Review: The Children of Húrin by J. R. R. Tolkien

Originally published: 2007
Read: January 2021

Narn i Chîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin

 by J. R. R. Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien has taken a number of fragments his father left about an ancient Middle-earth tale and stitched them together into a somewhat coherent narrative; the notes at the end give a pretty good sense of how he did it. This unites material from across Tolkien's life, and also uses some pieces from The Silmarillion to fill in the gaps.

It makes for an odd book. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien adopted a pretty usual novelistic style, keeping us close to events. In The Silmarillion, he took a more distant style (in fact, he saw The Silmarillion as a synopsis of a much more detailed work that he never wrote). Children of Húrin ends up swerving back and forth. We have some bits where we're in scenes and learning about the ways characters think; we have other scenes that do things like "they fought together for three years and became the best of friends" and we just have to accept that these characters are friends now. On average, I would say we're somewhere in between those two points in terms of detail. Closer to Túrin than we ever get to any Silmarillion character, but you'll never come to know Túrin the way you did Bilbo or Frodo or Faramir.

At times the book really comes to life; I liked the glimpses of Túrin's childhood, and I liked his robber baron years. On the other hand, the overall effect of the book is pretty muted. If one is meant to feel the tragedy of Túrin and his family... you just don't, there's not enough here to make you do it. I kept thinking I would like to see someone else take this and expand it so it can have the emotional effect it deserves to. I'd hate to see someone else try to fill in Tolkien's prose, but I also think someone else writing it from scratch wouldn't quite feel right. So perhaps it would work best transposed into another medium; the idea I had was that I feel like it would make for an excellent graphic novel, or series of graphic novels. (Get P. Craig Russell to do it!)

I of course got a lot of enjoyment out of the notes at the back explaining how the story had been put together. That said, I mostly read this because my wife owned it; interesting as it was, I don't think I would take the time to read the subsequent posthumous "novels" Christopher Tolkien assembled out of his father's materials (Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin). Sometimes reading prequels can be interesting, of course, but this is so detached from the era of Lord of the Rings that it feels like a standalone fantasy world that reuses some of the same names.

My 2019 Hugo Awards Ballot: Book(ish) Categories

This final post covers my votes in the three of the Hugo categories for book-length works: novels, YA fiction, and nonfiction. (Though, as we'll see, "book" isn't entirely accurate when it comes to half of the Best Related Work finalists.) If I did a full review of a work, I'll link to that here. I only did that if I owned the book: I didn't do it for anything I read an e-version of from the Hugo voters packet, or borrowed from the library. I will also link if the work is available on-line.

Best Novel 

7. Space Opera by Catherynne Valente

I just totally and completely bounced off this book, taking what felt like weeks to crawl through its low page count; I felt it squandered a great premise, though as I said in my review, I suspect it was a premise for a short story, not a novel.

6. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

I read the first two Galactic Commons novels for the 2017 Hugo Awards; the first left me largely cold, but the second brought tears to my eyes, so I bought the third right when it came out (making it one of two novels on the shortlist I'd read before it was announced). But this was more like the unfocused, low-stakes storytelling of the first novel, and it did little for me. I've seen a lot of praise for these books for how they eschew the usual trappings of space opera for personal stories-- and I'm all for that, I read contemporary literary fiction! But something needs to be at stake for that approach to work, and outside of A Closed and Common Orbit, I never feel like it is in Chambers's work.

5. No Award

I have a couple different personal "No Award" tests. One is: do I understand why someone else likes something, even if I myself do not? Versus, do I find it inexplicable that someone else would like a thing, even if intellectually I know it must be the case? I have no idea what people see in Space Opera and Record of a Spaceborn Few (outside of the premises themselves), and so I have no desire to see them win a Hugo Award. On the other hand, even though I wasn't much into it myself, I can see why someone would like Trail of Lightning.

4. Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

This was fine. As essentially urban fantasy, very much Not My Thing, but I suspect a well-executed example of Not My Thing. I wouldn't be embarrassed if it won, but I wouldn't exactly be excited either, so here it sits.

3. Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee

Revenant Gun is the other Best Novel finalist I'd read in advance, and with a similar reason for Record: it's the third book in a series where I largely bounced off the first installment, but then enjoyed the second enough to pick up the third. I definitely liked it more than Record or Trail, but I don't think it quite delivered on its own potential. A version of this book with more energy could have easily blew me away; as it was, the book kind of fizzles instead of climaxing, and I wouldn't be super-excited if it won. (I suspect it won't, though; the previous two Machineries of Empire books finished in third and fifth.)

2. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

This is the second-last novel finalist I read, and thank God for it, because after my first four books, I was wondering if this was really the best we could do. But Calculating Stars nailed it-- a great alternate history story with some intense writing and emotional scenes. One of the best of these finalists.

1. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Even though I liked Calculating Stars a lot, I wasn't entirely satisfied with the idea of it as a Best Novel winner; I think I probably would have ranked it fourth or fifth in 2017 if it had been on the ballot then, which was a much stronger year for Best Novel. It does what it want to do very well, but I feel like a winner of the Hugo Award needs to do more than be very good. Spinning Silver is more than very good; it manages to be unique, and timeless, and of its moment all at once. I like Calculating Stars, but it feels very 2018, and I wonder how much people will care about what it's trying to do in 2083 except as an historical document. Spinning Silver also feels very 2018, but I can imagine someone reading it in 2083 and learning something about their own time. This is a great book. It's the clear best on this weak shortlist, but it would be a contender in any year (I'd've ranked it second in 2017, or above any of 2018's finalists.)

