masterghandalf

The Fellowship of the King: Volume One of The War of the Rings

By Demetrious Polychron

Alternate Title: Lord of the WTH
SPORKER: MasterGhandalf

SUMMARY

Two decades after the end of the War of the Ring, preparations for celebrating Elanor Gamgee’s twenty-second birthday are interrupted by the arrival of the wizard Alatar, who comes with a warning – dark forces are once again stirring in Middle-earth, and hobbits will once again be called upon to stand against them. But while the story starts off straightforwardly enough… it ends up going off the rails very quickly, displaying a quite shocking lack of understanding not only of Tolkien’s works, but perhaps of basic literary competence itself. Heroes will fall, villains will rise, flashbacks will be had, and Middle-earth will stand on the brink of cataclysm… and if you expect any of it to make a single lick of sense, you will be sorely mistaken.

Introduction

The notion of writing a sequel to The Lord of the Rings is nothing new; after all, the One Ring may have been destroyed, the reign of Sauron overthrown, and the Third Age ended, but the tale of Middle-earth still goes on. Tolkien himself toyed with the idea, briefly working on a sequel he gave the tentative title The New Shadow, which would have apparently been set in Gondor during the reign of Aragorn’s son Eldarion and involved a cult worshipping the Dark Lords attempting to seize power. However, Tolkien seems to have quickly decided that the story was depressing and, in his own words, “sinister,” didn’t really add much to the overall narrative of the Legendarium and wasn’t worth doing; he abandoned it after about half a chapter. Said fragment can be found in The Peoples of Middle-earth and is mostly a curiosity, though I’ve always wondered what might have happened if Tolkien had returned to the premise before his death and found a story actually worth telling there. What could have been…

Other people have tried their hands at it too, in various forms. Quite aside from numerous fanfics, some of those works made their way to publication in various ways. Perhaps the most notorious – until now – was Dennis McKiernan’s Silver Call duology and his Mithgar series more generally, originally conceived as a fanfic about the reclamation of Moria by the dwarves in the Fourth Age. He, or his editor, apparently actually contacted the Tolkien Estate to get their permission to publish it and was denied, so he ended up reworking it into an original setting. Bizarrely, his new publisher wanted the backstory (ie, LotR itself) and had him write and publish that first; the result was the Iron Tower trilogy, perhaps the most blatant and redundant LotR clone in all of modern fantasy, even beating out The Sword of Shannara for the position because, well, in most respects it literally is LotR with the serial numbers filed off. McKiernan would go on to be a fairly prominent fantasy writer in his own right with the Mithgar novels, though he was never able to shake the (accurate) reputation of being nothing more than Tolkien-lite writing in Middle-earth-lite and a cautionary tale against making a career out of being an inferior copy of another author rather than finding your own voice; fairly prominent in the nineties and early 2000s, he’s mostly fallen off the radar these days and AFAIK hasn’t published anything in more than ten years. Harry Turtledove reportedly wrote a fairly elaborate fanfic about Fourth Age Gondor that he ended up reworking massively and making the basis of his Videssos series (Videssos itself is also a pretty clear expy of the Byzantine Empire, suggesting that Turtledove, unlike Yeskov, actually understood Gondor’s real-world inspirations). Over in Russia, Nik Perumov actually did manage to publish his own LotR sequel trilogy, Ring of Darkness, without needing to file the serial numbers off (due to the same lax copyright laws that let Last Ringbearer squeak through, apparently); unlike TLR it’s never been translated into English, officially or otherwise, that I’ve been able to tell (though if anyone knows otherwise, I’d love to read it, if only out of morbid curiosity) and the bits and pieces I’ve read about it make it sound pretty wild. It also apparently turns into a tie-in to Perumov’s own original epic fantasy series in the end, which takes some gall, if nothing else. And recent years have seen a bunch of variations on “what happens after the epic fantasy quest is done?” type narratives, where the usually unseen original quest tends to take at least some inspiration from LotR even if they’re not based on it directly.

