy! Blagh (and speaking of elves, apparently poor Arwen still had to stay married to him for his whole reign, existing as nothing but a sort of movable ornament. The only bright side I can see in this is that she was apparently never forced to bear any of Aragorn’s kids… though part of me wonders if that’s because elves and humans are just biologically incompatible in TLR verse, or she was taking contraceptives…). This does make him one of the only characters in TLR who Yeskov actually managed to write with some degree of moral ambiguity, but it’s hard to appreciate because of how awkwardly it’s handled, making it feel more like Yeskov just couldn’t commit to a consistent direction for the character than anything. And, of course, the “scale of the terror was greatly exaggerated.” This is a weird bit, because canonically, there was no “terror” and Aragorn seems to have been broadly popular from the get-go. Yeskov is the one who made Aragorn a villain… and now he’s also the one arguing that Aragorn was never really a villain and was just slandered by the nobility he supplanted! So Yeskov, instead of debunking Tolkien… is now debunking himself. What. Also, per the endnotes: ““… the scale of terror had been greatly magnified by the nobility’s historians” – a dig at official historians, who had changed the estimates of the number of victims of Ivan the Terrible, Richard the IIIrd, the French Revolution, etc. many times to conform to official propaganda.”
Beyond that… we have a major change from canon. Canonically, Aragorn and Arwen had multiple children, including at least one son, Eldarion (the name of the dynasty, it should be noted, is “Telcontar,” not “Elfstone”). So far as we know, they continued ruling for the next several generations (though Tolkien noted in his letters that it wouldn’t take long before all was not well in Gondor, and the historical figure Aragorn is sometimes considered to resemble, Charlemagne, did not create a lasting unified empire…). That’s what the “official histories” say. Except… we learn here that in this version, Aragorn had no kids, and the throne soon reverted to Faramir’s line (possibly Faramir himself; canonically, Faramir predeceased Aragorn, but it would hardly be Yeskov’s worst offense against Tolkien to swap that around). From which I can only conclude that Faramir’s descendants were complicit in writing themselves out of history (unless another, pro-Aragorn dynasty took power later and did it… but if so, we have no indication of that). What the hells is going on here, Yeskov?
Elven Brutality: 234
Mixed-up Mythos: 236
It is rather hard to analyze the reign of the first Princes of Ithilien, Faramir and Éowyn, in political or economical terms – it appears that they had neither politics nor economics over there, but only a never-ending romantic ballad.
Havaktri: Am… am I the only one who thinks that would get rather dull after a while?
Nearly all the contemporary poets and painters must have contributed to the creation of the captivating image of the Fairy of the Ithilien Woods (weird, isn’t it – Ithilien, the industrial heart of Middle Earth, had forests once!), since Faramir’s modest court had become a sort of a holy shrine to them, and not making a pilgrimage there was the height of bad taste. But even correcting for the unavoidable idealization, one has to admit that Éowyn must have been an exceptionally pure soul.
MG: “The Fairy of the Ithilien Woods” and “an exceptionally pure soul” – yes, I’m sure that’s exactly how Eowyn would want to be remembered, not for anything she did, just for being “pure.” Of course, someone wrote the heroic deed that set her name “among the queens of renown” out of the story and turned it into a punchline, Yeskov. But on another note – Tolkien wrote at length about the natural beauty of Ithilien, and how even when most of it fell under the dominion of Sauron, it nonetheless retained “a disheveled dryad loveliness.” He also wasn’t fond of the destruction of nature to make way for industry, to put it very mildly. So, whether it was intentional or not (and I somehow suspect it was), having Ithilien get paved over to become the “industrial heart of Middle-earth” just feels in incredible poor taste. But hey, Faramir’s descendants apparently managed to do something even Sauron never did and destroyed the beauty of Ithilien! Hope they’re proud of themselves!
Take That, Tolkien!: 70
Thanks to that army of artists we have several portraits of Prince Faramir, too; the best one I know of is reproduced in a monograph entitled Philosophical Agnosticism and its Early Adepts recently printed by the Amon Súl Tower Publishers in Annúminas.