Best Related Work

7. Archive of Our Own by the Organization for Transformative Works

I could be mistaken, but I don't think a website has ever been a Hugo finalist before, at least not as a website. The WSFS Constiution specifies that finalists for Related Work must be "either non-fiction or, if fictional, [...] noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text." So, despite containing 4.7 million fanfictions, Archive of Our Own isn't nominated for them per se, but for the project of archiving and maintaining them. This, I think, is an astoundingly good project, and AO3 is a really well put together website, but I feel like Hugos are for works, not projects, and I find it hard to justify rating a project particularly high in a category with "work" in the title. AO3 deserves all the awards it can get, but this particular one doesn't feel like a good fit.

6. The Mexicanx Initiative Experience at Worldcon 76, founded by John Picacio

This website chronicles the Mexicanx Initiative, where people could pledge money to fund Mexicanx creators to attend Worldcon 76; it funded 50 people, 42 of which ultimately attended. The site contains interviews with key participants, a photo gallery, and A Larger Reality, an anthology of Mexicanx speculative fiction. (Note that I didn't read the anthology because of the stipulation about non-fiction quoted above.) It's a really cool project, decently chronicled (though one kind of wishes for more participant narratives, and the photo gallery is poorly designed) and you can tell how much it meant to its participants but...

5. No Award

...but one of my Hugo Award pet peeves is when they get too self-referential. Is one of the best sf-related things from 2018 that WSFS can find something that WSFS itself did? This isn't as bad as when one of the 2012 Dramatic Presentation finalists was the acceptance speech a Hugo Award winner gave at the 2011 ceremony, but it still smacks of fannishness, and so I am compelled to rank both websites beneath No Award for various reasons.

4. Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ultimately, I just felt like there wasn't much to this book; it doesn't compare favorably to Le Guin's Best Related Work finalists from 2017 or 2018, both of which were much more interesting and insightful collections of writing, but I would feel okay about it if it won.

3. An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953-2000 by Jo Walton

Walton's book collects a series of blog posts she made on Tor.com from 2010 to 2011, where in each post she examines what the short list of Hugo Award finalists was for that year, and considers how well the award did at picking out the "best" books, through some combination of 1) has she read them, 2) did she like them, 3) and do they represent the state of sf at that time. I had read some of the blogs, though not systematically; usually, I have just dipped in to get a take on a year I am interested in. Walton's thoughts are interesting, but the book is somewhat overrun by lists: lists of finalists, many of which she doesn't say much about (she mostly comments on Best Novel, with a little commentary on the short fiction categories), as well as lists of books that did not make the finalists, usually culled from other award nominees. I like her comments, and thus I wanted more of them. Thank goodness the book has some extra essays stuck in where she rereads and reviews finalists in depth. I'm currently reading all the Best Novel winners, but she's made me want to read the other finalists, too. (I'll keep my undertaking to a manageable size, though.) The book also includes some of the comments from the blog posts, usually those by Rich Horton and the late Gardner Dozois. Dozois's are insightful, particularly once the book gets to the point where he is editing Asimov's. Horton's started out as more lists (of eligible short fiction), but as the book goes on, he gets better about providing commentary, which is usually interesting. Sometimes Dozois and Horton get more interesting than Walton. Anyway, I liked it well enough, but 500+ pages when so much of it is lists you can get on the Internet is too much, and I got to read it for free in the Hugo voter packet; I probably would have been less into it if I'd shelled out the inane $32 list price for a collection of free-to-read blog posts where much of the best content isn't always by the author.

2. The Hobbit: A Long-Expected Autopsy / The Battle of the Five Studios / The Desolation of Warners, written and edited by Lindsay Ellis and Angelina M

Best Related Work is always hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons in, as nonfiction books alone can be very different to each other; this year is worse than normal because I am meant to compare websites to books to... a YouTube video. But Lindsay Ellis's critique of The Hobbit has a depth to it that's missing from both Conversations on Writing and An Informal History of the Hugos. Running over ninety minutes, it explores the narrative and artistic choices that all too often just do not work, as well as delving into the backstory of how the films came to exist as they are. Ellis even travels to New Zealand and talks to one of the dwarf actors, which turned out to be kind of touching; as he and she both point out, the dwarves are the core of the film at the beginning, but not by the end. She also delves into the labor dispute that rose up around the films' production in New Zealand, which was resolved by the New Zealand government passing a law to restrict labor rights in order to ensure that production remained in the country, which continues to affect it today. Essentially it's a documentary that delves into the transformation between something we loved in childhood but cannot love as adults. Not as impressive an achievement as Astounding, but imagine a big gap between it and everything below it.

1. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

This is essentially a biography of John W. Campbell, who as editor of Astounding/Analog from 1937 to 1971 reshaped the genre of science fiction, cultivating many great talents, and publishing many classics of the genre. But because editors do their work through their authors, it also weaves into Campbell's story the stories of three key writers, as indicated in the subtitle. It's a great, fascinating book; I knew a little about Campbell from reading Asimov's autobiographies, but Nevala-Lee dives deeps, showing his transformation to mediocre writer to sterling editor to hateful crackpot across the course of a long life. I didn't know that, for example, he helped Hubbard write Dianetics, or that it was first published in the pages of Astounding (because, surprise, no medical journal would take it). It's well-researched, well-written, and the kind of thing I would expect this category to be rewarding.

Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

6. Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

If you read my review of this one, you'll know I largely bounced off it, for being derivative and poorly written. Only partway through, and I was already certain it would be near the bottom of my ballot, if not at it.

