Bite-Sized Book Thoughts (The Fall of Númenor, Back Book 3, and Masks of the Illuminati)

Sometimes I’ll read a book and have a thing or two to say about it on here, but not enough that I think it merits a full article, so here’s the first entrance in my Bite-Sized Book Thoughts – a book-themed update of the old Ferretnibbles concept from the Ferretbrain days.

This time around, I’m going to look at three pieces which are either direct sequels to stuff or further entries in their overall settings – where, as such, I don’t have loads to say about them which wouldn’t be redundant with what I said about related works in their respective series.

The Fall of Númenor (J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Brian Sibley)

This is essentially doing for the Second Age of Middle-Earth what The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin did for the major legends of the First Age – bringing together as much as possible of the material Tolkien cooked up on the subject, arranging it in a sensible order, and releasing it as a “new” Tolkien book. With Christopher Tolkien having sailed to Valinor, for this volume the editorial burden is taken up by Brian Sibley, who was responsible for the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings – for my money the best adaptation of the story extant.

This is an apt choice; between his hand in the radio drama and his authoring the official making-of books for Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies, Sibley has a wealth of experience in the problem of adapting Tolkien, which inherently involves a certain amount of editing Tolkien, which is the task he is faced with here. He wisely decides to follow the chronology in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings; the book is essentially a massively adapted version of that, with additional information from The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, The Nature of Middle-Earth, and Tolkien’s letters and whatnot parachuted in to expand on the entries there.

Whereas I didn’t like The History of Middle-Earth and The Nature of Middle-Earth, because to an extent they’re as much a compilation of ideas that Tolkien toyed with and then rejected as it is a collection of ideas he added to his worldbuilding but never saw light of day in his published work, I did like Christopher Tolkien’s various expansions on the First Age legends, because they saw him doing the additional legwork of taking all that material and presenting it in a much more focused fashion. This does more or less the same trick, and is able to cover a much greater span of time than any of those volumes because the Second Age is the one that Tolkien developed the least.

As a consequence of Tolkien not really writing any stories set in that time (there’s one fairly developed story of the tempestuous marriage of a Númenorean prince and a woman who does not understand his urge for exploration), this is more backstory than it is a satisfying story in its own right. This will mostly be of interest for use as a worldbuilding reference, looking up Second Age-relevant information – say, if you’re writing fanfic, running a Middle-Earth-based RPG like The One Ring, or are trying to figure out where Amazon have deviated from canon in The Rings of Power. (Answer: everywhere.)

Back Book 3 (K.C. Green and Andrew Clark)

I covered the first two volumes of this graphic novel back when I wrote about the Kickstarter for Book 2. This volume is about as long as both the previous ones put together, but the plot here has become sufficiently un-episodic that it makes sense to burn through it all in one go. The most interesting thing I have to note here is that the production of the book wasn’t crowded through Kickstarter but TopatoGO! – the TopatoCo own-brand crowdfunding platform. This is an interesting development and might make sense for projects likely to use the TopatoCo umbrella for distribution and the like, and may also be a symptom of growing mistrust of Kickstarter due to stuff like their investment in blockchain technologies of dubious utility.

In terms of the action here, this rounds out the series, sees the final revelation of the nature of the strange world that Abigail the gunslinger and Daniel the druid live on, exposes the plans of the witches manipulating King Dang, and brings everything to a satisfying resolution. This whole arc dragged a little bit when I read it on release, because it suffered from the curse of webcomic pacing where you don’t really get much more than a few pages a week, and that’s if you’re very lucky and the artist can work very quickly and update very reliably; it works substantially better read all at once, so I’m glad to get the collection. (The whole sequence is online, but it’s nice to have insurance against it disappearing in the future.)