MG: This one is minor, and I might let it slide under other circumstances, but there’s still something weird about taking Faramir, the character the devoutly Catholic Tolkien at least sometimes used as his mouthpiece… and turning him into a notable agnostic. Like making him a Mordor-phile, it just feels like Yeskov is trying to appropriate Tolkien’s mouthpiece for himself, which is weird and feels rather mean-spirited.
Take That, Tolkien!: 71
In any event, none of those images have anything in common with the brass profile gracing the cockades on the mustard-colored berets worn by the commandos of the Ithilien Paratrooper Regiment. By the way, the famous ‘mongooses’ – a special anti-terrorist unit whose soldiers were on every TV screen in Arda recently when they brilliantly freed the passengers of a Vendotenian airliner captured in Minas Tirith airport by the Hannani fanatics from the Northern Mingad Liberation Front – are part of that regiment, as well.
Havaktri: …huh. I can make neither heads nor tails of that. I suppose its inclusion must be important, or else why include it at all, but I just don’t see why…
Faramir had committed exactly one act of foreign policy during his entire reign
Havaktri: Otherwise, he just sat in his study all day and pretended the rest of the world didn’t exist! Quite a foolish thing to do, except the rest of the world played along and pretended he didn’t exist, so it all worked out, really!
– he approved Baron Grager’s request to send him south of the Harnen River to conduct a series of intelligence and sabotage operations he had devised: “… by all indications the fate of Middle Earth will be decided, and soon, in Near Harad.”
MG… right, because we still have to deal with the godawful and horrifically racist “the black people are invading!” plotline. Prepare to be underwhelmed.
Strangely, the subsequent fate of Grager of Aran (often called, not without justification, the savior of Western civilization)
MG: *growls angrily*
remains the stuff of unverified legends and anecdotes. The only thing that is known is the end result of his efforts – the massive rebellion of nomadic Aranians against their Haradi masters, which had led, domino-fashion, to the fall of the entire ominous Harad Empire and its fracturing into an ineffective bunch of warring tribes.
MG: And that’s that. Faramir’s favorite spy brought down the entire Haradrim empire that Yeskov wasted several very racist chapters hyping up as the greatest threat to the world, singlehandedly, in a single paragraph, related secondhand. Welp, so much for that subplot! Sure hope you thought it was worth your time, Yeskov, because I sure didn’t!
Spies Like Us: 301
Nobody knows how this adventurous intellectual had earned his iron-clad authority among the fierce savages of the Harnen savannah. The fairy tale of him accidentally ransoming a son of an Aranian chieftain at a slave market in Khand appears entirely unreliable; the suggestion that his path to power lay through chief priestess Svantatra’s bed is cute and romantic, but people familiar with the realities of the South can only laugh at it.
Havaktri: Oh, but of course! Because surely the idea that a woman might hold the real power, and a man need to secure her favor to get it, is a ludicrous one! *she sighs* Why do I keep feeling offended by this story?
Spies Like Us: 302
Even the manner of the baron’s death is uncertain: either he perished in a lion hunt, or was killed accidentally while mediating a conflict over summer watering-hole rights between two small Aranian clans.
MG: Seriously, what is it with Yeskov and hunting lions? We also have a couple of bits from the endnotes that may (or may not) shed some light on things. “Grager of Aran – a clear and unambiguous reference to Lawrence of Arabia.” Not especially surprising. “Priestess Svantatra – the author’s joke; Svantatra was the name of a right-wing party in India of the 1960’s.” *blankly* Ha ha? Maybe if I knew anything about that priestess and her politics, I might get the joke?
But the fate of Éomer is so incredible that some researchers are still trying to prove that he was a legend rather than a real person.
Havaktri: Perhaps he was a real legend? It’s more likely than you think!
MG: Canonically, I’ll note, Eomer died of old age after a long and successful reign (the second-longest of any king of Rohan, in fact) and passed his throne peacefully to his son, Elfwine. Yeskov has… different plans for him.