5. The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

This book was weirdly similar to Tess of the Road (see below): in both, the main character, who shares her name with the protagonist of a famous Thomas Hardy novel, is one of a pair of twin sisters, and the one more prone to acting out, while her twin does everything right. While they are human, they have an older half-sibling who is half magic, from the previous marriage of one of their parents. That all seems very specific, but they're very different books. Jude of The Cruel Prince was abducted from the human world along with her siblings and raised in Faerie by her older sister's father, a warrior fairy. She struggles to fit in, since her fairy classmates taunt her, and eventually finds herself roped into politics of the fairy courts, serving as spy for one of the princes. It's all fine, I'm sure but it's Very Much Not For Me. Ever since The Sandman, I've struggled to care about fairies, and this book did not change my mind. Parts of the book are very obvious and cliched, even though it has some effective twists as well. I didn't care for the narrative voice, which was a bit too much like Children of Blood and Bone's, though not as bad; is that how YA is written now? I did like that I actually kept on forgetting the narrator was a girl at first; Black writes her a plot and a characterization that I feel would usually be the province of a male character (except for the romances, which were the weakest parts anyway). On the other hand, that Jude and her twin wouldn't just move back to Earth didn't seem believable given how awful Faerie is for them, so I don't get why Black established that they could have if they wanted to. So yeah, fine enough, but it doesn't strike me as award-winning.

4. The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton

At about page 200, I would have told you I was ranking this at the bottom. This novel is set in a fantasy world where most people are born ugly; special people called "Belles" have the magical power to reshape the body to make people beautiful. The narrator (first-person present tense again; I guess this is the way YA is written now, and I hate it) wants to be "the favorite," the Belle at the Royal Court, but is passed over... then ends up with a second chance. I just did not care about her or her tribulations; the world here seems like it could be interesting, but never clicked for me either. But I did get interested as the plot finally emerged and events accelerated, and I'd say by the end I was more into it than I had been Cruel Prince. Another thing unites CBB, Cruel Prince, and this book, though, and it's that they all lack real resolution because they're all set ups for trilogies. I don't mind trilogies per se but these opening installments just don't stand alone in the way that the trilogy-derived Best Novel finalists of the past couple years have (e.g., Ninefox Gambit, Fifth Season), and I find that hard to reward.

3. The Invasion by Peadar O'Guilin

I really liked the premise of this book. Ireland has been cut off from the outside world for a generation, a generation where every child is called by the Sidhe to the Grey Land during their teen years. At first, only three in a thousand survived, but now kids are enrolled in survival colleges to enable them to last the twenty-four hours you need to last to return to the real world. This book mostly follows two kids who survived such an ordeal in the previous book. I liked the sense of a changed world, but got bored by the actual story told, and neither of the main characters ever grabbed me (though I admit that may have been different if I'd read the first book). Plus, the ending wrapped a lot of stuff up out of basically nowhere, though it does seemingly leave room for a book 3. I'd say pretty comparable to Belles, but better worldbuilding and more interesting premise, and more self-containedness give it the edge. It doesn't really set me alight as a potential winner, though.

2. Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Beginning this book, I was worried; it was my fourth present-tense first-person YA narrative, and I was already sick of the style. But I soon warmed to it, because Dread Nation has a distinct narrative voice, and actually makes good use of its tense, shifting between present and past as it shifts back and forth in time. Dread Nation is an alternate history zombie novel, where after the Battle of Gettysburg, the dead ("shamblers") began to walk. The Civil War thus became a zombie war, and American society has restructured around defending against the undead, including taking African-Americans and training them to defend whites from attack. Our narrator is one of those, the daughter of a plantation owner's wife and a slave, who is good at killing shamblers but not good at taking direction. I enjoyed it a lot; Ireland packs in a lot of interesting ideas, and uses the zombie conceit to make some commentary to make some commentary on our own world. (Though it raises some issues I wish it had actually dealt with, like the role of Native Americans in all this.) The dialogue is good, the characters are interesting, and the plot goes in a lot of unexpected but interesting directions. I did have some quibbles with internal chronology, though, and the ending packs in one too many surprise reveals. There is a sequel forthcoming, which I would read, but it works as a standalone.

1. Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman

At first, I found this book plodding and a little obvious, but once Tess actually goes on the road, it steadily gets better and better until you're reading something quite special. It's kind of a fantasy riff on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, in big ways and small was, from the double standard of premarital sex for men and women to the solace of physical labor. Seventeen-year-old Tess, always the "bad twin," finally runs away from home shortly after her "good" sister gets married, escaping a negligent father and stringent mother. She teams up with a lizard creature, pretends to be a man, learns the joys of construction work, seeks out the Serpent that birthed the world, learns that sex can be more than she thought, and learns something about herself and the world. With the exception of one bit in the middle where I found the logistics wonky (how did she find time to work on farms while trailing the two ne'er-do-wells, and why did they tolerate her?), I really enjoyed Tess's trek; it's the best sort of travel narrative. My main reservation would be that I feel like it's the kind of YA novel that's not actually for young adults, but for the adults who read YA.

Overall Thoughts

Last year, I was grumpy at the Best Novel finalists. This year, I am slightly less grumpy, in that I think Spinning Silver is clearly better than any of last year's finalists, and is 100% a worthy winner that presents me with what I want in a Hugo finalist. But I found the ranking really easy to do, and I feel like the ideal set of finalists is the one you find difficult to rank. The YA Award, which last year I called a "smashing success"... well, you can see what a struggle it was for me this year. Again, I mourn the lack of any real sf in this category (though the only book I nominated myself, M. T. Anderson's The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, was fantasy). There are clearly a set of trends in YA fiction that are completely incompatible with my tastes.

