Remaking Lord of the Rings out of Only Public Domain Sources: Part 3

Ilya Repin

Part 1, Part 2

Home stretch, let’s go.

The Balrog

How did I skip the Balrog? Absolutely shameful.

Anyway:  dig too deep and you’ll find a guardian of the underworld, so I’ll roll with Ox-Head and or Horse-Face from Chinese folk religion because honestly if there’s a giant horse-headed monster wrecking your day who looks like this, yeah I’m going freak the fuck out a bit.

• Q: Who was fucking around with the underworld enough to bring these guys to earth?
• Q: Is anything going screwy in the underworld now that they’re busy here?

Shelob

A jorōgumo, which both gives me a giant monster spider and allows me to take a shot at Shadow of Mordor’s drearily uncreative sexy lady Shelob (since jorōgumos have the shapeshifting into a lady feature built in.)

Pseudo-Shelob will in turn be the rebellious bad-apple daughter of Spider Grandmother, who will be replacing Ungoliant; this marks a total inversion from the source text, since Spider Grandmother is a positive figure in the lore of indigenous peoples across the southwest and beyond. More on that in a bit.

Wormtongue

Well he’s gotta be some kind of evil vizier, a trope which has existed as long as there have been viziers. Or court eunuchs, for that matter. But the trope is also like one of the standard-issue Orientalist tropes so if he’s going to be attached to Themiskyra or Iram of the Pillars or what have you he should be sourced  from a story on the right side of the Bosphorus.

I’m going with one of the OGs, Haman from the Book of Esther. Who, now that I think about it for more than 10 seconds, is actually a perfect fit for multiple reasons:

• Book of Esther is set during the height of the Achaemenid Empire, and if we presume that Ahasuerus is supposed to be Xerxes I (as most people do) much of the central government has moved out of Babylon but the city and territory is well within the empire (easy connection to the Tower of Babel)
• Makes total sense for not-Persia to send a diplomatic envoy to the Amazons, being both neighbors and culturally-close (easy reason why he’s in Themiskrya).
• If Queen Hippolyta has been kidnapped by Theseus and her sisters are acting as regents, that’s a perfect opportunity for a scheming vizier to scheme a major power play.
• Rather than following the Book of Esther’s plot directly, I can just extrapolate it into “Haman is more than willing to inflame existing ethnic and religious tensions for his own benefit” (good justification for his antagonism)
• If Bradamante is going to ride Rakhsh, that means Rostam is dead (potentially fairly recently)...

…which means that fantasy!Persia (where Haman would be from) is also likely in a state of political disorder (not aided by Alexander the Great running his operation out of the Tower)...

…because if Rostam is dead it means that Siyâvash (son of the shah Kay Kāvus, who has an eagle-powered flying throne he used to fly to China) is also dead… 

…and if Siyâvash is dead then it means his wife Farangis has fled the country with their son Kay Khosrow…

…which means that we have either an elderly ruler with no heir apparent or a recently dead ruler with a very young heir and that is a textbook scenario for a regency.

Which is a long way of saying that Gondor is fantasy Persia.

• Q: How does a weakened Themiskrya benefit Haman? What’s his end goal?
• Q: Who supports him back in the Empire? Who supports him here?
• Q: What stops people from just killing him?
• Q: What existing tensions is he going to take advantage of?

• Addition: Mission to rescue Hippolyta
• Addition: Theseus and his incredibly underwhelming and stupid death (some jobber named Lycomedes throws him off a cliff)

Denethor

Surprisingly a lot more difficult than Haman for Wormtongue; I can’t find a regent in the Shahnameh (in my defense, there are a lot of characters in the Shahnameh and I’m flying by the seat of my pants), Googling “regents in folklore and mythology” got me nothing but pages about revenants and ents, and the relevant TVtropes pages are in similarly dire condition.

From Arthuriana there’s King Lot, who I could syncretize with Biblical Lot, and I could even have Farangis fill the role if I need to, but this might be the first case of the knock-on effects from the changes rendering it unnecessary to port over a Tolkien character.

If we already have an old king, a missing heir, and a scheming vizier, what point does pseudo-Denethor have? He wouldn’t be Sigurd’s father, so that’s out, and pseudo-Faramir is going to be the same deal. 

So yeah, I think this is going to be a solid Not Applicable.

Faramir

He lives in the woods with a bunch of outlaws, wears green and has a bow: he’s Robin Hood. Non-zero chance Tolkien intended the connection anyway. 