Having ascended to the throne of the Mark of Rohan after the Mordorian campaign, he had discovered – to his surprise and acute displeasure – that there was no one left to fight any more, at least in the near Middle Earth. For some time the famed warrior had tried to amuse himself with tournaments, hunts, and amorous adventures, but quickly tired of it all and fell into depression. (Historical veracity impels me to admit that on the battlefields of love this chevalier sans per et sans rеproche was characterized by a total lack of taste combined with a fantastic appetite, so much so that Edoras wags suggested that their monarch’s motto should have been ‘king size fits all.’)
Havaktri: That’s… interesting. *she makes a face* But I wish I hadn’t learned it, even so?
That was when the involuntarily idle king remembered a certain marvelous eastern faith that had led him to victory on the Field of Pelennor.
MG: Ah, yes, the one thing that can reinvigorate a king succumbing to ennui – the prospect of lots of heavenly sex in the afterlife! Because that was just such a wonderful plot point that we just had to revisit!
Havaktri: One would think after all he’d apparently been doing lately, he might be feeling rather… spent. But apparently not!
At first Éomer wanted to make Hakima the state religion of Rohan, but then he came up with a more interesting plan.
At that time the Khand Caliphate was in the middle of an anemic religious war between two sects of Hakimians. It is still uncertain how Éomer decided which one of those was the one true faith. Personally, I suspect that he flipped a coin – the actual dogmatic differences thereof were and are a fertile field for scores of Doctors of Divinity.
Havaktri: Well, I suspect the differences between the sects were likely of great importance to them! Otherwise, why would they be fighting? Perhaps someone close to Eomer wrote down his reasoning, and you might be able to check?
MG: Maybe it’s just me, but there’s just something smug about the way this is phrased, like the sects couldn’t possibly have been fighting over anything important, and Eomer couldn’t possibly have had a genuine reason for picking one over the other!
Be that as it may, he converted his entire Royal Guard, bored silly and ready to fight anyone at all, to that true faith (legend has it that one of Éomer’s knights, when asked how he felt on the path of True Faith, responded guilelessly: “Not bad, praise Tulkas – my boots aren’t leaking”)
Havaktri: *confused* But it’s not that kind of path…
and went South. The king left his cousin-twice-removed as regent in Edoras; sure enough, this plunged the country into dynastic struggles that lasted almost a century and culminated in the War of Nine Castles, which wiped out the entire knighthood of Rohan.
MG: So… are we to take it that Eomer didn’t marry Princess Lothiriel of Dol Amroth and sire a son named Elfwine who succeeded him in TLR-verse, then? I guess the “official histories” just… invented them, and completely rewrote the post-War of the Ring history of Rohan. Just because.
Mixed-up Mythos: 238
To the total astonishment of his companions, once in Khand Éomer actually did renounce his previous life as sinful, gave all his possessions but the sword to the poor, and joined the order of Hannanites (warrior dervishes). Utilizing his commander’s talent in the service of his chosen sect, he crushed the opposition in three decisive battles, ending the twenty-six-year ‘holy war’ in only six months; the faithful Hakimians deservedly dubbed him The Prophet’s Sword, while the schismatics called him God’s Wrath.
MG: …and of course, it took a (white) foreigner showing up out of the blue to do all that, because Eru forbid the Khandians actually produce any competent commanders of their own, right?
At the end of the third battle, when the heretics’ imminent defeat was beyond doubt, Éomer was killed by a stone from an enemy catapult – truly the best death a genuine warrior may wish for.
Havaktri: …no? I mean, personally, I would rather live to a ripe old age, and many of the warriors of my acquaintance would like to do the same… but if one must die in battle, isn’t it better to do down fighting against an actual enemy, rather than being incidentally killed by an impersonal war machine you can’t do anything against? It seems that way to me, at least.
Mixed-up Mythos: 239
The Hakimians promptly canonized him as a holy martyr, so he should have no problems obtaining the companionship of houranies.