Based on buzz and other awards, I reckon The Calculating Stars will win Best Novel. If not that, I could imagine Spinning Silver (Novik came in second with her previous fairy tale novel, Uprooted, in 2015); I don't think any of the other four have broad enough appeal to win it. I also reckon very strongly that Children of Blood and Bone will win the Lodestar, though I would love to read a convincing positive review of this book, as I just don't get it. I also suspect Dread Nation has a good shot. I doubt it will be Tess.

Related Work was just an odd duck. I don't think AO3 will get it; there were too many people grumbling about the weirdness of nominating a web site of fiction for not its fiction. Astounding is the most traditional finalist in this category, so I hope that's it, and I feel like it has the broadest appeal. Maybe Walton will appeal to Hugo voters' interest in themselves, though, or maybe the Le Guin streak will go on for a third year. (I miss her, too, but I really don't think she deserves to win it for this.) I've seen some grumbling about the oddness of Related Work, and some wondering if it should go back to "Related Book," but I like it, even AO3. Fandom is a broad church, and a reward like this lets us reward the interesting stuff about sf that is not itself sf. My life would be poorer for not having seen Lindsay Ellis's The Hobbit duology.

Review: Appendices: Being the Final Book of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hardcover, 189 pages
Published 2000 (originally 1955)
Acquired February 2011
Read August 2013

Appendices: Being the Final Book of The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien

Reading this as my last installment on my The Lord of the Rings voyage is even more of an anticlimax than the second half of The End of the Third Age; the whole thing is polished off with a series of facts and figures. I'm glad this book exists in the abstract: it reveals the staggering amount of thought Tolkien put into his fully-realized fantasy world, which was definitely a first and probably never surpassed (who would have guessed how Shire pronouns would contribute to the perception of Pippin in Minas Tirith?). But I don't know if it actually needed to be published. Well, I'm sure it did, but it definitely didn't need to be read by me.

I know there are people who loved this, but it reads like a less realistic if more consistent version of the History of the Kings of Britain. Which king went to which mountain range to fight which raider when is chronicled lovingly. I did like the snippets of the Aragorn/Arwen romance; too bad that couldn't have been in the actual book.

Review: A Game of Chess by Altariel

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2011 (originally 2002)
Read July 2013

A Game of Chess
by Altariel

As I read The Last Ringbearer, I recalled some grumbling from when it hit Slate and the blogosphere: why was this piece of glorified fanfiction getting attention? Good question. So, I tracked down this because 1) at 70,000 words, it is novel-length, 2) it is about Faramir, who is the greatest, and 3) it is by Una McCormack, who is one of the better writers of Star Trek and Doctor Who tie-ins.  Unfortunately for the book, it was something very different than what I was expecting. Because of McCormack's authorship and the title, I was expecting a book of political intrigue with Faramir at the center. How awesome does that sound? Instead, it's about the rocky first couple years of Faramir's marriage to Éowyn, alternating chapters from each one's perspective.

There's nothing wrong with this in principle, but in practice it turned out to be less exciting than I wanted. An awful lot of the book is reported speech, which undermines the effect of the conversations, and leaves it feeling underwritten and overwritten at the same time. If there was more dialogue, it'd feel fuller, but it'd have to be longer than its 70,000 words, but as it is, it feels like not enough actually happens to justify spending 70,000 words on it.

In the end, this wasn't the Faramir I wanted to see. I've no doubt Faramir has some trauma in his past-- I thought his relationships with his father and his brother were very sensitively portrayed-- but this is the man who when he saw the Ring, essentially shrugged. A lot of people tell each other how awesome Faramir is, but we see virtually none of that actually depicted in the text. I would have liked this book a lot more if we'd seen more sides of Faramir's character than mopeyness. This guy's badass! But not here, alas. This book shows us one side of a character, not an integrated person. There are flashes of something better (Faramir and Éowyn's physical confrontation, for example), and I really liked the epilogue, but on the whole I wanted something else than what I got.

Review: The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2011 (originally 1999)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2013

The Last Ringbearer
by Kirill Yeskov
translated by Yisroel Markov

This Russian reworking attracted some Anglosphere attention when a free English translation was published on LiveJournal a few years ago; it seemed appropriate to follow-up to my finally reading all six books of The Lord of the Rings. Yeskov presents The Lords of the Rings as propaganda written by the victorious Gondorian forces after the war. Aragorn is a conniving manipulator backed by the Elves, while Mordor is a bastion of rationality in a sea of magic-users on the verge of completing the industrial revolution. Gandalf, feeling threatened, deposes Saruman and orchestrates the collapse of Gondor.

Yeskov's rewriting is quite fun; I enjoyed picking out the details of the "new universe" as the story went. Aragron is a pretty threatening villain, a stone-cold thug backed by zombies who killed Denethor to secure the Gondorian throne. Orcs are just human beings of a different ethnicity (Orocuen), as are trolls, and probably hobbits, though we never see any hobbits. The Nazgûl are good wizards who planted rumors of an all-powerful Ring to try to break up the alliance between Aragorn and the Elves. (One of my favorite jokes is about what a bad job the Nazgûl going after the Ring in the Shire did.) Aragorn is the one who killed the "Witch-King" (no one more than a commander of a Mordorian regiment), and spreads a rumor that he was killed by a woman to humiliate him even after death.

