LotR Rewritten From a Mordor Perspective

Hugh Pickens writes writes "It's been said that history is written by the winners but Laura Miller writes in Salon about a counterexample as she reviews a new version of Lord of the Rings. The Last Ring-bearer was published to acclaim in Russia by Kirill Yeskov, a paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life. Yeskov performs essentially the same feat in his book. The Last Ring-bearer is set during and after the end of the War of the Ring and told from the perspective of the losers. In Yeskov's retelling, available in translation as a free download, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science 'destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men' and Aragorn is depicted by Yeskov as a ruthless Machiavellian schemer who is ultimately the puppet of his wife, the elf Arwen. Sauron's citadel Barad-dur is, by contrast, described as 'that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.'"

Comments

Great book

[KiloByte]

It's a great book, I've read it ten years ago, in the Polish translation.

Quoting Wikipedia: "fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English". Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?

Re:Great book

[snaggen]

exactly! Without copyright nothing of any quality would ever be written. It would all just be the cheap amateurish crap like shakespear and mozart. Thank god for copyright so we can enjoy good culture like die hard 4 and Britney Spears.

Re:Great book

[vadim_t]

Copyright is needed, but it's currently far too long.

Tolkien has been dead and buried for 38 years now. His estate is preventing the translation from being published for what reason exactly? Where's the benefit to society from that?

Re:Great book

[thijsh]

Oh, I know the answers: 'greed' and 'none'. I shall now claim this free PDF as my prize...

Re:Great book

[Jason Levine]

I agree. Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 and 1955. According to current copyright law (assuming no extensions are passed, which is a huge assumption), the copyright will end in 2049/2050. It's been under copyright for about 56 years already and still has about 39 to go. I know the Tolkien estate profits off of Lord of the Rings, but I don't see how that encourages new works. Yes, we got the LoTR movies, but those could have been made if LoTR passed into the public domain. The only people who would lose out would be the children/grandchildren of JRR Tolkien.

Of course, even worse is Gone With The Wind. It was published in 1936 and is still considered to be under copyright protection 75 years later. We need to wait until 2031 until it enters the Public Domain. Meanwhile, the author, Margaret Mitchell, has been dead for 62 years. Her children (if she had any, I can't find any reference to kids) would be grown up by now with grandkids of their own. Copyright was not intended to be a paycheck for your great-grandkids.

A fair copyright term would be 20 years plus a one time 20 year renewal. (And I'm being generous as I think the ideal would be 14/14.) Under this, Lord of the Rings would have passed into the public domain in 1994/1995. In fact, under this copyright term length, anything published before 1971 would be in the public domain. How many works published prior to 1971 create substantial income for their authors (or their estates)? How many languish in obscurity because no publishing house wants to re-release them and small presses can't secure the rights to print them? How many derivative works could be made from stories that are over 40 years old (thus bringing the originals back into the public light)?

Re:Great book

[Guido von Guido]

Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.

Which is why Hamlet and King Lear, among other plays, are thought to be reworkings of older plays.

At the time England didn't have copyright laws. They did have the Stationer's Company, which was the printers' guild. In theory once a printer entered a work into the Stationer's Company Register, other printers weren't able to print a copy of that work. In practice, this wasn't well enforced, and publishers often printed works registered to other printers. The first actual copyright law didn't come until the 18th century.

Re:Great book

[Compaqt]

>Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.

Well, I'm no expert, but this guy from Duke says Shakespeare was written before the "Statute of Anne" or any other copyright law:

http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2011/02/18/shakespeare-and-copyright/

Re:Great book

[bunratty]

Mozart's works were generally commissioned by the wealthy. Without copyright, we'd likely go back to a patronage system, and as a result we'd have significantly fewer books and movies. We'd have theater and music, because actors and musicians could charge audiences to see shows. We'd likely have television because broadcasters could keep shows from being copied until they were shown with ads. Books and movies, however, could be copied and distributed without money going back to the people who produced them.