MG: So Eomer got his harem in the afterlife after all! *wipes their forehead in relief* Whew! I was worried for a while there, but I’m glad that subplot had a happy ending. /s By the way, we have a few more bits from the endnotes to wrap up this section. “The story of Éomer’s conversion echoes both the story of the sudden conversion of several Viking konungs to Christianity in order to rule Russia’s northern tibes, and the official story of Prince Vladimir the Baptist, who supposedly chose a monotheistic faith to convert his
country to after an open debate in Kiev between the preachers of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam.” Okay, not really seeing the connection beyond the general idea of a ruler converting to a new religion, but whatever. “The War of Nine Castles – a cross between the War of the Roses and the Battle of the Golden Spurs (fought at Courtraj on 7/11/1302 between a Flemish militia and a French mounted expeditionary force, the first battle in which infantry vanquished armored knights).” And finally, “
“the faithful Hakimians … the schismatics” – this mix of Islamic and Greek religious terms is yet another deliberate attempt to prevent a too-firm identification of any entity described in the book with any real-world one.” If that’s the case… I fear Yeskov and/or Markov overestimated their audience. I mean, when I hear the words “schism” and “schismatics,” “those have a Greek etymology” is hardly the first thing that comes to mind, nor would I associate those words with any particular religion. So, if that’s the intended connection… I really don’t think it’s an obvious one. And as for not making the Hakimians a stand-in for any particular real-world religion… with how they whole fic has characterized them as a caricature of Islam, I fear that ship sailed long ago!
This looks like a good place to stop …
Havaktri: It certainly is… but it seems like you’re going on for quite a while longer…
In conclusion, I would like to stress that I have filled the gaps in Tzerlag’s story at my own discretion.
MG: …what. Weren’t you at the beginning of this essay saying that the whole story was based on Tzerlag’s account? Now you’re admitting the whole thing is full of holes you had to fill? All right, new headcanon – our nameless historian found an old account of an orc scout and an Umbaran medic who travelled together for a while as they returned home after the War of the Ring. Being a pro-Mordor revisionist already, he used it as a springboard for this account of “the truth,” dragging in various other conspiracy theories and the names of some obscure historical figures from around the time of the War to make his point, and the actual narrative got buried. Anyone who is influenced by this book and looks up what’s actually in Tzerlag’s story is going to be in for a rude awakening, finding a rather mundane account showing that Tzerlag and Haladdin were tangential players in the War who just wanted to get home safely after their side lost, and almost everything they supposedly did was someone else’s invention.
The old soldier bears no responsibility for my inventions, especially since many will now passionately charge the storyteller – who else? – with deviating from the mainstream version of the events of the end of the Third Age.
Havaktri: Well, when the mainstream version of events do seem much more plausible…
One has to note that the public’s knowledge of those events is usually derived from the literary adaptation of the Western epos – The Lord of the Rings – at best, but often only from the Sword of Isildur TV series and the Galleries of Moria first-person shooter game. I might sonorously remind such critics that The Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors, who had a clear interest in presenting the vanquished in a certain way.
