The Last Ringbearer

The Last Ringbearer

Nor is this an idle question. For example, I’ve read Yankee at King Arthur’s Court prior to
the legends themselves, and Mark Twain had forever poisoned my perception of this part of
the global cultural heritage with his vitriol: “Now Sir Kay arose, and began to fire up on his
history-mill with me for fuel. It was time for me to feel serious, and I did.” (And brothers
Strugatzky made it even worse with their “comrade Merlin” and “fair sir Melnichenko” …)
Honestly – cross my heart and hope to die – the last thing I want to do is to poison some
teenager’s future experience of Tolkien. Looking for a place for The Last Ringbearer in the
long row of literary apocrypha, I dare place it next to my personal favorite Rozenkrantz and
Gildenstern Are Dead (the movie, not the play). An exquisitely paradoxical post-modern
game Tom Stoppard played against the Shakespearean backdrop is precisely the relationship
with the source Text that I sought to accomplish. Whether I have succeeded is for readers to
judge.

Now for the biggest question which I get asked constantly: “What was it about the world of
The Lord of the Rings that had so attracted you, enough to make you want to write in it?”
Briefly, I was attracted by a logical challenge to come up with a consistent explanation for
several obvious contradictions in the image of Middle Earth that the Professor painted,
demonstrating thereby that those contradictions are not real. Paradoxically, it was precisely
the widely known “the Professor was wrong” thesis (which, thanks to the publisher’s whim,
graces the cover of the first edition of The Last Ringbearer) that I sought to disprove.

“It appears to us that the chief motive and the main impulse of Tolkien’s myth-making was
the joy of creating a vast and consistent imaginary world, well developed in space and time.
It is this joy of creation that undergirds Tolkien’s ethical-religious concept of ‘co-creation,’
which likens the true Artist creating his own world to the Creator Himself. […] Apparently,
this writer has created the most complete ‘personal’ mythology in the history of literature:
an imaginary world with its own Book of Genesis, history, chronicles, geography,
languages, etc. This painstakingly detailed imaginary universe has no close literary
equivalent (emphasis mine).” (R.I. Kabakov, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the Problem of
Contemporary Literary Myth-making.) In other words, the world the Professor had created
turned out to be “real”; moreover, it is the only real one in the entire fantasy genre. Well,
noblesse oblige.

It’s unlikely that anyone will devote any serious effort to analyzing the ecosystem of a
barren desert populated by train-sized predatory worms that eat excavators and sweat
psychedelics – fantasy is fantasy. Not so the Middle Earth; the developed perfection of
Tolkien’s world quite impels one to conduct natural history studies of it, sometimes
provocatively so. This invites another comparison, however strange at first blush, between
Tolkien and Yefremov.

Perhaps you remember The Hour of the Bull – a sociological dissection of totalitarianism
plus intriguing (albeit sometimes drawn-out) philosophical digressions on various topics.
Besides all that, the book featured a very curious planet, with its axis of rotation in the
orbital plane (making for no seasons), eight continents grouped in four-link chains in the
middle latitudes of either hemisphere (the combination of ocean currents that arises under
such conditions makes for a very warm and even climate, like that of Earth’s Mezozoic).

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And if we observe the existence of ancient giant trees (much like mallorns), then you can be
sure that the absence of strong winds that would endanger such structures is implicit in the
properties of atmospheric circulation in the planet’s trade wind belts in this type of climate.
It’s noteworthy that Yefremov introduced all those peculiarities of Tormans’s physical
geography only for the sake of that “real feel”; they are completely irrelevant to the literary
goals of the book. It’s just that Yefremov (a professional geologist who was awarded the
USSR State Prize for his scientific, rather than literary, work) couldn’t help but do a good
job on these details.

Tolkien was a practicing scientist, too, but a linguist rather than a natural scientist like
Yefremov, so the foundation of professional knowledge he had used to erect Middle Earth
was different. It is fairly obvious to me that the game the Oxford professor decided to play
with nature began, in essence, with the creation of imaginary languages, with their own
alphabets and grammar. Then he created the epic tales to match those languages, then the
peoples who composed those tales, and only then the steppes, mountains, and forests for
those peoples to pasture their herds, build citadels, and battle the “Dark from the East”
therein. This, precisely, was the sequence: “In the beginning was the Word” – Ainur’s
music, pure and simple. Truly an excellent model of the Act of Creation!