Masks of the Illuminati (Robert Anton Wilson)

In the days immediately prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicking off World War I, Sir John Babcock comes to Zürich in a state of high agitation, believing himself to be hounded across Europe by a diabolical conspiracy. Through sheer coincidence, he encounters Albert Einstein and James Joyce – two notable thinkers of their age who happen to both be in town – and regales them with his story. Is he merely highly paranoid, or could it be that he has stumbled across a vast occult conspiracy directed by none less than the wickedest man in the world, one Aleister Crowley?

Published in 1981, Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati came out hot on the heels of his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy, in which Wilson dialled the most irritating aspects of his writing up to 11 in order to make much the same points as he did in the Illuminatus! trilogy, only in a more meandering structure with more filler which has dated worse. Since the Illuminatus! trilogy has a highly meandering structure, perhaps a bit of filler, and hasn’t dated brilliantly, that’s saying a lot.

Nonetheless, I actually think Masks of the Illuminati is pretty good. Sure, Wilson’s usual writing quirks are still there, but unexpectedly, out of nowhere, he suddenly learns something resembling narrative discipline, and he ensures his use of his various recurring schticks are actually appropriate to the job at had. For instance, yet again he’s back to mimicing James Joyce at points, but this is generally pulled out for sections written from Joyce’s point of view, so the Joyce-isms are justified by the premise.

(One might argue that that’s also true in Schrödinger’s Cat, since that’s a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot which is consciously borrowing from Ulysses, famously a slice-of-life book without any conventional plot, but in that context it doesn’t stick the landing because it’s also trying to do a dozen other things in a fairly disorganised fashion.)

More broadly, the whole arc of the novel is about an initiatory experience in which Babcock’s worldview is forcibly leapfrogged from a somewhat stuffy and old-fashioned Victorian mindset into a more postmodern outlook – so Wilson’s occasional drifts into experimentalism, his comedic asides, the sections of the book written as scripts (some including cinematic-style notes on shots), the obligatory hallucinatory trip at the end (likely induced by mescaline rather than LSD, but other than that a good old-fashioned Wilson standby), and all the rest are kind of apt in that sense.

In particular, such anachronistically experimental notes end up being a neat device for nudging the reader and reminding them that, despite appearances to the contrary, this is not a straight-up horror novel in the style of Arthur Machen, Robert Chambers, or Lovecraft (not credited in the text, obviously, but an entire strand of the story is a nicely-done riff on The Whisperer In Darkness) with a plot from straight out of Dennis Wheatley; that’s merely the subjective experience of Sir John, who has a worldview which reverts to that sort of thing when under stress.

In addition, whereas Schrödinger’s Cat had Wilson attempt address a large number of subjects in a fairly disorganised way, with the result that he touches on a lot of them in a fairly oversimplified manner, Masks sees him be a bit more careful about setting the boundaries of his narrative. Sure, there’s all sorts of nods to Schrödinger’s Cat and Illuminatus! scattered through the thing, with various characters here conceivably being ancestors or alternate versions of characters from those series, and there’s implications about deeper linkages and the possibility that World War I might have been the result of Illuminati machinations, but those are sideshows, and Wilson makes sure not to get bogged down in them. His story here is the psychological liberation of Sir John Babcock, and he focuses on that.

Wilson actually focusing on something is a novelty, but in this instance it pans out surprisingly well. The entire story spins a yarn about Crowley which, though fictional in its particulars, shows a fairly deep knowledge of Crowley’s life and philosophy and a fair amount of research; Wilson’s erudition on the subject is especially impressive when you remember he was writing at a time before some of the better biographies of Crowley were extant.

Indeed, it is possible to interpret the novel in an entirely sceptical manner – regarding any claims about the Golden Dawn (and therefore Crowley’s A.’.A.’., his Golden Dawn splinter group) having a sort of apostolic succession dating back to the Knights Templar and beyond as spurious and regarding the entire thrust of the novel as psychological, and not magical, and for the book to still tell a story with a satisfying narrative arc. Equally, you can read all sorts of additional stuff into it should you wish. Squaring that particular circle is difficult, and it’s impressive how well Wilson does it. Although Illuminatus! would forever be Wilson’s major claim to fame, Masks of the Illuminati is possibly a better novel if you are after something that resembles an actual novel, rather than a bullshit session between two stoned philosophical autodidacts.