MG: Okay, I have some things to say here. First off… just what is the Red Book of Westmarch, ie, the supposed “source” for LotR, in Tolkien’s conception? It’s a collection of the accounts of the hobbits, mostly centered around their personal experiences of the War and the events that led up to it, and it’s mostly written by the hobbits. The Hobbit is supposed to be based on Bilbo’s earlier memoirs, Bilbo also wrote the first few chapters of what would become LotR, Frodo wrote the bulk of it, and Sam finished it, with some additions from Merry and Pippin. Some scholarly works of Bilbo (Translations from the Elvish, which most fans seem to consider to be the basis for The Silmarillion) were also included, as were some more contemporary histories (in the appendices). But the bulk of LotR is based on in-universe eyewitness accounts. For LotR to have diverged as far from the truth as Yeskov (speaking through this anonymous scholar) is implying, then either the Red Book was written by its stated authors, but they were liars… or it’s a forgery, and it was never what it claimed at all (meanwhile, once again, the part of it that is an actual in-universe history gets ignored entirely, which is a pretty glaring omission, in context). Either way, I think there’s quite a bit of difference between “the source material was biased” and “the source material is a pack of slanderous lies,” and I think Yeskov has crossed it. TLR and LotR simply cannot coexist in the same universe, because their depiction of… everything is too different. They’re not alternate interpretations of the same basic events; if one is true, then the other must be false. And I know which version I prefer…
Also… we don’t know how long it’s been between the War of the Ring and the “modern” period our scholar is writing it, but I’d assume centuries, if not millennia. And so, I’m left wondering at how likely it is that the events of the War would still be such a seemingly continuous presence in popular culture; the way Yeskov writes it, though, it seems to have about as much cultural presence as WWII – which is still in living memory – has in the modern IRL West! I mean, looking at some historical examples, the Greco-Persian Wars were era-defining for the ancient world, but just recently I’ve read a number of posts from historians of that era bemoaning how little modern cultural presence they have aside from Thermopylae (and people mostly know that one from 300, which… yeah). Or take the Punic Wars. If those ended differently, and Carthage, rather than Rome, becomes the dominant empire of the Mediterranean, history looks very different. They were so important to Roman national identity that Carthage-bashing remained a central facet of Roman literature as late as the Imperial period, long after the Carthaginian empire was ashes. But aside from people maybe knowing about Hannibal and that he had elephants, the Punic Wars have pretty much zero presence in modern pop culture. Certainly, neither of those is getting high-profile TV shows or popular video games based on them! Now, admittedly, as an American I might be biased – I know full well the US is often regarded as having a rather myopic view of history (how does that old joke go – a British person thinks a hundred miles is a long distance, and an American thinks a hundred years is a long time?) – but it just doesn’t seem quite convincing to me. Surely the War of the Ring would’ve been supplanted in the zeitgeist by later conflicts? *shrugs*
Mixed-up Mythos: 241
Take That, Tolkien!: 73
Had genocide taken place back then, after the Western victory (and where did those peoples vanish if it hadn’t?), then it’s doubly important to convince everybody, including oneself, that those had been orcs and trolls rather than people.
Havaktri: But I thought the trolls actually called themselves Trolls… or was I somehow mistaken?
MG: Oh, and don’t forget, if the enemy is elves rather than “people,” then their genocide is fine and dandy! But I think Yeskov is making a rather noticeable error, in that he’s conflating the categories of “nonhuman” with “subhuman.” Sure, the text of LotR describes the orcs and trolls as not human. The elves aren’t human either, nor are the dwarves, the ents, the Dunedain are part of the race of Man but clearly aren’t “human” the way we’d use the term, and, oh right, our actual main characters aren’t human either. And, of course, there are plenty of human peoples who fought for Sauron and/or Saruman, that LotR has no problem with portraying as human (as well as orcs who, though antagonistic, aren’t aligned with Mordor). I think Yeskov is angling for a worthwhile point- the role of propaganda in dehumanizing one’s enemies – but, in this specific context, he takes a swerve and misses it.
Oh, and, “where did all these peoples vanish?” Depends on who you’re asking. Per Tolkien, there’s no evidence of an organized “orcish genocide” following the collapse of Mordor. The implication I always got is that, in the long run, the orcs met the same general fate as all the other nonhuman races, including the elves and hobbits – they gradually faded during the Dominion of Men, until there was nothing left of them but scraps of legend. Per Yeskov… they didn’t. Based on this very epilogue, the occupation ended after less than a year, and though Mordor’s population took heavy casualties, in the long term its people survived (with the nomadic “Orocuen” who the orcs were supposedly primarily based on escaping mostly unscathed) and are described as still existing in the present. So, uh, I think our good “revisionist historian” can’t even keep his own story straight.
Mixed-up Mythos: 243
Take That, Tolkien!: 74
Or I could ask them: how often do we find in human history a ruler that would relinquish his power, for free, to some nobody from nowhere (pardon me – a Dúnadan from the North)?
MG: Need I remind you of how Aragorn had to cement himself as a beloved war hero and healer before anyone offered him the throne? And how particular the political situation in Gondor had to be for there to even be an opening (and remember, Aragorn’s ancestor Arvedui placed a claim on the throne of Gondor and was rejected, per the appendices). Don’t confuse LotR with other fantasy stories where some farmboy shows up and gets crowned because he happens to have the right bloodline; Aragorn worked his whole adult life for this!
