Tag: Lord of the Rings

Happy Lord of the Rings Day

War is on all our minds these days. There is a war happening in Ukraine and something barely resembling a war (because it’s a genocide) in Gaza. Governments have been fond of casting our collective responses – such as they are – to climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and water crises as wars. In every nationalist country, and there are more of them every year, the states have claimed they’re at war against “anti-national” forces within and without. War is everywhere. At this time, where does fantasy fiction stand, what can it do?

First, the genre itself is often centred around military action as a means to challenge protagonists and resolve conflicts. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the skirmish on Weathertop showcases Aragorn’s leadership; the Battle of Helm’s Deep is where Théoden truly returns as the king of Rohan; the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is the stage on which Denethor fails, Faramir rises in his stead, Rohan’s crown effectively passes to Éowyn, and Aragorn does something only Gondor’s ruler can; the Battle of the Morannon is a test of every protagonist’s mettle as they distract Sauron and his armies in a doomed stand long enough for Sam, Frodo, and Gollum to destroy the ring; and the Battles of Isengard and Bywater are where the ents and hobbits, respectively, retake their lands from Saruman’s rule, unto the powerful wizard’s political and then mortal demise. Even outside the trilogy, war is never short of a great contest between good and evil.

There have been many flights of fancy that bear little resemblance to JRR Tolkien’s epic and its style, yet it’s just as true that every English attempt at epic fantasy since the trilogy has either basked in its shadow or tried to escape from it. Another way in which Tolkien foreshadowed the genre is in terms of its authors: predominantly cis-male and white. Despite the variety of factors at play that could influence who becomes an author of epic fantasy fiction, this is no coincidence, at least insofar as it determines who becomes a ‘successful’ author – and just as well, it’s not a coincidence that so much of modern fantasy is concerned with similar depictions of war.

Bret Devereaux wrote in his popular blog that Amazon Primevideo’s Rings of Power fell so flat even though it had borrowed heavily as well as branched off from Lord of the Rings because, among other things, it failed to “maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well)”, rendering it “impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules”. Yet even with the ‘rules’, Tolkien’s narrative arcs within his books were modeled perceptibly on the Arthurian legends. A similar complaint can be foisted on other (esp. white male) works of epic fantasy fiction, which have been concerned on a metaphysical level at least with recasting the past in a different light, unto different ends.

I admit I haven’t read enough of epic fantasy – all of Tolkien, a smattering of Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing), some of M. John Harrison’s short stories, Brandon Sanderson, Marlon James (BLRW), and George R.R. Martin – to be able to write with any kind of authority about the genre, but for this I blame partly myself and the rest Steven Erikson, whose Malazan Book of the Fallen series spoiled me for anything else. My own tendency to read the work of the cis-white men of fantasy is also to blame.

However, Erikson, unlike any of the other writers I’d read until then, both within and beyond the genre, is also a white man yet his Malazan series treats war differently: its tragic toll is always in view thanks to Erikson’s decision to train the narrator’s focus on its smallest players, the soldiers, rather than on its kings and queens. This is how, for its well-earned reputation as a military epic bar none, the series itself recounts a tale of compassion.

And having read and re-read the Malazan series for more than a decade (to the uninitiated: it’s possible to do this without getting bored because of its rich detailing and layered story-telling), war – including ones of annihilation, which can apparently be fought these days without the use of terrible weapons – is if nothing else the ultimate examination of purpose. It is brutal on people, the land, the cultures, and the planet for much longer after it ends, and it magnifies through these effects and the methods by which they are achieved the moral character of those conducting this violence.

Like others I’m sure, I feel completely powerless against and often dispirited by Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, Russia’s wanton destruction in Ukraine, and the systemic violence the Indian state continues to inflict on its poorest and most marginalised sections. The best tools of opposition available at my disposal are my words, my ideas, my morality, and, if a situation demands it, some spine – and all four good fantasy fiction can inspire in abundance.

I remember reading a Roger Ebert review of a film sometime back (can’t remember its name now) in which he said good story-telling can inspire us to become our best versions of ourselves, that even should the film flop on other counts, it will have succeeded if it can do this. These words are applied easily to any form and mode of story-telling, including epic fantasy. Lord of the Rings is a tale of good versus evil but it’s also a tale of friendships and their survival through untold hardships, and while some may disagree it was good story-telling. In the end, whether or not it succeeded and also setting aside the moralities of the time in which it was written, it strove to inspire goodness.