Mini-Review: The Dregs of Middle-Earth

Christopher Tolkien is dead, but the cottage industry based around sifting through his dad’s old records continues. The latest product of this process is The Nature of Middle-Earth, which by and large veers away from narrative material in favour of presenting a range of little essays Tolkien wrote working out various different aspects of how his secondary creation worked.

These texts predominantly date from fairly late in Tolkien’s development of the setting – in fact, a good chunk comes from after he finished The Lord of the Rings, when he decided that in light of decisions made in writing that he needed to back and give the Silmarillion another revision. As such, it’s contemporary with a lot of the material which Christopher Tolkien would later compile as the last few volumes of The History of Middle-Earth.

Indeed, despite not being a numbered volume in that series, The Nature of Middle-Earth can be argued to be an extension of that project; it’s sufficiently reliant on it in his introduction editor Carl E. Hostetter states that, although he only considers knowledge of the Silmarillion to be truly essential to following what’s presented in here, he also thinks that being familiar with the latter volumes of History of Middle-Earth would be a big help, and certainly there’s enough references to texts found in there that this caveat seems plausible.

I personally find The History of Middle-Earth to be a slice of Tolkien scholarship too far, largely because whilst it isn’t exclusively rewrites or first drafts of material already produced in more polished form or in alternate tellings in The Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion, there’s certainly a large proportion of that sort of stuff, and I’m much more interested in entirely new material, like that which made up Unfinished Tales, than I am in repackagings of the old: as far as I am concerned, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion already represent Tolkien’s intentions perfectly adequately.

(Yes, yes, Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay did the final edit on the Silmarillion – but Tolkien’s intentions were always “if I die before finishing the Silmarillion, Christopher should finish the job”, so regardless of how the Silmarillion might have turned out if Tolkien had ever decided it was finished, you can’t say the published version did not at least in some respect reflect his intentions.)

If, like me, you’re only interested in genuinely new stuff, then extracting that from The History of Middle-Earth is something of a chore. That said, I quite liked the three book-length treatments Christopher Tolkien put together of subjects from the First Age – The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, and The Fall of Gondolin – because those drew together as much as possible of what Tolkien wrote on that subject matter in order to provide as close to definitive overviews as could be arrived at (sometimes in more fragmentary forms than others).

That being the case, the idea of a selection of Tolkien’s non-narrative essays on Middle-Earth taking a similar approach rather appealed to me, which is why I gave The Nature of Middle-Earth a try in the first place. Unfortunately, it does not take the same approach. Rather than extracting useful snippets from the vast morass of The History of Middle-Earth in order to aid understanding, it focuses near-exclusively on hitherto unreleased texts, many of which are quite fragmentary or rough.

If you wanted Tolkien’s back-of-a-piece-of-scrap-paper notes on how the years of the glory days of the Two Trees were longer than the years of the Sun and Moon and what implication that had on Elven history when he decided to greatly expand the length of 1 tree year from 10 solar years to 144 solar years, or Tolkien’s thoughts on which characters should have beards, knock yourself out – this will please the Tolkien scholars nicely. Perhaps a few topics in here are of passing interest, but most people will find these are rare diamonds in the rough. I am sure that the eager beavers at Tolkien Gateway will incorporate the genuinely significant details from here into various wiki articles soon enough; that’ll do for the rest of us.

Rediscovering Familiar Things In Middle-Earth

When I want to take in some Lord of the Rings I tend not to go back to the original book or the movies – dipping into the BBC Radio adaptation is my preferred way, and I remain of the opinion that the radio series might be the best adaptation of the story ever. But every so often I get around to rereading the original books, and that time has come again. The last time was about ten or fifteen years ago, hot on the heels of me first tackling the Silmarillion, and I found that it greatly improved the experience, so let’s see how that goes this time around. This won’t be a full-blown review of these books – there’s little point in contributing further reviews at this point – so much as a chronicle of my thoughts and impressions on this readthrough.

