09 May 2012

Gandalf the Oppressor?

From Damien G. Walter’s unfathomably headlined article “Is science fiction literature's first international language?” in the Guardian:
Russian SF has a long and well-documented history as an outlet for political perspectives that were otherwise repressed. But it is as a critique of the values of western capitalism that the genre has recently caught attention.

The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Eskov is set in the Middle Earth of JRR Tolkien, immediately after the climatic [sic] battle of The Return of the King, and has recently been issued in its second edition translation free online, despite objections from the Tolkien estate. The book reimagines Lord of the Rings as a history written by the victors, with Mordor recast as an emergent industrial nation crushed under the heel of a war-mongering western alliance lead by Gondor, and Gandalf described as "engineering a final solution to the Mordorian problem".

If this mirrors a large proportion of European / Russian history it seems entirely valid, given how easily exactly the same reading can be made of Tolkien's fantasy epic.
Now is this really a critique of Lord of the Rings or a rip-off of it? Or does a rip-off constitute a form of political critique of such a dominant intellectual property?

What does it mean to identify with orcs, even if you present them as misrepresented? Is the “war-mongering western alliance” that Eskov and Walter see the Axis or NATO?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There have been numerous unauthorized Tolkien sequels and reimaginings over the past two decades. Probably the bst known one was by Nik Perumov.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Perumov

Brian Floca said...

It's nice to see the Oz poster that I illustrated show up here, thank you!

As for this particular post, it calls to mind a McSweeney's piece from a few years ago:

UNUSED AUDIO COMMENTARY BY HOWARD ZINN AND NOAM CHOMSKY, RECORDED SUMMER 2002 FOR THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (PLATINUM SERIES EXTENDED EDITION) DVD. PART ONE.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/unused-audio-commentary-by-howard-zinn-and-noam-chomsky-recorded-summer-2002-for-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-platinum-series-extended-edition-dvd-part-one

Thanks again.

Brian Floca

J. L. Bell said...

Thanks for the links!

The existence of Tolkien fanfiction is no surprise, nor the fact that in the wide-open early 1990s a Russian press was willing to publish a good example, regardless of western copyrights. (I remember seeing some unauthorized editions of books I’d edited around that time. Strange cover images!) The conflation of national and borrowed myths in this particular Middle Earth rewriting that caught my eye.