Quite properly, Faramir is the same in all universes. He's forced into ceding his kingship to Aragorn and given a little principality, but he soon unites with Éowyn, a discarded lover of Aragorn, and begins a resistance against Aragorn's people. He's completely badass, and the relationship between them is quite well done.

The book, though, does not actually focus on most of this; it's just background fodder for Yeskov's story. The real story is that of Haladin, a Mordorian physician, and Tzerlag, a Mordorian scout, as well as Tangorn, a Gondorian noble who realizes the Elves are up to no good. The first quarter of the novel sees them in the desert, trying to evade Elvish capture and get away. It's a well-done wartime thriller. Then it becomes a quest novel, as Haladin learns how to banish magic from Middle-earth, and thus save rationality, if not his country. In subsequent quarters, we follow Faramir's attempts to escape Aragorn's control, a mission by Tangorn to Umbar, and the infiltration of Lórien itself. The first two quarters are definitely the best, as the further it goes on, the more it feels like a generic espionage novel. I like Haladin, Tzerlag, and Tangorn a lot: as pretty ordinary guys caught up in terrible events, it's hard not to.

The book has its odd moments, though. It's hard to know when to blame them on Yeskov or his (volunteer!) English translator Markov, though. There's an attempt to make the dialogue more casual, but it sits poorly with the long, expository dialogue characters speak in. You can have Gandalf talk like a violent thug, or you can have him deliver long speeches on the necessity of the Fall of Mordor. I'm not convinced you can do both; it's an awkward mix of generic standards.

Also awkward is Yeskov's constant bringing in of real-world references, especially from World War II and the Cold War. Whether you think his novels are good or not, you have to admit Tolkien did an amazing job building a linguistically coherent world, whereas Yeskov's world feels cheap by comparison. At one point, Éomer even mentions the differences between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam!

Also, though it's shorter by far than The Lord of the Rings I suspect, it goes on too long. Though the espionage tricks are fun, Yeskov is clearly more interested in them than I am.

I was trying to puzzle through why an espionage novel. If one is to unpack the rhetorical underpinnings of high fantasy, one of them is typically moral absolutism, I think: good is Good and bad is Evil. In Tolkien's story, the enemy country is led not just by a guy who wants something for his country different than our heroes', but basically Satan. Yeskov doesn't really undercut this, though, so much as reverse it: we end up with Good and Evil, just reversed.

So why deconstruct The Lord of the Rings by turning it into an espionage novel? The key, I think, is that though espionage stories can feature Good and Evil (though perhaps not always), Good and Evil are distinguished by their ultimate aims-- not their methods. When it comes down to it, each side is no better than the other in terms of what they do: "in order to win you have to walk over corpses and wade through unthinkable muck, again and again -- a vicious circle." Yeskov seems unable to push the moral absolutism of Tolkien so far as to say there is not Good and Evil, but he does get it to saying that Good is often not any better than Evil. There's a recurrent saying about the ends justifying the means: "Stated generally, the problem lacks a solution." I take this to mean that whether the ends justify the means depends on what ends and what means. The rhetoric of espionage fiction is that often Good's ends do not seem to justify Good's means... but you gotta do it anyway if you want to live.

Review: The End of the Third Age by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hardcover, 182 pages
Published 2000 (originally 1955)
Acquired February 2011
Read June 2013

The End of the Third Age: Being the Sixth Book of The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien

This turned out to be my least favorite and the most uneven installment of The Lord of the Rings. Mainly, I think, because Tolkien severely overestimates how much I care about the kingship of Middle-earth. Seriously. I get that it's a sign of the restoration of Middle-earth, but the book just goes on and on about the details of the restoration of the crown, and the marriage, and whatever. I'm not sure where Aragorn didn't show up and ask for his crown years ago, nor why a king is so important-- at one point we're told the roads to the Shire will be kept up better now. What, a steward of Gondor can't order anyone to put down new pavement? I also don't think it's really explained why all the elves are like, "Welp, we're leaving." It just suddenly seems to be something everyone knows about.

The book still has its moments, of course. Frodo and Sam escaping from Cirith Ungol continues the good work done in The Ring Goes East, and the "Mount Doom" chapter is excellent. I'd read the book and seen the films before, but I'd forgotten that even Frodo succumbs to the Ring in the end. I also really like the romance between Faramir and Éowyn-- two of the most awesome characters in the books, of course they have to get together, and unlike always happened in the Harry Potter books, they actually do.  Also, they have the most epic kiss ever:

'Éowyn, Éowyn, White Lady of Rohan, in this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!' And he stooped and kissed her brow. 

And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air. And the Shadow departed, and the Sun was unveiled, and light leaped forth; and the waters of Anduin shone like silver, and in all the houses of the City men sang for the joy that welled up in their hearts from what source they could not tell. (93)

If that's what happens when he kisses her on the forehead, imagine what locking lips will do-- probably cure cancer! Actually, I don't like that Éowyn-- the women who slew the Witch-King of Angmar-- has to give up being a warrior for being a healer when she gets married, but 1) lets not ask for too much progressiveness of old Tolkien and 2) given that Aragorn, that manliest of men, turns out to be the world's best healer, I can't really argue that healing is particular feminine activity.

Once you muddle through the interminable chapters about the coronation and then everyone saying goodbye all the time (seriously, the climax of this installment comes in the third chapter of nine!), the end of the book is pretty good, too. "The Scouring of the Shire," far from being an anticlimax serves to both escalate the threat at the novel's end (sure, Sauron is dead, but the Shire itself is in danger!) and show how badass our little group of hobbits has become.  And the last chapter is just lovely; Bilbo was irrevocably changed by his journey, but poor Frodo was changed even moreso. All adventures have their price, and even if Sam suffers less for it, he'll never be the same either.