Yet another subject of immodest curiosity might be the actual payment Elessar Elfstone had to make to the marvelous companions he had acquired on the Paths of the Dead.
Havaktri: Ah… he gave them their freedom and they happily faded away to the afterlife when their job was done, ending millennia of torment? Did they want something else?
Mixed-up Mythos: 244
I mean, summoning the powers of Absolute Evil (for a noble cause, of course) is totally commonplace, he’s neither the first nor the last; but for those powers to meekly revert back to nothingness after doing their job without asking anything in return sounds highly dubious. At least I’ve never heard of such a thing.
MG: Yeah, no. The Oathbreakers weren’t “evil,” absolute or otherwise. Per canon, when Isildur and Anarion founded Gondor, they made alliance with the King of the White Mountains, who promised to fight with them should they need it. When Sauron returned, the King, who feared him greatly, refused aid, and because he broke the terms of his oath Isildur was able to curse him and his soldiers to never rest until they fulfilled it. Aragorn, as Isildur’s heir, was the holder of the curse, and was able to use it to summon the Oathbreakers to fight against Mordor. Once they’d done so, he held their oath fulfilled and let them go. Havaktri is right, their “payment” was their freedom, and they neither needed nor wanted anything else. Nor did TLR!Aragorn make any “payment” of any sort to his Secret Guard – they were his slaves, nothing else, and they didn’t meekly fade away, they were destroyed when magic left Middle-earth. Despite his earlier words of praise for Aragorn, weirdly enough, it just feels like our “revisionist historian” is deliberately phrasing things to cast him in the worst light possible, no matter how little sense it makes.
Take That, Tolkien!: 75
Or I can … I can, but I won’t. Whatever for? I have no desire to engage in this sort of polemics.
Havaktri: *glancing back at the whole rest of the fic* Really? The evidence would seem to say otherwise… unless it’s a most clever diversion!
In other words, guys, live and let live. In our case it translates to this: you don’t have to listen to me spin tall tales if you don’t like them.
THE END
MG: And so, Yeskov ends The Last Ringbearer… with a variation of the old “don’t like, don’t read” chestnut. Except instead of posting it at the start of the fic… he posts it at the end, where you’d have to read the whole fic first to get to it! And I can’t get past the hypocrisy of “live and let live,” either, when Yeskov’s just devoted approximately 150,000 words to a glorified spitefic about a book he clearly didn’t like. I mean, it would clearly be hypocritical of me to denounce him for that on principle, considering what we do around here… but still, what’s fair is fair. If Yeskov can dedicate tens of thousands of words to tearing down Tolkien, he can hardly complain when I do the same to him.
Anyway, that is indeed the conclusion of the actual story of The Last Ringbearer. And, IMO, its biggest problem is that it proves the entire “moral dilemma” of the climax pointless. Haladdin destroyed the Palantir and removed magic from the world… and the world didn’t end. However long after TLR our “revisionist historian” is writing from, Arda is clearly still there. In fact, things progressed exactly as Sharya-Rana said they would, the elves are gone so thoroughly people seem to think they were a myth at best (the epilogue doesn’t even bother specifying their, or the wizards’, final fate), and even though Mordor was defeated, the ideas it ostensibly stood for still ended up triumphing across Middle-earth. The old world burned in the fires of industry… the forests fell. And based on our nameless historian’s references, all the major OCs Yeskov introduced went on to become well-known historical figures, and the events of the aftermath of the War of the Ring were completely rewritten to make sense with TLR and not LotR, even up to changing the fates of major personages to bring them more in line with how Yeskov characterized them. The whole thing just feels like it’s rubbing it in – you thought you won, but really we did, and you’re too stupid to even realize it. Not to mention the totally gratuitous swipes at aspects of modern culture Yeskov doesn’t like.