With Denethor out of the picture and Boromir-Sigurd having no narrative room for siblings, what remains is the guerilla war against Alexander’s forces minus the direct connection to Persia-Gondor. I could maintain his relationship with Bradamante and make him Ruggiero and call it a day, but that feels a bit too pat.

Going further afield for a more radical change, I’ve entertained the thought that Faramir could serve as a representative / leader of some sort of alliance among indigenous peoples of Middle Earth in their fight against Alexander. Tolkien frustratingly doesn’t entirely overlook this front of the war, but reduces the Druedain to isolationists who aid the Rohirrim in one key operation but are otherwise wholly absent from the narrative.  

The premise of the project being what it is, most sources will get me boilerplate noble savage at best. It’s possible to write those characters with more nuance, but even then there won’t be a lot of grist for the mill.

But…  roll with me for a moment.

So I said a couple entries ago that Spider Grandmother / Spider Woman is taking the role of nega-Ungoliant. 

If Gondor = Persia, the climate where pseudo-Faramir would be operating would be a lot drier and hotter than Sherwood Forest: Grandmother Spider is associated primarily with the peoples of the American southwest, a region that is also a lot drier and hotter than Sherwood Forest.

In Navajo narratives, she goes by Na'ashjé'ii Asdzáá (Spider-Woman) and she directly aids the hero twins Naayééʼ Neizghání (Monster-Slayer) and Tóbájízhchíní  (Born-for -Water) in their fights against all sorts of giants and monsters.

Witch-King Alexander the Above-Average doubtlessly has a lot of giants and monsters on his payroll (metaphorical; they don’t get paid); if pseudo-Faramir is an outlaw leading a guerilla war against two much larger imperial powers all while killing the nastiest monsters around, not a big leap for people to call him Monster-Slayer. Especially if he has some sort of boon from Spider Woman. The line between mortal man and legendary hero can get mighty blurred, after a while.

• Q: Is there going to be an equivalent to Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham?
• Q: What are the odds he lives in Humbaba’s Woods?
• Q: Wait hold up is Humbaba also one of these giants?

• Addition: Anaye / Nayéé’ (aforementioned monstrous giants)
• Addition: The Merry Men
• Addition: Gifts from Spider Woman
• Addition: Another outlaw leader filling the role of Born-for-Water?

Gandalf

Gandalf I am still sorta figuring out because I’ve got two options that could work both combined into a single character or as two separate but related characters, and I still haven’t decided which I like more. So here’s both.

Option A: Glinda the Good Witch
Meddlesome in favor of heroes, delivers quests, and - for a touch of meta appropriateness via Sir Ian McClellan - outrageously gay. The lady canonically lives in a palace with the 100 most beautiful women in Oz. 

Claims that she was based on Matilda Joslyn Gage don’t seem to have any substantial foundation, but Matilda Joslyn Gage was certainly about as close to “meddling witch on the side of good” as you can get in real life.

Source B: The Angel of Eden
The one with the fiery sword and all that. They don’t have a consistent name in any of the apocrypha; you’ll find some people saying Uriel, though I can’t find any textual source to back that up. I’d probably sub in a Sumerian name for the vibes (probably Uanna / Oannes).

Anyway: I’m fond of the idea that this particular angel has grown attached to humanity via proximity and acts as a sort of Prometheus figure in the Fall. Strong shades of Aziraphale there, but by a different route.

• Q: What other forms have they taken?
• Q: What’s their relationship with other angels?
• Q: What’s their relationship with the other wizards?
• Q: What’s their bigger game plan wrt the Seal & Nyarlathotep?
• Q: Can I resist K6BD vibes? (No, I cannot)

• Addition: Gigantic fiery sword

The Peoples of Middle-Earth

All right, got a lot to work through here.

Orcs are tharks, did them in Part 1. 

Uruk-hai are going to be soldiers grown from dragon’s teeth, which happens a few times in Greek myth via Jason and Cadmus. (Friend of the blog Dandibuja, who has been an immense help with this project, suggested that this could be tied into Archimago hunting dragons as a way to get into the good graces of society: I think that’s a killer idea.)

Goblins is goblins, but in the folkloric sense of just being every weird little magical guy possible. You can just call anything weird a goblin, them’s the rules. Between the Denham Tracts and the Gazu Hyakki Yagy, I’m spoiled for choice.

Ents and trolls are going to be played by a wide variety of ogres and giants. Plenty of ogres and giants from all over the world, people love asking “what if there were big people”. 