Re:Great book

[vadim_t]

The original owner of a work may be dead, but the franchise lives on. Shouldn't the franchise holders be protected from losing their investment to copy-cats?

Why should they be? My idea is simply reducing the length. It would be simply the question of planning to make a profit within 14-30 years. And if you can't make a profit in 14 years they'll probably never make it, anyway.

If George Lucas died today, should Star Wars immediately become public domain, even when there's a huge MMO and lots of movie memorabilia with full licensing and lots of money still to be made by the people who paid for the right to do so?

No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.

Copyright should be much shorter, but it should last the same whether the creator lives or dies.

Re:Great book

[shikaisi]

I wouldn't want to abolish it, but I'd like to make it much shorter.

I totally agree.

Oh, sorry, you were talking about copyright. I thought you meant Lord of the Rings.

Re:Great book

[Haeleth]

Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.

Which is why Hamlet and King Lear, among other plays, are thought to be reworkings of older plays.

And, in the case of Hamlet, the earliest edition is widely believed to be an unauthorized copy -- basically the 17th-century equivalent of a camcorder. There is no record whatsoever of anyone ever being sued or punished for that.

Re:Great book

[Myopic]

You have made a moral argument for copyright, which I reject. I don't pay the workmen who built my house each year that I live in it; General Motors didn't get a cut when I bought my used Jeep Liberty vehicle; I don't pay the Ginsu company a royalty every time I cut meat with its knives -- and I reject a moral argument that I "should" do so in any of those cases. For intellectual works, I feel similarly. I get up every morning and make my money by performing my craft, which is software programming, which is just like almost everybody makes their money, for performances.

The arguments in favor of copyright which I accept are practical arguments. I want the best ongoing media creation I can have, and I support whatever laws help me get it. Some intellectual property doesn't lend itself to performance-style income, such as long-term-use-with-no-support software, or literary novels, or blockbuster movies. Because I like software, novels and movies, I support laws that help me get those things.

The question, then, is not what do we "owe" the authors (answer: nothing) but rather what system do we need to encourage them. Do we need copyrights that last longer than two human lifetimes? I don't think we do. Do we need copyrights that preclude derivative works? I don't think we do. How about preventing collage and sampling? I don't think so. I think we can have all the benefits of copyright, and much less of the drawbacks, if we change the balances in the copyright system.

Banewreaker

[ShakaUVM]

If y'all are interested in this kind of fiction, Jacqueline Carey did a really good duology on it in her Banewreaker series.

She's mostly known for steamy fantasy/romance novels (the Kushiel series), but she does a very good take on a LOTR-analogue world in which the Sauron equivalent is shown as the good guys. Or not good guys, precisely, but as more or less a guy wanting to be left alone, with the Gandalf-equivalent instigating the "good" races to destroy him in his Mordorish fortress. You really end up hating the good guys by the end of the series. =)

I highly recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Banewreaker-Sundering-Book-Jacqueline-Carey/dp/0765305216

Re:Banewreaker

[ShakaUVM]

>>The WW2 allies were hardly virtuous, what with fire-bombing of innocent civilians

It's not that simple.

Hamburg, for example, was partly in retaliation for Coventry earlier in the war. But Hitler only took the gloves off and started targeting civilians after the RAF started dropping bombs on German civilians. Why did the RAF target civilians, when the (evil) Nazis were refraining? Because the Luftwaffe had radar navigation, but the RAF thought they had the skill to astronavigate accurately enough to put bombs onto military targets. They didn't.

Then you could get into the whole Battle of the Beams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams), and whether it was ethical to redirect German bombers onto English farmhouses...

>>throwing minority Americans into death camps for the crime of having german/japanese grandparents

I don't think you know what the words "death camps" actually mean.

Re:Banewreaker

[tophermeyer]

You're about to be modded troll for this bit:

throwing minority Americans into death camps for the crime of having german/japanese grandparents.

It's untrue as it is offensive. My grandfather, an off the boat German immigrant from the early 30's, joined the US Marines and fought during the war. His family was not rounded up into camps.