The Malazan series strives similarly (present-tense because Erikson is still building out its lore) and, to be fair, does it much better, directing its empathy at almost everyone who appears in the books (excluding – spoiler alert – the truly vile). In our present time of seemingly incessant conflict, it helps me look beyond the propaganda both noisy and subtle at the people who are suffering, and with its stories refill senses constantly on the verge of depletion. If we just let it, fantasy can step up where reality has failed us, alerting us to the infinite possibility of worlds within worlds, new and necessary forms of justice, and of course how and where we can begin to cope together.

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. 🙂

Previous editions: 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

Note: I chose to ignore sci-fi in this post. I suspect “sci-fi” and “fantasy” are at the end of the day labels invented to make marketing these books easier, but I also stuck to fantasy per se so I could finish writing this post in a finite amount of time.

Lord of the Rings Day

Today is Lord of the Rings Day (previous editions: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.). Every year, I spend a part of March 25 thinking about the continued relevance of this book; even though this may have diminished significantly, it remains for better or for worse the work that founded modern fantasy literature (in the English language) and which subsequent works sidestepped, superseded or transcended. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, thinking about Lord of the Rings has largely been, to me at least, thinking about fantasy as escape, but this year, it may represent something else – and in doing so also become a little bit more relevant in my own imagination.

This year, on this day, war is on all our minds. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Middle-Earth saga, of which Lord of the Rings is one important part, there are many, many wars. The fundamental themes of Lord of the Rings, the greatness of friendship and the triumph of good over evil, are themselves consummated by victories in battles, a motif that Tolkien establishes in the (fictitious) history of Middle-Earth from the very beginning itself. Some of them come immediately to mind, for being more poignant than the others: the Battle of Sudden Flame, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the War of Wrath and the Defence of Osgiliath. Three of these four conflicts are tragedies.

In the Battle of Sudden Flame (‘Dagor Bragollach’ in Sindarin), Morgoth, the primordial antagonist in Tolkien’s works, breaks the siege around his fortress by the high-elven Noldor and marches forth with a great army, including the first dragon, to reassert his power in the region of Beleriand. Shortly before this battle, some of the Noldor had contemplated an assault of their own to quell Morgoth once and for all, but didn’t proceed for want of consensus. Most of the Noldor believed the siege alone, which by then had lasted over four centuries, would suffice and that Morgoth would fade away. But after the Battle of Sudden Flame, Morgoth rose and rose in power.

Two decades after the siege was broken, many of the high-elves, dwarves and Earthlings – led by Maedhros – united once more under his banner, inspired by the heroics of Beren and Luthien against the kingdom of Morgoth, and intended to take the fight to him instead of, as with the siege, letting him muster his forces. But through a network of spies and turncoats, Morgoth got early wind of the Union of Maedhros. This led to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (‘Nirnaeth Arnoediad’), in which the Noldor were decimated, by the end of which Morgoth had an iron grip on the continent’s north, and had only three kingdoms left to challenge him: Gondolin (which had secluded itself anyway), Doriath and Nargothrond.

Some six centuries, and many interim epics, later, Eärendil pleads with the Valar – the angelic peoples called the “Powers of the World” in the Middle-Earth mythos – to help the elves and the humans defeat Morgoth. They agree, thus the Host of Valinor is assembled, and thus begins the War of Wrath, which by one account lasted fully 40 years. The exchange of power is so great in this time that Beleriand itself is reshaped and many of its mountains and plains are drowned by newly recast rivers and seas. Morgoth himself is defeated and cast into the “Timeless Void” (that favourite place of fantasy authors in which to consign villains who have become too mighty for anyone’s good).

His lieutenant, the necromancer Thû, however escapes and hides in east Middle-Earth, eventually creating the dreaded kingdom of Mordor and himself becoming known as Sauron. The Defence of Osgiliath transpires when Sauron is preparing to assault Gondor, a great kingdom of humans on Middle-Earth. Osgiliath, by this time, is an outpost with a military garrison. A small scratch force from Gondor sets out to prevent Sauron’s forces from occupying Osgiliath, and fails miserably. One of the casualties is Faramir, younger son of Denethor, the steward of Gondor. Faramir, as captain of the party, sets out to defend Osgiliath though he knows he can’t, that he may even die, simply because Denethor had wished Faramir had died in battle instead of his older, and favoured, son, Boromir.