Review: The War of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hardcover, 197 pages
Published 2000 (originally 1955)
Acquired February 2011
Read May 2013

The War of the Ring: Being the Fifth Book of The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien

Each installment of The Lord of the Rings escalates over the previous one: The Ring Sets Out sees very little action happening in the Shire, The Ring Goes South features the Fellowship in some encounters, and The Treason of Isengard moves us to the scale of battles. The War of the Ring, as the title promises, brings us up to all-out war. (However, there's no Ring, oddly enough.) The entire book depicts one long battle, beginning with its buildup, spending several chapters on its actual duration, and then its aftermath. As someone who is not super-into heroic fantasy, I was trepidatious when I realized this, but it turned out to work (more on that later).

The other way in which each installment has shifted is viewpoint characters over time. The Ring Sets Out is driven by Frodo, while The Ring Goes South adds the other members of the Fellowship. The Treason of Isengard removes Frodo and Sam so we just have Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, with occasional peaks at Merry and Pippin. The War of the Ring largely removes Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli as viewpoint characters-- meaning it's largely the Merry and Pippin show! This was what really made this big epic battle work, to tell it from the perspective of two ordinary hobbits.

The War of the Ring's best moments are, as a result, the ones in Pippin's plotline. Pippin has come a long way from the "fool of a Took" that Gandalf used to berate in The Ring Goes South; his service in Minas Tirith comprises one of the best subplots in The Lord of the Rings so far. I was impressed with the newfound maturity he demonstrates in offering his service; it's a very touching moment. All of his interactions with the Gondor military men are great (I love the rumors that spread about warrior-hobbits) and his struggle to stop Denethor from killing Faramir is fantastic. Poor Faramir! You're still the best, no matter what your dad says. The scenes where Denethor tries to kill Faramir and then dies himself are chilling, and though the films let me know that Faramir wouldn't be dying, I can't deny a sensation of suspense at the whole sequence.

Merry gets his own action, of course, contributing to the death of the Witch-King of Angmar. Can I say, though, that the revelation that Éowyn is secretly riding with the Rohirrim is kinda anticlimactic in the novels? She's had like three lines of dialogue as herself. And those happened two books ago. And then Pippin gets in again at the end, which layers a couple good cliffhangers: have Frodo and Sam been killed over in The End of the Third Age, which is happening simultaneously? Is Pippin about to die (even though he's just killed a troll, the little bad-ass)?

There are times where it's men riding horses in manly ways (though Tolkien subverts that) or Aragon talking to ghosts or pirates or something (seriously what was that?), but on the whole The War of the Ring makes an enjoyable masterpiece of fantasy warfare, and I am looking forward to the conclusion. Can't believe I'm there already!

(So is it just a coincidence that Denethor and Théoden are near-anagrams? They're like the same guy. In that they're both old kings.)

Review: The Ring Goes East by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hardcover, 189 pages
Published 2000 (originally 1954)
Acquired February 2011
Read May 2013

The Ring Goes East: Being the Fourth Book of The Lord of the Rings

by J. R. R. Tolkien

The only members of the Fellowship that we see in The Ring Goes East are Frodo and Sam, hacking slowly and meanderingly through mountains, wastelands, swamps, and caves. Seriously, there's a lot of swamps in this book, and I went into it knowing that and dreading it.

To my great surprise and greater relief, it was better than that. Though the presence of a chapter called "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" didn't bode well, the book is livened up considerably when Gollum shows up to accompany our heroes, stopping it from being a straightforward journey of two people. Gollum is a great foil to our heroes, and funny too; I had to resist the temptation to continuously read all his lines out loud in a funny voice to my wife. The "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" chapter is actually a good one, and I did not know that Sam saying "Po – ta – toes" wasn't an invention of the film. (Unfortunately, "boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew" is.)

Anyway, then Faramir shows up. I love Faramir. Faramir is awesome. That is a guy without pretensions who just does his job. If Denethor had sent him to Rivendell, this whole Ring-destroying business would have gone ten times as good-- the Fellowship may not have even broken! I cursed Sam for his foolishness when he revealed Frodo's possession of the Ring to Faramir, but the scene where Faramir reveals that he's not even tempted is great. He's probably my favorite character in The Lord of the Rings who's not a member of the Fellowship.

Though it's not my favorite book of the story, so far, it has what is definitely my favorite sequence: Sam fighting Shelob. Everything in this section is fantastic: Sam's determination, his reaction to the "death" of Frodo. The whole last chapter is a class act; everything in the book up until this point has shown you what an undertaking it is for three people to carry the Ring into the fire, and here, Sam decides that he's going to do it alone. But then Frodo's not dead! Poor guy. And I loved the bit where he charges around the corner to reclaim Frodo from the orcs only to realize that they were much further off than he thought, and they don't even notice him. The Ring Goes East is really the installment of The Lord of the Rings that elevates Sam from comedy assistant to developed, forceful character, and I love it.

There are a lot of other things to like in The Ring Goes East, when they're not slogging through swamps. On the other hand, what's with the totally racist depiction of the Southrons? That's a little troubling. I love Sam's search for an oliphaunt.

But best of all is the page where Sam and Frodo discuss stories. This I'm going to quote in full, because it's all good:

'And we shouldn't be here at all, [said Sam] if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those that went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?' 

'I wonder,' said Frodo. 'But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to.' 

'No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it [...]. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! [...] Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?' 

'No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. 'But the people in then come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.' 