And death camps? Seriously? While the Japanese internment camps were indeed an atrocious violation of basic civil rights, they were limited to the West coast, and had living conditions a fair sight better than some other contemporary 'death' camps.

I get your point, soldiers on both sides did some pretty horrible things. But implying that we were not better than governments engaged in active genocide is inflammatory. And as an American, incredibly offensive.

Life imitates art

[NoZart]

If that is not the best practical "in soviet russia..." joke, i don't know what is.

Re:Sounds about right

[varcher]

That's the classical fantasy/SF duality.

Quick-n-dirty how-to distinguish fantasy from science-fiction: It's not about elves vs spaceships. It's about conservatism vs progressivism.

A fantasy book is about preserving/restoring/keeping the old order. Calamity befalls, and it's up to the heroes to repair the world. The tyrant has obtained absolute power, and your task is to topple it and restore the rightful ruler(s). The gods are angry because the people have strayed from the "path" and things go suddendly to hell.

The sci-fi book is transformative. Change happens, and the world progresses. The old ways are discarded, the new ways begins (with their usual lot of gut-wrenching change) and life is transformed.

(and then, you have modern hi-tech thrillers, in which big change happens, except it has no lasting consequences whatsoever. But that's a different topic)

So, intrinsically, the Ring War in which Frodo and his merry band wins is fantasy. The Ring War in which Mordor wins would have been sci-fi.

Re:Sounds about right

[sourcerror]

Set against that on the sci-fi side, Star Wars fits perfectly into your description of fantasy.

A lot of people think (me included) that Star Wars is fantasy.

Re:Sounds about right

[Nimey]

Wrong. The difference between SF and Fantasy is that SF *could* happen - its setting high tech. Fantasy *can't* happen - its setting requires magic of some sort.

Why do some people have to inject their politics into everything?

Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the Oz Wicked Witch

[Paul Fernhout]

When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.

Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives.
    http://www.rakontu.org/

Re:Sounds about right

[amnesia_tc]

And any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So fantasy is actually the most sci-fi.

I tried to read it

[DNS-and-BIND]

I tried to read this a while back. I was really excited because I always was more interested in the lives of the Orcs than reading about the hicks of the Shire. My favorite scene in LotR is the two orcs talking to each other and expressing a desire to stuff this Mordor stuff and get lost in the world somewhere distant, where they can waylay passing travelers. It's the closest thing the Orcs get to being treated as characters. I was really disappointed with The Last Ringbearer. It really didn't make any sense, maybe because it was translated? I skipped ahead several times before just giving up. I had really wanted to like this book but it just didn't work.

Of course, the whole thing ignores the fact that Sauron was evil, and he committed many evil acts in his thousands of years of existence prior to the events of LotR. Sauron was a total sociopath control freak. If he were alive today he'd be in charge of a corporation poisoning the public for profit. The entire point of his forging of The One Ring was slavery. Sauron crossed the moral event horizon and went full-on evil when he helped Morgoth destroy the land of Almaren, and that was in the First Age. Honestly, this review tells us a lot more about the reviewer that it does anything. Sample quote: "The novelist Michael Moorcock has attacked Middle-earth as a childishly rose-tinted vision of the Merrie Olde England that never was, as well as willfully blind to the hardships and injustice of preindustrial and feudal societies." WTF? It's a fantasy novel, people. It's something you read when you're not reading real books. Oh. I see. The reviewer has an axe to grind. "So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the Church in disguise." Yeah, surprise surprise, lady. No wonder she sees racial demonization, it's what she's looking for. Yet another writer who can't write anything original and instead can only parody others. That's the greatest failing of The Last Ringbearer. If the author had something to say, great! Say it. But jeez it's pathetic when the only thing you can do is attach another author's name to your work while criticizing the shit out of it. Am I the only one who is utterly sick to death of sequels, rewrites, spinoffs, and reimaginings? I suppose so if that's what everyone is buying. Can't argue with the market.