I was hoping in the course of this recollection to find parallels to Russia’s war in Ukraine. I don’t know what they might be. However, the battles of Beleriand – especially the ones the ‘good guys’ lost – in Tolkien’s telling are not about underestimating Morgoth’s might or miscalculating one’s own, even when they are. They are ultimately animated by the spirit of resisting a mindless tyrant irrespective of the outcome. It’s certainly folly to found one’s attacks on flawed strategies, but in the face of an enemy who can’t be reasoned with and who just won’t back down, there are times when waiting for the numbers to add up, for the skies to clear, for the stars to align can be more indefensible. Ukraine may not have wanted this war but it must fight anyway to resist Russia, and Vladimir Putin.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration.

John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy: And Chapters on Socialism, 1848

Happy Lord of the Rings Day!

Featured image: ‘Maps of Tolkien world‘, tamburix, CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Lord of the Rings Day

Here’s wishing you a Happy Lord of the Rings Day! (Previous editions: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.) On this day in the book, Frodo, Sam and Smeagol (with help from Gandalf, Aragon, Gimli, Legolas, Faramir, Eowyn, Theoden, Eomer, Treebeard and the Ents, Meriadoc, Peregrin, Galadriel, Arwen and many, many others) destroyed the One Ring in the fires of Orodruin, throwing down Barad-dûr, bringing about the end of Sauron the Deceiver and forestalling the Age of Orcs, and making way for peace on Middle Earth.

Even though my – rather our – awareness of the different ways in which Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien’s literature more broadly are flawed increases every year, in the last year in particular I’ve come back to the trilogy more than before, finding both that it’s entwined in messy ways with various events in my life, having been the sole piece of fantasy I read between 1998 and 2005, and more importantly, because Lord of the Rings was more expansive than most similar work of its time, I often can’t help but see that much of what came after is responding to it in some way. (I know I’ve made this point before but, as in journalism, what stories we have available to tell doesn’t change just because we’re repeating ourselves. :D)

This said, I don’t know what Lord of the Rings means today, in 2021, simply because the last 15 months or so have been a lousy time for replenishing my creative energy. I haven’t been very able to think about stories, leave alone write them – but on the flip side, I’ve been very grateful for the work and energy of story writers and tellers, irrespective of how much of it they’ve been able to summon, whether one sentence or one book, or the forms in which they’ve been able to summon it, whether as a Wikipedia page, a blog post, a D&D quest or a user’s manual. I’m thankful for all the stories that keep us going just as I’m mindful that everything, even the alt text of images, is fiction. More power to anyone thinking of something and putting it down in words – and also to your readers.

Lord of the Rings Day

A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! (Previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014)

Every year I pen a commemorative piece about Lord of the Rings, and share something about the books and films that I think about nearly every day week. This year, I don’t have the strength, thanks to the workload due to the coronavirus pandemic, to say anything more than that you should take advantage of the lockdown – and the commute time it has likely saved you – to read more works of fantasy fiction.

It remains the single most rewarding thing in my life, even more than my blog, because fantasy as I’ve said before in quite clumsy terms is fractal. It recapitulates itself, especially its careful – or deliberately and absurdly careless – inventiveness, demanding more answers of the writer than any other form of fiction ever could simply because fantasy brings together three infinities: both what is and what isn’t that are the general attributes of all fiction plus the preserve of ‘are you frigging kidding me’. Reading good fantasy is sure to give you ideas of your own, to push towards (or away from) new worlds and new world-visions.

Fantasy is to my mind ergodic: riding its coattails, I get to visit all possibilities available to visit in the possibility-space of my mind; if I keep reading, I get to solipsistically encompass the worlds and world-visions of my fellow creators as well. Fantasy to me is newness, an endless font of it, in a world that has only been becoming more and more predictable; it is a secret place where goodness still lives, and on occasion even reaches a hand out and nudges me towards the right thing.

If I had been in Faramir’s shoes and stood before Denethor, bearing the full brunt of my father’s derision and being told he’d rather I had been killed instead of my brother, I would have done to him what he did to himself later: set him on fire. But Faramir rode out into a battle that he knew full well he was going to lose. Nothing about it was fair – just as nothing was fair about Anomander Rake’s tortuous, tortuous penance. Ours is a nasty world, and right and wrong aren’t always clear just as they might not have been to Faramir and Rake in moments of profound distress. In fact, the distinction is sometimes so blurry it might as well not be there.