[...] 'Still, I wonder if shall ever be put into songs or tales. We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they'll say: "Yes, that's one of my favorite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."' 

'It's saying a lot too much,' said Frodo, and he laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. [...] 'Why Sam,' he said, 'to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you've left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. "I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn't they put in more of his talk, dad? That's what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn't have got far without Sam, would he, dad?"' 

'Now, Mr. Frodo,' said Sam, 'you shouldn't make fun. I was serious.' 

'So was I,' said Frodo, 'and so I am.' (pp. 149-51)

I didn't mean to quote that much (is that fair use?), but now I have, and I stand by it. It's a lovely passage-- from meditation on the nature of storytelling to deep emotional revelation. And every word of it is true.

Review: The Treason of Isengard by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hardcover, 252 pages
Published 2000 (originally 1954)
Acquired February 2011
Read April 2013

The Treason of Isengard: Being the Third Book of The Lord of the Rings

by J. R. R. Tolkien

I didn't realize/remember the way that The Lord of the Rings was structured in detail, so I was surprised by intrigued when I discovered that Frodo and Sam were completely absent from this book, which instead follows the adventures of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli and Merry and Pippin following the disintegration of the Fellowship. One of my problems with The Ring Goes South was that there were too many characters caught up in the narrative; the splitting of the Fellowship into three distinct groups gives everyone more space to breathe and become their own people.

Merry and Pippin on their own was fantastic, and I wish we'd gotten to see more of it directly (much of their adventures are reported by the two hobbits to the other characters late in the novel). They turn out to be surprisingly resourceful when captured by the orcs; the bit where they pretend to the have the Ring on them was one of my favorite parts. Their encounters with the Ents, too, are good fun.

Most of the book is spent on the Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli trio (who are later joined by Gandalf), and it is time well spent. Gimli is my favorite character-- always ready to threaten someone with his axe and competing with Legolas over his number of kills, but also grumpy when he thinks Galadriel hasn't sent him a message, and wistful about the beauty of the caverns behind Helm's Deep. (Also, he refuses to sing over Boromir's grave. Unlike Aragorn, who sings every ten pages-- something I have a hard time picturing his film counterpart doing!)

While the Battle of Helm's Deep isn't the spectacle it is in the films, it's still one of the highlights of the books so far. Tolkien shifts his usual style; rather than long passages of description, the events come at us in short sections, sometimes only a couple paragraphs at a time, imbuing both the buildup to the battle and the battle itself with tension and a slight sense of disconnection and choppiness that really works.

Each book of The Lords of the Rings so far has been different to the once preceding it; this one is a high fantasy war story. I don't know if I prefer it to The Ring Sets Out's more rustic tone, but it's well-executed, enjoyable, and fast-paced.

Review: The Ring Goes South by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hardcover, 253 pages
Published 2000 (originally 1954)
Acquired February 2011
Read March 2013

The Ring Goes South: Being the Second Book of The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien

To my surprise, I didn't like The Ring Goes South as much as the previous volume in the series. While The Ring Sets Out has a pretty firm focus on the Shire and the dangers facing it, The Ring Goes South is a little more disjointed, alternating between excitement and boredom, and a little too overcrowded.

Unfortunately, it leads off with boredom: "The Council of Elrond" ought to be a textbook case of how not to handle exposition. I like the idea of the backstory, but the way it's related meant I had to go back over it multiple times in order to absorb it all, as I kept on skimming through whether I wanted to or not. I did notice that though there are many songs sung in Rivendell, they're all by Bilbo; the elves themselves do not sing much if at all. It's a marked difference to the more mischievous elves of The Hobbit.

Finally, though, the Company gets underway, and things begin to pick up. There are an awful lot of characters in the Company, and inevitable short shrift is given to most of them. Pippin is there just to be mocked by Gandalf (I loved it when Gandalf threatened to bash his head against the Gate of Moria), but even outside of the hobbits, I found it took a long time to get a grip on any one character's personality, beyond the fact that no matter what plan you come up with, Boromir will think it's a bad idea. They do get some moments, though, especially when Gimli visits Lothlórien and takes issue with the elves' prescriptions... but is then saddened when they must leave.

The visit to the Mines of Moria was definitely my favorite part of the novel: Tolkien very vividly communicates Moria's creepiness, and I'm a complete sucker for stories where characters find a fragmented narrative telling of a past disaster. The journey to Lothlórien is a complete shift, and though it has its moments (the stuff with Gimli, the looking in the Mirror of Galadriel, Galadriel's rant), it feels a little disconnected, and repetitive to the already-long stay in Rivendell.

The last chapter, though, is amazing, from Boromir's breakdown to Frodo's use of the ring to see all Middle-earth to Frodo and Sam's amazingly brave decision. The end of the book left me excited to see what would happen next; I just wish it had cohered a little bit more in and of itself, and that there's been more time to spend with any of the nine principal characters.

Review: The Ring Sets Out by J. R. R. Tolkien

Hardcover, 283 pages
Published 2000 (originally 1954)
Acquired February 2011
Read January 2013

The Ring Sets Out: Being the First Book of The Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien

Reading The Lord of the Rings book by book is an interesting experience. I have often heard others being (and remember myself being) frustrated by how long it took The Fellowship of the Ring to get out of the Shire. But when you read The Ring Sets Out on its own, it's a novel about the Shire.  About living in it, about it being invaded, about leaving it.

