The Last Ringbearer

There are a few nagging questions from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, such as: why didn't Gandalf just get a giant eagle to dump Frodo in the volcano?  But not many people--unlike in the real world--ask the question, what really happened during the war?

Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer does just that.  Much like how Tolkien's original series was really just an excuse for him to get his linguistic jollies off inventing two dialects of Elvish, Yeskov's book is a product of him being interested in recreating old things (or as they say in Latin, paleontology) and him being Russian.

The less offensive thing first.  In the book, Yeskov essentially takes the saying, "History is written by the victors," and throws it at the story of Lord of the Rings.  In his mind, the reason why Gandalf and Aragorn are portrayed as heroes is because their side recorded it that way ... and why they're played by Sir Ian Mckellen and Viggo Mortenson, and not Jack Black and Michael Cera.  So he re-frames the narrative: in The Last Ringbearer, Orcs and Trolls are normal-looking people who were the victims of a an Elf & Wizard-led genocide; Gandalf was a collaborator who sold out the race of Men to the Elves; Aragorn is a pirate with a spy-network (less Jack Sparrow hijinks and [presumably] more raping and pillaging) who led a military coup that overthrew the government of Gondor; and the whole quest surrounding the One Ring was just a diversion that Gandalf and his hillbilly hobbits fell for.

The reason why there weren't any *spoiler* tags around that paragraph is because that's not the story in The Last Ringbearer.  The real story is about what happens after that, and this is where Yeskov being Russian seems to figure in.  The majority of the book plays out like an Spy vs Spy cartoon--it's probably what a pimply-faced Dungeons and Dragons-playing Ian Fleming would have written as a Lord of the Rings fan-fic.  It's as if Middle Earth got plunged into a Cold War, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, except that it's obvious that Yeskov loves writing spy fictions more than he likes resolving the story.

In the end, I'm kind of lukewarm about the book on it's own merits.  It's an interesting spin on a familiar story ... and that's probably the best thing it has going for it.

If you're still interested in reading The Last Ringbearer, here's the pdf.