However, Tolkien the philologist had obviously had little interest in this last, non-living
component of Middle Earth – its physical geography – and created it only because he had to,
with predictable results. It is a well-known fact that the Professor had painstakingly verified,
to the day, the lunar phases during his heroes’ long quest. I believe that, but the problem is
that he had overlooked some much more significant elements of the local natural history
background.

The Middle Earth has several built-in physical defects, and there’s no getting away from
that. In his well-known essay Must Fantasy Be Stupid? Sergei Pereslegin provides a detailed
classification of errors commonly committed by fantasy authors. He uses Tolkien’s work as
an example of one of them, an “irreversible professional error”: “It occurs in a geologically
unstable world. Tolkien, being a professor of English Literature, knew nothing of plate
tectonics, while the topography of Beleriand and Eriador are highly important to the story;
therefore, it seems impossible to fix the author’s mistake.”

To explain: if a planet has a single continent – Middle Earth – it means that the convection
currents in the planet’s mantle form a single cell, so that the entire “light” part of the
continental crust has gathered over the point where the mantle matter sinks toward the core,
like foam gathers over the bathtub drain. (This had happened on Earth at least twice, in mid-
Proterozoic and late Paleozoic, which was when two super-continents of Megagea and
Pangea formed.) When subcontinents collide, they bunch up into folds (e.g., the Himalayas
that arose at the collision of the Indian subcontinent with the Eurasian plate). This means
that there ought to be a huge Tibet-like mountain plateau smack in the center of Middle
Earth; well, where is it?

Pay attention, now – strictly speaking, such errors are trifles. In Pereslegin’s litany of sins an
“irreversible professional error” is classified under tolerable errors, being one of the minor

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ones. It’s obvious that one person can’t be equally proficient in linguistics and geology (I
suspect that Yefremov had committed no fewer errors creating Tormansian languages than
Tolkien had in Middle Earth tectonics). So we can pardon the Professor – the infraction he
had committed was not particularly dangerous to society; The Lord of the Rings can be
paroled. This will acknowledge it to be a regular fantasy text – I mean, a really good one,
easily in the top five …

Do you like this option? Me neither. Because The Lord of the Rings is not a good, or even
the best, fantasy text. It is sui generis, the only one of its kind; therefore, we will not settle
for anything less than a full exoneration.

We will assume that Middle Earth is as real as our world, so if some of the details do not fit
our concepts, it’s our problem. On the other hand, we will adhere scrupulously to the laws of
nature. As Tolkien himself wrote, it’s easy to imagine a green sun, but “To make a
Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary
Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a
kind of elvish craft.” Well, the sun has its usual color in Middle Earth (and probably belongs
to G-2 spectrum class), its surface gravity and geochemistry do not seem different from
ours, and even the lunar month is 28 days. Therefore we have to approach the task wielding
Occam’s Razor (as is customary to the European intellectual tradition): we will appeal to
magic and suchlike only when out of all other options.

It turns out that all the seeming contradictions of Middle Earth’s natural history can be
resolved with a single assumption: that Tolkien is describing only the northwestern part of
the local landmass, rather than the whole thing. Actually, it’s not even an assumption:
Tolkien’s map is obviously intentionally cut off in the south and the east; why should we
assume that his world ends there? There’s enough room there for the hypothetical central
plateau or even other continents and archipelagos.

If Middle Earth is as real as our world, it must be as infinitely varied. It must have a myriad
of aspects that Tolkien had not covered as not worthy of his attention. For example, any
mention of economics is as missing from his romantic world as sex was supposedly missing
in the USSR – but how likely is one to find any such mundane matters in the knightly
romances of our world? It seems quite justified to me to assume that the Middle Earth
population, aside from battling the Dark Lord and his minions, also plowed, reaped, traded,
robbed, etc. The heroic hobbits on their quest did not subsist only on herbs, rabbits, and
Elvish breads – they also drank beer in taverns, and one has to pay for beer. (I mean, one
doesn’t have to, really, but that would make for a criminal rather than a knightly novel.)
Trick question: what coin did they use? Right – the Professor made no mention of that
(pennies are merely a generic name for a fraction of a currency).