The Hobbit

One thing that’s quite notable about The Lord of the Rings is the stylistic shift it undergoes from the whimsical, almost fairytale-adjacent style of its earliest sections through to the nigh-Beowulf epic style of its late portions; something I’d forgotten about The Hobbit is that it does largely the same thing, and somewhat more smoothly. Endearing, funny fairytale stuff where Bilbo and the dwarves get out of trouble largely through luck or quick wits give way to grimmer fare as the story goes on, and if it never quite gets as Wagnerian as Lord of the Rings, it still gets a good chunk of the way there.

This sets up problems later for The Fellowship of the Ring, where Tolkien starts out almost reverting to the early fairytale tones of the first parts of The Hobbit but doesn’t quite – probably quite wisely realising that readers coming direct from The Hobbit would revolt at that. This does lead to some tonally odd bits like the conversation between Frodo and Gandalf at Bag End about the Ring and its history, which is a sudden injection of material somewhat darker and more steeped in deep worldbuilding lore than the material around it.

Beleriand Revisited

When The Silmarillion was first released in 1977, it was the first major release of Middle-Earth material since Tolkien’s death. Whilst chunks of the backstory to Middle-Earth had been hinted at throughout The Lord of the Rings – and laid out openly in the appendices to The Return of the King – Tolkien had not quite laid everything out in full, not least because he still intended to publish some form of The Silmarillion during his lifetime. In fact, he’d suggested it as a followup to The Hobbit initially, before his publisher Stanley Unwin decided he didn’t like the early draft he’d seen and Tolkien set to work on The Lord of the Rings instead.

Indeed, Tolkien had originally wanted The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to be published together, or at least “in conjunction or in connexion” with each other, to the point where it became a matter of dispute between him and Allen & Unwin; in the early 1950s he actually tried to explore whether Collins would release the entire saga, only for Milton Waldman (a friend of Tolkien’s and his point of contact at Collins) to argue that not only was he not interested in The Silmarillion, but he also felt that The Lord of the Rings itself needed cutting back significantly.

Tolkien shifted back to Allen & Unwin and an agreement was reached: they would release The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien would not press the matter on The Silmarillion. It is possible that by this point Tolkien was having second thoughts as to how ready The Silmarillion was for release anyway. After writing the first material in his Middle-Earth writings in the midst of World War I, Tolkien would essentially revise the body of stories that make up The Silmarillion over and over again over the course of his lifetime, as we’ve seen in our look at The History of Middle-Earth, both experimenting with new structures and framing stories for delivering the information and tinkering with the structure itself.

The Remains of Middle-Earth

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth stories weren’t cranked out to satisfy an audience demand, and writing them wasn’t even Tolkien’s day job: writing the legends of Arda was effectively a hobby of Tolkien’s, a way to exercise the skills of his professional work in a recreational manner he could share with his immediate family and his friends in the Inklings.

Since Tolkien prepared far more material than he ever actually published, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were enriched by numerous references to a mythology only half-glimpsed by the reader, which plays a major role in creating the impression of a world with a rich past. Sure, it’s entirely possible to fake that sort of thing, but having the structure of those myths worked out both makes it easier to make those allusions seem like they relate to an actual story rather than being made up on the spot and can also help inspire aspects of the present story.

Still, a side effect of this is that after Tolkien died, he left behind a ton of unpublished material, a sizable chunk of which has been released since. First, Christopher Tolkien (with the assistance of Guy Gavriel Kay) produced The Silmarillion, as close a reconstruction of Tolkien’s intended narrative of the backstory of Middle-Earth as could be reached. Much later, three books were produced focusing on the three Great Tales – the stories of the First Age which Tolkien thought had the most scope for being fleshed out into full-length narratives that could be read in their own right; these were The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin.