Of course, we also have the in-universe “historian” admitting that his primary source was Tzerlag (who wasn’t present for, and had no way of knowing about, large chunks of the story) and everything Tzerlag didn’t include directly, our “historian” made up. Which just seems to underscore the idea that this isn’t actual history, it’s a historical conspiracy theory by a guy sore the side he liked lost… but Yeskov still seems to expect us to take this seriously. Ugh. What a mess. But we’re not done yet. First off, we still have the appendices to go, in which Yeskov will share with us his own thoughts on why he wrote TLR, as well as his opinions on Tolkien and the fantasy genre in general. Then it will be time for my final thoughts, which will get their own post. We’ll see you next time to get that started! Our final counts stand at:
Age of Anachronisms: 182
The Dung Ages: 96
Elven Brutality: 234
Linguistic Confusion: 75
Mixed-up Mythos: 245
Mordor the Magnificent: 115
Not So Magnificent: 51
Spies Like Us: 302
Take That, Tolkien!: 76
no subject
Date: 2024-05-27 06:52 pm (UTC)The story of Éomer’s conversion echoes both the story of the sudden conversion of several Viking konungs to Christianity in order to rule Russia’s northern tibes
Norhthern Russia? Wasn't that region mostly pagan until forcibly converted to Christianity during Vladimir's reign?
and the official story of Prince Vladimir the Baptist, who supposedly chose a monotheistic faith to convert his country to after an open debate in Kiev between the preachers of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam
Ah, the story which details how Vladimir chose the new official religion for his country totally parallels the story of pseudo-Eomer chosing his religious sect for unknown reason and leaving his country.
Okay, not really seeing the connection beyond the general idea of a ruler converting to a new religion, but whatever.
There is also relationsips with multiple women both Vladimir and pseudo-Eomer had, so there is another parralel. Our arachno-paleontologist author sure posesses the great power of comparative historiography ;) It's just as great as his deconstruction of racist tropes ;)
Yeskov: People often portray their enemies as non-human monsters. I should portray Orcs and Trolls as humans to point this out.
Also Yeskov: Anyway, aren't those elves inhuman monsters? Aren't those Muslim-coded people fanatics? Aren't those African-coded people savages? Isn't Gondorian colonialism cool? Isn't American political correctnes hilarious?
In our case it translates to this: you don’t have to listen to me spin tall tales if you don’t like them.
Yeskov: Tolkien's story isn't scientific enough with its giant spiders and white-washed historical events. I should write a scientifically plausible version of the events.
Also Yeskov: Anyway, this book is an in-universe retelling of a retelling with gaps filled by the storyteller's imagination. Don't like - don't listen, but don't stop me from lying!
no subject
Date: 2024-05-29 12:42 am (UTC)*shrugs* When I quote the endnotes, I'm just c&ping. Your guess is as good as mine what Yeskov and/or Markov meant about some of them.
There is also relationsips with multiple women both Vladimir and pseudo-Eomer had, so there is another parralel. Our arachno-paleontologist author sure posesses the great power of comparative historiography ;) It's just as great as his deconstruction of racist tropes ;)
Yeskov: People often portray their enemies as non-human monsters. I should portray Orcs and Trolls as humans to point this out.
Also Yeskov: Anyway, aren't those elves inhuman monsters? Aren't those Muslim-coded people fanatics? Aren't those African-coded people savages? Isn't Gondorian colonialism cool? Isn't American political correctnes hilarious?
*applauds*
Yeskov: Tolkien's story isn't scientific enough with its giant spiders and white-washed historical events. I should write a scientifically plausible version of the events.
Also Yeskov: Anyway, this book is an in-universe retelling of a retelling with gaps filled by the storyteller's imagination. Don't like - don't listen, but don't stop me from lying!
I'm actually going to include a section in my final thoughts about how TLR can't really commit to whether it's deconstructing LotR (ie, taking apart its tropes and exploring whether its heroes were really good and its villains really evil, etc.) or demythifying LotR (ie, pulling out the supernatural elements and trying to construct a historically plausible version of events). And that inability to commit to a direction hurts the story and worldbuilding a lot.