Dwarves are neanderthals, no muss no fuss. There’s overlap there with REH’s Picts but I’m going to lean heavier on reality than Hyboria for that one.

Humans (or to crib Dungeon Meshi parlance, tallmen) are are going to broadly reflect the major populations in prehistoric Europe and the Mediterranean (adjusted with a bit of anachronism for artistic flair) - Tolkien prepped the layup for me on this one because he was aware that there was a migration into Europe that displaced or absorbed the peoples already living there and kinda-sorta modeled it into the relationship between Rohan and the Woses / Druedain and between the Edain and the Easterlings. 

Since it’s very easy to get both far too into the weeds on this (archaeogenetics is extremely complex!) and also fairly easy to run into some issues (go too deep and you straight up just start sounding like Measurehead even if you’re being careful), I’m just going to strip the moral judgements and flesh out Tolkien’s general shape of things with modestly more historically appropriate material.

• Druedain = Western Hunter Gatherers
• Edain = Early European Farmers + Western Steppe Herders.
• Those dang Indo-Europeans with their horses and wheeled carts, I tell ya.
• Easterlings / Rhûnedain - Other Indo-European speaking peoples (Anatolians and Indo-Iranians)
• Numenoreans = Atlanteans, which in this case means that the mi-go have been fucking around in their genome for Mi-Go Reasons™.
• Honestly this excuse lets them pull triple duty as both Valyria and Melnibone if I want to go that route. 
• Additions: Non-IE speaking groups

(If I was ever to actually do a project using Nostratic this would be the place to do it, but like many crank theories requires too much elbow grease to be feasible. Existing conlangs would be easier.)

Elves, continuing on the threads set out by my picks for Elrond and Galadriel, are going to be WHGs who got magic through contact with the Otherworld (Annwn, Tír na nÓg, etc). This sets them up nicely as a thematic counter to the Seal by giving their magic a source in reciprocal relationships with the spirits of the world and the world beyond. It also gives them more of a material reason to be isolated from the rest of humanity than just being ethereal and sad (i.e. they, as effectively the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost the war)

Hobbits are tricksy; there’s no shortage of little folk in folklore and early fantasy to choose from - “what if there were small people” is about as universal as “what if there were big people” - but the hobbits’ size is mostly thematic, a way to reflect them as distinct from capital-M Men visually as well as culturally, and to reinforce the idea that evil isn’t defeated with power. They’re not particularly magical and they’re protagonists rather than figures the protagonist encounters, which puts them at odds with the rest of the literature. Doubly so when we consider that hobbits are first and foremost idealized English villagers.

Those themes don’t require little people to function, and during brainstorming I found the little people options tended to cut off the stronger picks for the main quartet. So I going to go for a fairly radical move and split hobbits as a people from the main quartet of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin.

For hobbits the people, I’m going to take a major swerve and go with Arthur Machen’s little people, asterisk.

Machen’s version is that the folkloric little people of the British Isles (same tradition that Tolkien was pulling from) were based on a population of relict hominids driven to the most remote wilderness and / or underground by the arrival of the Celts. This idea was enormously popular with both Lovecraft and REH, and through them the rest of weird fiction and onward.

It’s also just as gross and racist as you’d expect for the time period. Not satisfied with making his little people rapists and murderers, Machen presents their mere existence as abhorrent instead of one of the most important scientific and anthropological discoveries in history. Oh no they’re short and brown and use stone tools come the fuck on Arthur that’s just homo erectus (note: h. erectus was not discovered until after Machen wrote The Black Seal).

(Learning all this has really made me appreciate what Tolkien did with the Hobbits; the situation was dire wrt little people in fantasy fiction back then.)

(Early science fiction honestly kinda hates any field outside of material science. New alloys and rays and objects are good and cool, everything else is bad.)

I’m getting off track. Hobbits as a people are descendents of homo erectus (close to floriensis, obvs) who live out in the deep wilderness, but are no more horrible than anyone else. Honorable mentions go to the Pygmies of Paracelsus, Lilliputians from Gulliver, Munchkins from Oz, but those I would include as cultural groups.

The Hobbits

The hobbit quartet have a few key prerequisites I need to carry over to their analogues:  they’re young, they have no political / martial / magical power, they have no prior connections to major goings on in the world, and they come from farm country. Frodo is technically landed gentry but that’s simple enough to work around.

Merry and Pippin are easy: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. That just leaves Frodo and Sam as the final replacements to make.