"Concerning Hobbits," the prologue, sets us up nicely with a loving description of the Shire, its inhabitants, and its customs. I expected to find this tedious, but in fact I ate it up. From there, we launch into the goings-on of Bilbo's birthday party, which both let us see the splendor of the Shire, foibles and all, but also beings hinting at something coming to upset the Shire. So effective is this setup, I think, that when the Black Riders make their move, it's incongruous: the Shire itself is under threat, and so we too feel threatened.

There's a lot of homeyness in The Ring Sets Out; never before have I read a book so interested in the quality and quantity of its protagonists' baths. Baths, food, sleep, drinks-- these are all the markers of home in The Ring Sets Out, and the Shire itself. Our main characters are all homebodies: adventurous by hobbit standards, but timid and naïve by all others. It's interesting to contrast their journey out of the Shire to the one in The Hobbit; Bilbo makes it all the way to the Lonely Mountain and back in the amount of pages that it takes Frodo to make it just to Bree. But that's because The Hobbit is a novel about the adventure, while The Ring Sets Out is a novel about how difficult it is to leave your home behind. I was always struck as a kid by the sections set in Bree, where our four heroes have literally no one they can trust, and they have no idea how to behave. They feel very alienating as a reader.

The only part where I felt The Ring Sets Out really flags is not the infamous Tom Bombadil segment, but after it; the encounter with him is fine, but immediately after it, the whole incident is repeated! The hobbits are captured by a tree, Tom Bombadil saves them, and they stay the night at his house. Then they leave, are captured by barrow-wights, and Tom saves them again. The only reason that the second capture can even happen is because Tom leaves them for no apparent reason.

The Ring Sets Out ends with Frodo lapsing into unconsciousness, beyond the Shire, beyond Bree, beyond Weathertop, beyond anything Frodo has even heard of.  The Shire is far behind, and everything ahead of him  is completely unknown...

Review: The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien

Mass market paperback, 287 pages
Published 1971 (originally 1937)
Borrowed from Hayley
Read December 2012

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (Revised Edition)
by J. R. R. Tolkien

I first read The Hobbit in fifth grade, when my mother bought me the box set of it and The Lord of the Rings. I liked it. I had a good friend we used to call "Bilbo" because he looked like Bilbo as rendered on the cover of my edition. I then tried to get into The Fellowship of the Ring. I don't think I even made it out of the Shire. The dense prose was something I didn't even know how to deal with.

So, one year later, I decided to try again. I reread The Hobbit first. I liked it. I then started into The Fellowship of the Rings. I think I made it about a third of the way through before I gave up. When I was a kid, I never gave up on books once I started them. (I still don't.)

Two years later, I gave The Lord of the Rings one last shot. I reread The Hobbit first. I liked it. And then, miracle of miracles, I made it through all of The Fellowship of the Ring. Once you've done that, you've committed: I crawled my way through The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I think it took me weeks to read the whole thing, in an era where I never spent more than a couple days on one book. Having finally conquered them, I resolved never to read them again.

When the Peter Jackson movies came out when I was in high school, I enjoyed them a lot (especially The Two Towers), but I advised all my friends whose interest was piqued by the films to give the books a wide berth. I'll stick with the achievable versions, thank you very much.

Ten years later, though, and I started to reconsider. In the interim, I'd read The Silmarillion and thought it okay. More importantly, I now read Victorian novels on what you might call a professional basis. Surely anyone who could read and love George Eliot couldn't be taken down by J. R. R. Tolkien? My decision solidified when I acquired the "Millennium Edition" box set of The Lord of the Rings for merely the price of shipping. Six chunks instead of three? It was beginning to sound achievable. I decided to reread it, pacing the books out, and slotted it onto my reading list, and waited-- and of course, The Hobbit floated to the top at the time the first film adaptation was in theaters, so now everything will think I'm just cashing in.

But anyway. What about The Hobbit? Having just seen The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, I was most struck by the difference between Bilbo's character arc in the two versions. The novel Bilbo very much wants to just sit at home and not be bothered: unlike in the film, where he decides to rush after the departed dwarves, he is practically pushed out the door by Gandalf! He does get a big moment of heroism, as in the film, but it comes a bit later-- instead of foolishly rushing out to save Thorin, he calculatedly uses his ring and Sting against the spiders of Mirkwood. My favorite part for Bilbo (aside from "Riddles in the Dark," of course) was when Bilbo orchestrated the escape from the Mirkwood elves. Smart thinking! I also really liked the way Bilbo handled himself once they got to the Lonely Mountain, both with Smaug and with Thorin. He's a canny chap, our Bilbo, and it's good development without being overwrought. I did quite sympathize with poor Bilbo the whole way through. Guy just wants to stay at home and eat lots of breakfast, and who can take exception with that?

I was surprised at the way that Thorin turns out; it's been over ten years, after all, and I forgot what happened to him in the end. It's a rather sad fate for the old chap, and I wonder how Peter Jackson will adapt it for the third film, as it doesn't really seem to play into the character arc that he's setting up for Thorin. I was also surprised at how little there is for most of the dwarf characters; I'm not sure why Tolkien would write in so many, if he barely uses any of them or gives them notable (or even unnotable) characteristics.

The world of The Hobbit is a bit more whimsical than I remember the world of The Lord of the Rings turning out: there are ton of talking animals (Beorn is awesome), for example, and more references to the modern world. (One of my favorite jokes is the one about the invention of golf, and I was completely surprised but quite happy that that made it into the film.) Overall, it's quite a fun book, and I can see why (beyond completism, of course) every time I read The Lord of the Rings as a child, I always reread The Hobbit first. I've rarely met a fantasy travel narrative that I didn't like, and this is no expection.

It certainly has the most musical numbers of any book I've ever read.