Orthanc bought for £1

It's interesting to skim YouTube currently for oddments that didn't make it into the The Lord of the Rings film triology for editorial or timing reasons. One (above) is the death of Saruman. Motivation-wise, it sticks to the book - Saruman finally taunting his sidekick Gríma Wormtongue beyond endurance - but in the book it happened in the Scouring of Shire chapter, when Frodo and Sam return to find the Shire industrialised by Saruman.

Perrott's Folly -
GNU Free Documentation License

This ties in with newspaper reports yesterday about the sale of a Georgian folly in Birmingham - Bought for £1, the mysterious tower that inspired JRR Tolkien ("Charity needs £1m to turn Perrott's Folly, said to have inspired author, into centre for Birmingham community" - Maev Kennedy, Guardian, 29th January) and It doesn't look much like Mordor: The 100ft Midlands tower which was Tolkien's unlikely inspiration (Steve Nolan, Daily Mail, 29th January). The Mail piece has more pictures, though it gets Orthanc confused with Sauron's Dark Tower (Barad-dûr).

Both articles mention how this, and a second tower - the Italianate Edgbaston Waterworks tower (see Flickr) - were in sight of JRR Tolkien's childhood home, and they echo a general "it is said" set of anecdotes about their being the inspiration for the towers in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien never was terribly forthcoming about his inspirations, and such identifications can be far too pat, but in this case it doesn't seem too unlikely.

The tower was built by John Perrott in 1758; the precise reason is unknown, and it was being called Perrott's Folly as early as the 1830s:

At a considerable distance to the left is seen a tall tower, commonly called the Monument. This is built of brick, is seven stories high, and was never made of any use, except in the capacity of pigeon-houses. It was erected in 1758, by John Perrott, Esq. whose name it partially bears, with an appropriate satirical adjunct—Perrott's Folly
- page 109, The Picture of Birmingham, Drake, 1831

Speculations continued thereafter:

I have heard a vague statement that our Monument, popularly known as " Perrott's Folly," was erected by a gentleman of that name, in order that his daughter might see the then frequent meets of hounds at Rotton Park, and the excitement of the chase round by Smethwick woods. So lately as sixty years ago it was not uncommon for the hounds to meet at Rotton Park, and I believe advertisements of the fact still exist in the old files of the Gazette. It is, however, more probable that the Monument was erected for a very different purpose, for in his description of Birmingham in 1818, Mr. Charles Pye speaks of it as "an observatory, lofty brick building seven stories high, which bears the name of the Monument . . . erected by John Perrott, Esq., about the year 1758". I do not remember any further account in print. The building was once let with the adjoining house (occupied in 1818 by John Guest, Esq.) but is now detached, and rises from a small plot of lawn. The door is massive oak, well studded with nails, a flight of  solid oak steps spiral fashion, in the staircase tower leads from room to room ; each room is well lighted and in good condition, with ornaments on the ceilings, and good oak fittings around. The upper room commands a very fine view on a clear day. The brickwork is (i.e.  in 1864) good and sound, and the Monument will remain for many generations yet, if left undisturbed by "improvements".
- 'ESTE', The Midland Antiquary - Volumes 3-4 - Page 42, 1884

See the Perrott's Folly website for further background; and Two Towers previously, in which I commented on various towers and on the engineering issues of Tolkien having giant towers in a tectonically active area.

- Ray

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Trailer #1 - more reflective version.
Trailer #2 - more gung-ho version.

This afternoon Clare and I went to Vue Exeter to see Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

It was hard to imagine how The Hobbit, a much shorter work than The Lord of The Rings, could be stretched to a film trilogy. But it managed the first part effortlessly, while followed the book very faithfully, from Bilbo's recruitment as a "burglar" for a party of dwarves on a quest to regain their home, through to the passage though the Misty Mountains and Bilbo's finding of the Ring. It even included Tolkien's songs, without their coming across as obtrusive musical set-pieces.

The film starts with a framing device of Bilbo writing the story on the eve of his departure party at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, then a deal of backstory of how the dwarves were driven from their subterranean kingdom by the dragon Smaug. Other areas for expansion included scenes with the nature wizard Radagast (only briefly mentioned in The Hobbit); the party being caught up in a mountain battle between the again briefly-mentioned stone giants; and a continuing thread deriving from the enmity between Thorin, the dwarves' leader, and Azog, the orc chieftain who killed his father.

The story is also very neatly framed as a precursor to the events of The Lord of the Rings. In the book, there's no motivation for Gandalf's choice of Bilbo as a participant. The film, however, suggests strongly that Gandalf is working from some intuition or foreknowledge of the importance of Bilbo and Frodo in the War of the Ring decades later. Saruman's presence, fairly unimportant in the book, also acquires darker significance in the light of later events in The Lord of the Rings.

Martin Freeman is an excellent choice as the younger Bilbo, and the dwarves (various largely unrecognisable character actors including Ken Stott and James Nesbit) catch the right balance between humor, pathos and nobility.