When I’m lost for ideas, when I really don’t know what to do, when I would really like to just be told what I should do instead of having to think it up myself, I often turn to fantasy’s ideas about right and wrong, about what Faramir or Rake might have done, because fantasy is fundamentally empathetic in its alienness: its creations are often apart from this world – just as I feel sometimes, and you probably do too. It’s a place “infused with bright hope now so scarce in the realm of the real,” as a friend put it – a place to go when you don’t like this one (and from there to other places, picking and choosing what you like), and it’s a place that will let you go when you’d like to return, all in peace. The faith it demands is only the faith you’d like to give. What more could one want?

[Takes a break from the typing frenzy]

At least, good fantasy is all I want. And this Lord of the Rings Day, I invite you to take a short dip into a fantastic realm of your choice. If you’d like recommendations, I highly recommend starting with Lord of the Rings itself; if you’ve read that and want to try something more ambitious, try the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson or Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. If you’d like something that won’t consume the next three to five years of your life, I recommend Exhalation, a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang that I’m currently reading, or all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.

If you’d like even more recommendations – or titles more gender-balanced, say – I also recommend recommendations by the following souls (all on Twitter):

  • @srividyatadpole
  • @thebekku
  • @dpanjana
  • @chitralekha_tcc
  • @notrueindian
  • @supriyan

There are many, many others, of course, but these people came immediately to mind.

I really need to get back to work now.

Happy Lord of the Rings Day!

The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out of reading the series feeling like nothing could surprise me anymore except some other Erikson fare. The man himself might not be appreciative of this outcome; the 10-book series was, and is, more like a drug to me than anything else.

At the start of any book you implicitly enter into a covenant with the author that you’ll the read the book in return for being allowed to expect that it will entertain you. This is because books are not allowed to disappoint you – an expectation that’s actually true of every form of art that’s produced for public consumption. The experience of disappointment, even though it’s a common emotion, is not an aspiration. There’s no market nor the (mainstream) aesthetic for it.

At some level, what Erikson ruined for me was the ability to expect to be surprised or entertained by whatever was coming. This is a remarkable thing for the consumption of fantasy to achieve because fantasy is an evacuation from our reality unto a different one more suited to making the author’s point while also not being too contrived (although that’s a hyper-reductive definition). And for millions of people around the world, including myself, the doorway to realising how good fantasy could be was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Lord of the Rings didn’t succeed by being too whimsical – a trait many simpleminded folk conflate with the fantasy genre – but in fact the opposite. It was tightly knit, gorgeously situated, described and narrated, in a world somewhat different from our own. Its success lay in its storytelling as much as in its seminal nature: Lord of the Rings, for many of us, was the first. It has had and will continue to have a certain quality of primacy associated with readers’ memories of it.

It set many readers’ expectations in terms of what they could expect from the fantasy genre: not frolicking cartoons for children but goddamned epics. The Malazan series took this premise and bled it to death in a beautiful, beautiful way. If Lord of the Rings was the gateway drug for realising, and acknowledging, the potential of fantasy to be assessed in the same league as mainstream literature, the Malazan series is the Manitoba shlimbo.

I’m sure you recognise this post has been a roundabout way of saying Malazan ruined me for other books, and you’re probably wondering, “What a hubristic schmuck.” What a hubristic schmuck indeed. One of the more amazing components of the reading experience that regular book-readers take for granted is the ability to clench your teeth and grind through the more boring parts of a book – a sort of restrained deferment to the idea that though the book may not be entertaining now, entertainment remains in the offing. That’s what I miss being able to do, and that’s the whole difference between plodding slowly through a book and giving up at p. 15 and throwing it away.

Yes, we’re allowed to stop reading books that are boring, but we, especially I, get bored very easily – and I’m almost proud of it because it’s a skill I’ve honed to allow me to quickly spot, and correct, dull news reports. I also need to relearn what it means to make a small cluster of points over 250 pages or more. Reacquiring a habit like reading isn’t easy, particularly if you lost it for the reasons specified above. So to make it easier for me to get back on that wagon, I’m going to start with obviously popular books – often written by white men; first on the list is The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.

So far so good.

Happy Lord of the Rings Day! Quoting verbatim from last year’s post on the same date:

March 25 every year is Lord of the Rings Day – a.k.a. Tolkien Day and Lord of the Rings Reading Day – because, in the books, that’s the day on which the One Ring is taken into the fires of Orodruin (or Mount Doom or Amon Amarth) by Gollum/Smeagol from the finger of Frodo Baggins. It was the year 3019 of the Third Age and augured the end of the War of the Ring.