Of those who engage with Tolkien’s Middle-Earth texts at all, many have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A pretty decent number have tackled The Silmarillion and bounced off it hard; for those who enjoyed it, the three First Age books I’d say are also worth a look. For those who want more Tolkien material set in Middle-Earth, however, there’s an even denser, drier inner circle of material than the already a bit dry and dense Silmarillion-tier stuff: that is the raw texts offered up with extensive commentary from Christopher Tolkien in Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-Earth. Few indeed are those who have undertaken the journey into those realms; I, myself, have wandered into the border region and then written it off as not for me. Here’s what I picked up on my excursion…

Unfinished Tales

Despite the title, a chunk of the material here doesn’t really represent actual stories so much as essays and worldbuilding notes. A Description of the Island of Númenor, for instance, is mostly what it says on the tin, but it’s mercifully brief and the geographical details are interwoven with sociological points which set the stage for the next story.

Ferretnibbles 5 – Wrecking Elven Cities and Drawing Elf Porn

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Note: Ferretnibbles 4 is not conserved here since it was not my own work.

The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. Christopher Tolkien)

The Fall of Gondolin is the third of Christopher Tolkien’s standalone presentations of major narratives from Middle Earth’s First Age, following on from The Children of Húrin and Beren and Lúthien. Since he’d hit his early 90s by the time the latter volume was done, Christopher had played down the hopes of his being able to complete this one, but thankfully he has been able to; this time around, he’s much more emphatic that this is well and truly the end of the line as far as his delvings into his father’s Middle Earth manuscripts go.

The three stories in this trilogy constitute the three stories which J.R.R. Tolkien himself thought could sustain an entire novel by themselves, and in each case he made multiple concerted attempts to set down and revise the narrative to a point he was happy with, but all were unfinished to a greater or lesser extent. As I’ve previously detailed, The Children of Húrin is presented mostly as a single, continuous narrative, Christopher Tolkien taking the most complete version of the narrative available and then drawing on other texts to patch over the gaps here and there. On the other hand, in the case of Beren and Lúthien no one version of that narrative was developed and polished to the point where that was possible, so Christopher instead presents the different versions of the texts in order of composition so readers can trace how the story developed from its early, Lord Dunsany-esque prototype into more distinctly Tolkien-ish later forms.

Shadow of WTF

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

When we last left the story of the Ranger Talion in Shadow of Mordor, he’d started his day being murdered by the forces of Sauron and then things just kept getting worse. Given a strange sort of half-life by being fused with the spirit of Celebrimbor, the legendary elven smith who had forged the Rings of Power with Sauron, we followed their journeys together as they began their guerilla war against Sauron, using the power to control orcs’ minds to turn the Dark Lord’s forces against him.

All this Grand Theft Mordor shenanigans was fun enough, but whilst the original Shadow of Mordor was like the Saint’s Row of Middle-Earth, Shadow of War is its Saint’s Row 2: it takes the gameplay of the original and injects it with a hefty dose of absolutely bizarre nonsense that makes a farcical cartoon of the whole thing.

Ferretnibbles 2 – Beren and Lúthien, Shin Megami Tensei on the 3DS, and Sithrak Tracts

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Sometimes you want to jabber about something on Ferretbrain to an extent which would be unwieldy for a Playpen post, but not necessarily make for a full-blooded article. To encourage contributors to offer up shorter pieces when the mood strikes them, here’s another set of Ferretnibbles – pocket-sized articles about all and sundry.

This time around, they’re all penned by me, but nibbles from others are always welcome at the usual editorial address. Today’s nibbles concern the latest and greatest in posthumous Tolkien releases, demon-summoning JRPGs, and fantasy porn comic spin-offs.

Beren and Lúthien

Christopher Tolkien is over 90 years old, and he states in his commentary in Beren and Lúthien that he suspects it will be the last book he releases of his father’s Middle-Earth material. If this is so, then he is leaving us on a strong note, because the approach taken here is extremely interesting and makes a virtue out of the fragmentary material he has to work with.