And that’s when we come to Demetrious Polychron and The Fellowship of the King. If you’ve heard of this one, it’s almost certainly because of the absolutely wild story surrounding its publication and the aftermath thereof. Like McKiernan before him, Polychron apparently reached out to the Tolkien Estate to get his work officially published with their approval, and like McKiernan, they told him to take a hike. Also like McKiernan, he went ahead and published it anyway. Unlike McKiernan, he didn’t actually bother to dress it up as original fiction first, which means that yes, this is literal, actual fanfic that the author was dumb enough to sell for profit without the IP-holder’s permission. But it gets better! See, Polychron also ended up suing both the Tolkien Estate and Amazon, claiming they’d ripped his work off for The Rings of Power without his permission. That, predictably, did not end well for him. Polychron decisively lost the case and was ordered to destroy all his physical and digital copies of the fic. Thus, “The War of the Rings,” apparently projected as a seven-book epic, was quite decisively nipped in the bud, because its author couldn’t resist antagonizing people with much better lawyers than him (and who also apparently never realized that AO3 and FF.net exist for a reason). But even that is not the end, because, in a seeming final effort to add insult to injury and keep Polychron from ever profiting from the damned thing, the Tolkien Estate’s lawyers entered the entire fic as evidence in the trial… which also means that as a court doc it’s still available for viewing online and may be found here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.881511/gov.uscourts.cacd.881511.37.6.pdf. Thus, it seemed it might deserve a sporking, and so I decided to look it over and see if it did…

…and I was not prepared. Because somehow among all the talk of Polychron’s plagiarism, legal woes, and outright stupidity, the actual content of Fellowship of the King got lost in the shuffle. And it is a trip. It starts as a fairly typical, if awkwardly written, LotR next-gen fic, with Elanor Gamgee and some of her friends getting approached by one of the Blue Wizards and drawn into a quest to save Middle-earth from a new threat. Nothing terribly original, but about what you’d expect, right? But after the prologue and first chapter it very quickly goes off the rails. The fic is practically overflowing with Rings of Power, both canon and original, and there are so many of them it’s literally impossible to keep them all straight, if you cared (the most powerful of which being the true “Master-ring of Middle-earth” which that dummy Sauron had to rip off to make the One Ring). There are at least (depending on how you count) six separate Big Bad-tier villains running around, almost all of them little more than slightly different flavors of would-be evil overlords, generally sucking up each other’s air and making it impossible to take any of them seriously as the big threat. There are a whole bunch of heroes, too, and Polychron doesn’t manage them nearly as well as Tolkien, and it’s often hard to tell just who is doing what or why. While the fic itself isn’t as weirdly horny as, say, Newcomb or Greenwood (I don’t really get the sense Polychron was drooling over his own writing the way I do with them, at least) the characters sure are, especially the villains, with sex as a motivation coming up everywhere and the word “lust” – not always, but often, in explicitly sexual contexts - almost always being capitalized like a proper noun (who let the homunculus in here?). Time and distance feel weirdly compressed and distorted, with characters zooming around Middle-earth at the speed of plot, while also being weirdly ignorant of what’s going on right next to them. While Polychron is clearly familiar with some fairly obscure elements from the History of Middle-earth series, he also makes some rather baffling changes to the setting’s lore for no particular discernable purpose, while a number of canon characters get derailed in confusing ways both major and minor. The fic has a bad case of The Edge, but Polychron’s attempts at injecting darkness mostly just end up feeling like he’s trying too hard without hitting the mark. In short, if Last Ringbearer was (supposedly) a deconstruction of LotR written by someone who didn’t understand LotR as well as he’d thought… FotK is (supposedly) a tribute to LotR written by someone who didn’t understand it as well as he thought. And that’s a very different, but equally terrible, thing.

And, for the record, it has very little overlap with anything Amazon did in Rings of Power, making the lawsuit even more stupid and ridiculous than it already was. The fic does feature a multi-chapter flashback to the Second Age and the forging of the Rings of Power with Galadriel as the primary POV character… but let’s just say Amazon and Polychron go very different directions with those basic events.

I’ll be including the following counts in this sporking, with the option of adding more as it continues:

Bigger, Louder, More!: Whenever the stakes are raised ridiculously high compared to canon.
Expansion-Pack World:Whenever Polychron adds new nations or regions to Middle-earth, especially if they just don’t fit on the map.
Feel My Edge: For whenever Polychron includes some element that seems to exist solely to be edgy.
Happy Ending Override: For when it really seems like Sauron’s defeat did absolutely nothing to improve anything in Middle-earth.
Linguistic Confusions: Borrowed from TLR, with the same meaning; for any time Polychron messes up Tolkien’s languages.
Loremaster’s Headache: Whenever Polychron blatantly overwrites something from Tolkien’s canon.
Pervy Hobbit Fanciers: For whenever characters seem weirdly obsessed with sex or sexuality, named for the surprising frequency with which (underage, by hobbit standards) Elanor gets hit on by much older men.
Plot-Induced Stupidity: Borrowing from my Newcomb sporkings. Whenever characters are inexplicably dumb just to allow plot to happen.
Rings-a-palooza: Whenever a character randomly turns out to have a Ring of Power, canon or otherwise, or a random new Ring of Power is introduced.
Take That, Tolkien!: Borrowing the name from Last Ringbearer but using it a bit differently here; this is for whenever Tolkien’s characters are presented as wrong, Polychron’s characters as better, or we get a condescending explanation about what’s “really” going on.
Traveling at the Speed of Plot: For whenever characters just happen to show up where the plot needs them to be, no matter how improbably, especially if they inexplicably do so unnoticed.
The Unfair Sex: This fic is weirdly sexist; it’s nowhere near Newcomb bad, but a lot of the female characters are portrayed in weird, uncomfortable or unflattering ways. For women being portrayed negatively for no purpose or being blamed on starting major conflicts.

And now, dear friends, it’s time to meet the sporkers who will be joining us on this journey! Since LotR is the archetypal high fantasy story, and FotK tries (and fails) to be LotR but moar, I decided to use some characters I’ve been kicking around a while. They’re OCs I’ve wanted to use in an adaptation of The War of the Burning Sky, an epic third-party D&D campaign I might get around to writing someday. For those unfamiliar, WotBS is an epic storyline that plays out across twelve linked adventures in an original setting. Shortly before the story begins, Drakkus Coaltongue, the seemingly immortal emperor of Ragesia, has been mysteriously assassinated and the Torch of the Burning Sky, the artifact that was the source of his power, has been stolen. Now, Coaltongue’s two closest supporters – Leska, head of the Ragesian Inquisition and newly crowned empress, and the elf king Shaaladel, ruler of the allied nation of Shahalesti – are preparing to go to war, while various third parties scheme to take advantage of the conflict from the sidelines. The PCs are a group of rebels from a Ragesian-occupied border city who get pulled into things when the conflict erupts into outright war, and obviously the situation, and their involvement, escalates from there. WotBS is very much designed to be an epic high fantasy war campaign in the vein of LotR, so, well… it seemed appropriate! We’ll get a chance to know them better as the spork progresses, but for now, let’s have a brief introduction to:

Kasanari, elf druid, an exile from a fallen homeland:

Tharkos, half-orc soldier, a renegade from an empire that is no longer what it once was:

Thalia, a tiefling with a connection to strange and ancient powers, who has seen things mortal eyes probably shouldn’t have:

Brother Sonam, monk of the West Wind, who has traveled far from his homeland on a mission of his own:

Shade, half elf thief, rebel and all-around malcontent, hiding from her past:

With this number of sporkers, I’ll end up rotating them around, so we shouldn’t see all of them at once on a single chapter. And with all of that out of the way, it is time to begin our journey! I’ll note that some parts of this fic contain potentially triggering content, and as usual I’ll warn where appropriate.

Table of Contents

CHAPTERS

Front Matter

Prologue

BOOK I
Chapter One: The Night Before a Party
Chapter Two: The Shadow of the Future
Chapter Three: The Sundering of the Gardners
Chapter Four: On the Road to Gondor
Chapter Five: An Unforgettable Entrance
Chapter Six: An Unexpected Meeting
Chapter Seven: Betrayal at the Havens
Chapter Eight: The Fall of the Prancing Pony
Chapter Nine: Corruption (Part One, Part Two)
Chapter Ten: Absolution
Chapter Eleven: The Wizard's Apprentice
Chapter Twelve: The Silence that Devours

BOOK II
Chapter One: The Daughters of Rohan
Chapter Two: I Dreamed of Numenor (Part One, Part Two)
Chapter Three: Before the Fall (Part One, Part Two)
Chapter Four: The Forging of the Ring (Part One, Part Two)
Chapter Five: Weathertop
Chapter Six: The Treasury of Elendil
Chapter Seven: The Coming of the Collocoll
Chapter Eight: Ulbandi
Chapter Nine: The Council of Glorfindel
Chapter Ten: The Fall of Gondolin Refounded
Chapter Eleven: Secret Meetings
Chapter Twelve: The Dragons are Coming