I ran across an interesting article in Salon.com, where Laura Miller described an easily available PDF file form online…This ‘eBook’ was a sort of novel, which was novel… The whole premise was to create a counter history to the Lord of the Rings…only told from the other side.
As a revisionist history of middle earth, I found the premise to this conceit to be quite amusing. Unfortunately, the idea is much better than the rest of the book… Tolkien’s world is so laboriously detailed and self consistent, that this effort starts to come off as a bit slapdash. The author obviously spent little time ‘fact checking’ to ensure that even place names were consistently used (let alone correctly spelled). Much of the LOTR is based upon a linguistic history of middle earth, and this novel plays with language with as much care as any pulp fiction detective novel. Now this doesn’t mean that I didn’t like reading this eBook, on the contrary, the freshness of the original idea kept me reading all the way to the end (it isn’t that long a piece).
I also find it amazing that this is the first piece of fiction to deal with Tolkien’s universe that I have run into which not a school boy satire (e.g. Bored of the Rings), or a school boy homage (such as some of the well intended bits of homemade stuff on YouTube).
My prime complaint to this freely available work is that it feels much more like a WWII spy novel than a counter history to The Lord of the Rings…
The Last Ringbearer
http://www.markbernstein.org/Feb11/TheLastRingbearer.html
Revisionist Middle Earth History: The Last Ringbearer
http://www.libertarianstandard.com/2011/02/24/revisionist-middle-earth-history-the-last-ringbearer
“The Last Ring-bearer”
http://symposium.transformativeworks.org/2011/03/the-last-ring-bearer