Watch the films, read the books, talk about it, read about it, write about it. Do whatever it takes you to remember the potential of fantasy fiction to be a legitimate way to survive and cherish our realities.

Featured image credit: aitoff/pixabay.

Happy Lord of the Rings Day

Just been having a bad day today – and from the midst of it all, almost forgot to blog about Lord of the Rings Day. I do this every year on the blog (I think), recalling two things: how great Lord of the Rings was, and how even better something else is. Last year, and I’m making no effort to check, it had to have been one of Steven Erikson’s books, possibly from the Malazan series. I’ve got nothing else to add this year. The Malazan series is still the best in my books, and if you’re into epic fantasy fiction and haven’t read it yet: boo. I would also highly recommend the Warcraft lore.

Customary recap: March 25 every year is Lord of the Rings Day – a.k.a. Tolkien Day and Lord of the Rings Reading Day – because, in the books, that’s the day on which the One Ring is taken into the fires of Orodruin (or Mount Doom or Amon Amarth) by Gollum/Smeagol from the finger of Frodo Baggins. It was the year 3019 of the Third Age and augured the end of the War of the Ring. On this day, let’s read a chapter or two from the trilogy and remember what an enlightening experience reading the books was.

Featured image credit: kewl/pixabay

Lord of the Rings Day

Today is Lord of the Rings Day. On this day, in the year 3019 of the Third Age, Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee reach the Sammath Naur and cast the One Ring into Orodruin, in whose fires the ring was first forged. Thus, the ring is destroyed and leads to the downfall of Sauron, the Dark Lord. However, this doesn’t mark the end of the War of the Ring (although it does in the movies) – that happens when Saruman is defeated in the Battle of Bywater by the hobbits on November 3 of the same year.

Why do I still remember the date? I don’t know. Tolkien’s books were good, three of the best, in fact, and much better than the trope to come after. There were a few notable exceptions, but nothing has came to being just as original until, I’d say, GRRM and Erikson. I was briefly excited by Robert Jordan but his more classical narrative combined with a droning style bored me. It was never the length because one of my enduring favourites is Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which has seen 10 books and one part of a trilogy already out (all kickass – you should check them out).

Nevertheless, reading Lord of the Rings in 2003 was an important part of my life. In the years since, I have taken away different morals from the book – which, thankfully, aren’t as mundane as Jordan’s nor as multi-hued as Erikson’s (or as gruesome as Martin’s or as juvenile as Feist’s). Beyond the immediate take-away that is good-versus-evil, there are tales of friendships, sacrifices, trust, humility and leadership. And what a great epic all of it made! As it happens, Lord of the Rings Day is actually Tolkien Reading Day. So if you haven’t already read the trilogy, or its adorable prequel The Hobbit (or Silmarillion, for that matter), grab a copy and start. It’s never too late.

On bad films and their purpose

The reason there are these movies that are adapted from books and don’t do well at the box office is that there are many people who haven’t read those books. Even though it’s reasonable that production houses see movies as standalone creative products, separate from the books, it’s the existence of an audience for either that’s driving the production itself.

The point is to capitalize on the potential ‘popular culture value’ of the book being adapted. And when a movie adapted from a book bombs, I think it’s because someone misjudged the size of the audience for it. The movie is subsequently forgotten, leaving no capitalizable trail of its own.

The reason I’m complaining is that I love such movies – which people think don’t do much but I think they do a lot for me. When I read books, I don’t focus on everything the book throws at me. As the plot develops, I am generally able to pick up on what’s relevant and what’s not, leaving the characters to play out in my mind as if located nowhere in particular but simply existing of/by themselves.

Now, when this ‘dud’ of a movie comes along, it fills up these spaces nicely, colors inside the plot-wise irrelevant boundaries. That’s why if there had been more people who’d read the book than those who hadn’t, the movie might’ve been appreciated for what it really was: not a creative standalone but a product crafted only to capitalize on existing emotions, not create a new one.

Most recently, Atlas Shrugged Part I did this well. The actors didn’t try to put up a performance of their own, abiding quite nicely by the narrative railroad set up by the book.

The same can be said of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but Tolkien left little to the imagination, not that that’s a problem. If anything, the movie was always only threatening to fall short (like The Hobbit Part I did), the difference being that The Hobbit left a detestable Narnia-like episode firmly lodged in my mind. That’s also why I’d rather a movie fall short if it can’t land on just the right spot, and if it can fall short, why wouldn’t it be a hit?