This question regarding Middle Earth currency, which I’ve used often to stump Tolkien
experts, has served as the departure point for a whole series of conclusions. Take Rohan, for
example: What was its population’s occupation? “The best horses in Middle Earth” are all
nice and fine, but horse-breeding can in no way be the mainstay of an economy. Or take the
Dark Lord’s countless hordes: What did they eat in the desert of Mordor – jackrabbits?

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We’ve all read Lev Gumilev and have some idea of the logistics of expansion. In general,
how can there be a capital city smack in the middle of a desert? That just doesn’t happen…
but wait – actually, it does happen! Cities in the desert – that’s the perished city civilizations
of Sahelian Africa. Once the “Atlantic climate optimum” was over, Sahara began
encroaching on the savannah, and that was the end of them. Actually, sorry – this isn’t The
Lord of the Rings any more, but rather The Last Ringbearer!

And if the world of Middle Earth is real, then so are its people. If all those Aragorns and
Faramirs are not “dramatis personae” but real people who figure in the epochal tales of the
North-western peoples (which tales Professor Tolkien had then collected and adapted), then
there can be a variety of opinions concerning their deeds. This is something we’re quite
familiar with in our own world: in alternative opinions Richard the III comes out a most
noble man who had paid for his nobleness with both his crown and his head, plus
posthumous reputation to boot, whereas Joanne of Arc turns out to have been a sadistic
psychopath who belonged on the auto-da-fe pyre like few others. Plus Middle Earth surely
has PR and infowars (how else?); perhaps it even has its own Professor Fomenko to claim in
all seriousness that there was no Second Age, Angbad is nothing but Mordor, and Fingon,
Isildur and Aragorn were the same person…

However, diversity of opinions doesn’t mean that those opinions lack clarity; quite the
contrary. I see fantasy as a genre with very strict rules (only the classical “closed” detective
story has stricter ones). Among those rules (such as medieval space-time structure of the
physical world and medieval structure of the spiritual world, meaning a conflict of Absolute
Good with Absolute Evil) Pereslegin lists this one: “A consistent romantic ethic – a
romantic attitude of the author, the characters, and the readers toward war, love, heroism,
and death.” It follows inexorably that the characters have to be classified as “good guys” and
“bad guys” – it is precisely this “black-white” contrast that makes fantasy so appealing to
teenagers. In other words, the very canon of fantasy forbids moral relativism – to allow it is
sort of like having a classical tragedy happen in more than one place or having the detective
be the murderer in a classic detective story.

Tolkien adheres to this rule perfectly, which is why for many readers, especially older ones,
The Lord of the Rings has forever remained a kind of an American action movie – a bunch
of good guys goes to wipe out a bunch of bad guys, who are bad if only because they are on
the other side. In reality it’s not quite so, and possibly not so at all, but this view is very
common. So when it was time to set up the pieces in The Last Ringbearer, I have decided
that although I have to have “black” and “white” (as per the canon), at least I would draw
the boundary between them in a line somewhat more meandering than the Anduin – more
like it usually lies in real life.

And another thing. The romantic tradition does not presuppose that every bad guy be
depicted a priori as a fiend from Hell, which is what Tolkien consistently practiced. Even if
we kill each other at the walls of Dechaud, does it follow that Comte de Rochefort is any
less noble than Athos? Not to mention that the Sheriff of Nottingham counts Richard at the
Lee among his men, while there are future risaldars among the Afghan bandits of Kamal.
Recall Kipling’s famous:

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Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
Tolkien clearly prefers the first two lines, while I go for the last two, even though both are
unadulterated 24K romanticism…
In conclusion, a few words about my personal take on the Professor. It is of a dual nature: I
bow before Demiurge Tolkien who had created an amazing Universe, but am rather cool
toward Tolkien the Storyteller, author of the tale of four Hobbits and their quest. In other
words, to me the theatrical backdrop is way more majestic and interesting than the play
itself. Terry Pratchett said it well: “Tolkien’s mountains have more personality than his
characters.” So I’ll bet that mine is far from the last Game that will be played in the
Professor’s world. Rozenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead – long live Rozenkrantz and
Gildenstern!

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