The effects, as usual, can't be faulted. This was the first time I'd seen a 3D film since decades back, when I saw one using a creaky red-blue system, but I was blown away by the Real3D system that uses circularly-polarised frames. It's done with a great deal more subtlety than the old-style 3D films that were obsessed with thrusting objects at you out of the screen. It's no mere gimmick, adding intimacy to indoor scenes, and vast depth to landscapes and other vistas.

Overall, we were both delighted with it, and recommend it, with the proviso that Clare found it somewhat over-padded with battle scenes.

Addendum: I do slightly fear where it'll go from here, though. I re-read The Hobbit today. IIt's a 271-page book. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey takes us up to page 102; the death of the dragon Smaug, another natural break, is on page 225; and the rest, including the Battle of the Five Armies, occupies only the remaining 50 pages. I hope - and I agree with Clare - that we're not going to get all the interesting stuff in the first two segments, with the third a padded-out battlefest.

- Ray

The Last Ringbearer

MetaFilter currently has an excellent thread worth visiting - The Last Ringbearer - which has a wealth of links concerning 'parallel novels': works that retell others from the viewpoint of a different character or perspective.

The particular focus of the thread, however, is Middle-earth according to Mordor ("A newly translated Russian novel retells Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' from the perspective of the bad guys") - this Salon article by Laura Miller discusses Последний кольценосец (The Last Ringbearer) by Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov. Working by the aphorism that "history is written by the victors", this is a counter-text to The Lord of the Rings that tells of the last days and aftermath of the War of the Ring from the viewpoint of the forces of Sauron. As Miller describes it:

... a well-written, energetic adventure yarn that offers an intriguing gloss on what some critics have described as the overly simplistic morality of Tolkien's masterpiece.

In Yeskov's retelling, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science "destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!"
...
The protagonist of "The Last Ringbearer" is a field medic from Umbar (a southern land), who is ably assisted by an Orocuen -- that is, orc -- scout, who is not a demonic creature like the orcs in "The Lord of the Rings," but an ordinary man.
...
In Yeskov's scenario, "The Lord of the Rings" is a highly romanticized and mythologized version of the fall of Mordor, perhaps even outright propaganda; "The Last Ringbearer" is supposed to be the more complicated and less sentimental true story.

The Last Ringbearer is in tune with a number of criticisms of Tolkien's mythos mentioned in the MetaFilter thread that, much as I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings films, I don't find hard to disagree with. There's Michael Moorcock's 1989 essay Epic Pooh. And David Brin's J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress (Salon again, Dec 17th 2002), that attacks its pro-aristocratic Romanticism. And Fantasy and revolution, an interview in International Socialism in which fantasy author China Miéville says: "Tolkien's worldview was resolutely rural, petty bourgeois, conservative, anti-modernist, misanthropically Christian and anti-intellectual".

If you know Russian, an article by Kirill Eskov, How and why I wrote the apocryphal "Lord of the Rings", looks worth reading. Skimming via Google Translate: Eskov explains that he's not formally a writer, but a "graphomaniac" who writes for his own pleasure and that of friends. He mentions the long history of works that dissect and overturn fictional worlds, right back to Dio Chrysostom, whose rhetorical "Trojan speech" argued the Iliad to be pure PR, the siege of Troy a failure. He mentions the power to expose interesting facets of a work through the device of approaching a work from an ethical or aesthetic position radically different from that of its creator, citing examples including Andrzej Sapkowski (whose Złote popołudnie - Golden Afternoon - retells the story of Alice from the viewpoint of the Cheshire Cat), "Gloria Howard's take on Moby Dick from Ahab's wife's viewpoint" (I can find no reference to Gloria Howard - but the book has to be Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer: A Novel), and Tom Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

However, a further aspect of Eskov's motivation was to examine Tolkien's Middle Earth as a real world, and as a geologist he spotted problems. Plate tectonics requires that Middle Earth, as a supercontinent, would have central highlands, which Tolkien doesn't describe. Evidently there must be more to Middle Earth, so Eskov posits other continents and archipelagoes.  He asks about practicalities of Middle Earth that have to exist. What's the monetary system? How can Rohan sustain itself solely by breeding horses? What do the inhabitants of Mordor eat, and why is their capital city in the middle of a desert? And if Middle Earth is treated as a real world, then characters such as Aragorn and Faramir are historical personages whose actions, just as with historical figures in our world, are open to very differing interpretations Finally, he tackles the tropes of fantasy itself.  Fantasy has very strict canonical rules: no moral relativism, but a black-and-white morality. He accepted this groundrule, but attempted to arrange good and evil more realistically, by individual person rather than by race (his elves are "not evil and not good - they are simply alien").

For the moment anyway, The Last Ringbearer is available in the English translation by Yisroel Markov, authorised by the author, as a free download. To circumvent the undoubtedly grey copyright situation - see the Guardian's Lord of the Rings reworking a hit with fans, but not Tolkien estate - it's being released on a non-commercial basis. I won't link to it, but you'll find links via Eskov's Wikipedia entry and the Salon article.

Eskov has, by the way, written another novel called The Gospel of Aphranius, which attempts to construct a demythologised account of the events of the Gospels (rather like Frank Yerby's Judas, My Brother).

Update: see The Last Ringbearer, posted in December 2012 after I read the ePUB version of the 2nd Edition.

- Ray