Lord of the Rings rewritten from Mordor's side

[beer good]

LotR Rewritten From a Mordor Perspective - Slashdot

"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.'"

 

[sparkchaser]

Oh, wow. That sounds awesome.

 

[direstraits]

Jacqueline Carey attempted something similar as well, to tell the Rings story from the perspective of the bad guys. The Sundering, set in a very different world, but deliberately familiar to the Tolkien's classic, asks the question - when seen from the other side, who exactly is the bad guy?

The books are:
1. Banewreaker: Volume I of The Sundering
2. Godslayer: Volume II of The Sundering

 

[beer good]

Hmmm, I didnt know that. I like what I've read of Carey, I'll have to hunt those down.

 

[Fantasy Moon]

I found a wonderfully written fanfiction that told the story of the children of Hurin from the perspective of Hurin and Morgoth that I'm reading. But I'm not jumping on the chance for this retelling... I think I shall wait and see what others think of it.

But the Carey books sound interesting.

 

[beer good]

I'm about 150 pages into The Last Ringbearer and I'm probably about to drop it. It's not really bad, he gets a lot of mileage out of the idea of the victors writing history, and I love that he takes Tolkien to task both for his luddism and his slight racism without making a huge deal of it; of course Orcs and Easterlings are people too however pure the blood of the Men Of The West might be, of course it's a bit iffy that the scouring of the Shire always came across as "let's never leave the middle ages". But at the same time, Yeskov is a lot happier to bash people with the Message Bat than even Tolkien was, and on a whole it's just far too fond of rewriting Tolkien's story without writing his own. Plus, so far he's chickified Eowyn a lot more than Jackson did.

Still thinking about reading Carey's books, though.