As explained by Christopher in The Children of Húrin, his previous book focusing on a particular legend of Middle-Earth’s First Age, J.R.R. Tolkien thought that there were three stories of that era that were substantial enough to conceivably stand as distinct tales in their own right as opposed to incidents in a wider story. One was the tale of how the hidden elven citadel of Gondolin fell to the forces of Morgoth, one was the doom of the children of Húrin, one was the story told here of how Beren (a human in most tellings, though a rival strand of the elven peoples in the story’s earliest version) ended up falling in love with the elven princess Lúthien, and how her father Thingol challenged Beren to go steal a Simaril from the crown of Morgoth if he wanted her hand in marriage. This was meant to be an insult, since the task was held to be impossible – and yet it was done, though at great price, with Beren losing his hand and even his life and Lúthien only winning him back from the clutches of death at the cost of giving up her elven immortality to share in the fate of mortal men (thus setting a model for Arwen’s similar sacrifice for Aragorn in later aeons).

As with The Children of Húrin, the presentation here is the result of a bit of literary archaeology by Christopher Tolkien – but whereas in the case of Húrin the extant writings were substantial enough that Christopher could massage them into what amounted to a new novel, the various writings on Beren and Lúthien were a much more diverse bunch, with several takes on the story being provided over the years, and written in a mixture of prose and poetry at that. Thus, rather than trying to reconcile them into a single continuous novel, Christopher instead gives us a book that tracks the development of the story, from its first incarnation to its more developed version.

One Does Not Simply Parkour Into Mordor… Oh, Wait, You Totally Can

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a game that shouldn’t work. First off, it’s yet another release based off the Peter Jackson movies – an IP with a patchy track record at best as far as videogame adaptations go – but at the same time it bears a generic Middle Earth title, as though it hasn’t quite proved worthy of displaying the more valuable trademarks of Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Secondly, the plot is utterly ludicrous – a badass ranger of Gondor is wronged by the forces of Mordor, so he simply walks into Mordor and starts hacking up orcs like it’s some sort of misorcist equivalent of Hatred.

Being as I am a man whose disposable income occasionally allows me to drop money on being among the first to get in on a bad joke, I actually bought Shadows based on the plot. I figured that if the game were as desperately silly and tonally inappropriate as it looked, I’d have something amusing to report back to you all, and if it turned out to be an unexpected delight then all the better. Somehow, it ended up being both.

One Child of Húrin Plus Guest Appearances From His Sister

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

You could forgive people for thinking that Christopher Tolkien has been scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to publishing posthumous work by his father. The Silmarillion, as ridiculously dense as it is, was a project which J.R.R. himself was intending to publish at some point, and provides so much vital context to all the strange allusions made in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to matters occurring in the First and Second Ages of Middle Earth that it’d have been a disservice both to Tolkien’s intentions and to reader’s hopes of understanding half of what Tolkien wrote to leave it unpublished. But Unfinished Tales and the twelve-volume The History of Middle-Earth series were never planned by Tolkien to be published in the form that they were, and contain so much that contradicts the core Middle-Earth texts that it’s difficult to say that they were quite so worthwhile.

The History of Middle-Earth, in particular, is likely to be of more interest to people who want to be able to study absolutely everything Tolkien wrote about Middle-Earth for academic purposes than people who actually just want to read the stories as Tolkien intended them to be read. In fact, Christopher Tolkien reveals in his introduction to The Children of Húrin that whilst the elder Tolkien populated the timeline of his secondary creation with a vast number of incidents, he didn’t believe all of those incidents were worthy of being worked up into fully-developed stories for publication. Of all the sagas of the First Age, which The Silmarillion covers in summary, Tolkien believed that there were three Great Tales which merited expansion into full narratives; these were the story of Beren and Lúthien, the Fall of Gondolin – and The Children of Húrin, which Christopher Tolkien has attempted to reconstruct from his father’s manuscripts with only a minimum of editorial intervention in the form of brief connecting passages to link together the portions of the text into a whole.