(Add a drumroll here if you’d like.)

Frodo and Sam are going to be played by Dorothy Gale and Princess Ozma. They’ve got the intimate friendship across a class divide thing down pat, and Glinda spearheads the quest to find Ozma in a display of good Gandalfian meddling. Being royalty of Oz does violate the “no political power” thing, but that can be worked around in a fair number of ways (Oz being a small backwater kingdom, Oz still being under the rule of the Wizard, Oz not operating according to real world political logic, etc)

(Actually now that I mention it, the Shire is split into four farthings, and Oz is split into four countries along the same lines…)

For purposes of the story, I imagine that the quartet would be older than in their source material and would have had at least the general shape of their adventures happen to them. Kansas probably doesn’t exist, but there’s certainly a place very much like Kansas out there. Probably the farmland upriver from Lud-in-the-Mist, since I decided that’s where Biblo’s from.

• Q: Whose body got exhumed the night Tom and Huck went to the graveyard?
• Q: Were the resurrectionists in question Dr. Frankenstein and Herbert West? (Yes)
• Q: If Jim is included, how do I best handle everything else his inclusion entails? There are a couple novels from the time period I could pull from, but this would basically require a dedicated post. 

• Addition: Assorted early-book Oz side characters (Lion, Scarecrow, Tin-Man, Wogglebug, General Jinjur, Mombi the Witch etc)

 

Final Roundup 

• Frodo & Sam = Dorothy and Ozma (Oz series)
• Merry & Pippin = Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) 
• Gandalf = Glinda the Good Witch / Angel of Eden (Oz series, Book of Genesis)
• Legolas = Zorro (The Curse of Capistrano et al.)
• Gimli = Conan the Barbarian (The Phoenix on the Sword et al.) 
• Boromir = Siegfried (Der Ring des Nibelungen)
• Aragorn = Pwyll (The Mabinogion) 
• Elrond = Arawn (The Mabinogion)
• Arwen = Rhiannon (The Mabinogion)
• Galadriel = The Venus of Willendorf (Real life) 
• Gollum = Caliban (The Tempest) 
• The Balrog = Ox-head and Horse-face (Chinese folk religion)
• Shelob = Jorogumo (Japanese folklore)
• ungoliant = Spider Grandmother (SW Indigenous American folklore) 
• Saruman = Archimago (The Faerie Queene) 
• Theoden = Hippolyta (Greek myth)
• Eowyn =  Bradamante (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• Wormtongue = Haman (Book of Esther) 
• Shadowfax = Rakhsh (The Shahnameh) 
• Treebeard = Humbaba (The Epic of Gilgamesh) 
• Denethor = Not included
• Faramir = Robin Hood + Monster-Slayer (British + Navajo folklore)  
• Tom Bombadil = Elder Thing (At the Mountains of Madness)
• The Council of the Wise = Many assorted magic-users 
• Bilbo Baggins = Nathaniel Chanticleer (Lud-in-the-Mist) 
• Middle Earth = Various composite sources
• Humans = Assorted archaic populations (Real world)
• Elves = Real-world archaic population + magic
• Dwarves = Neanderthals (Real world)
• Hobbits  = H. erectus descendants (Real world + a bit of Machen) 
• Orcs = Tharks / Green Martians (A Princess of Mars + sequels)
• Uruk-hai = dragon's-teeth soldiers (Greek myth)
• Goblins = goblins (Various folklores)
• Ents & Trolls = orges, giants, etc (Various folklores)
• The One Ring = Seal of Solomon (Testament of Solomon, etc.)
• Eru Illuvatar -MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI (The Gods of Pegana)
• The Valar = The Zoa (The prophetic works of William Blake)
• Mordor = The Land of Darkness (The Alexander Romance)
• Barad-dûr = The Tower of Babel (Book of Genesis) 
• The Nazgul = The 12 Paladins of Charlemagne (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• The Witch-King = Alexander the Above-Average (The Alexander Romance)
• Sauron = Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu Mythos, various)
• Mount Doom = Mt. Elbrus (Real world + Zoroastrian mythology)
• Numenor = Atlantis (The Lost Continent, etc)

**

And there we go. Experiment successful beyond my wildest predictions. 

My takeaways at the end are fairly similar to those I had in the beginning: this is the most fun I've had writing in recent memory. I kept surprising myself with how well features clicked into place with each other, without me intending to leave an opening. Rambling forward with no plan and just doing what seemed right in the moment turned into something with a stronger weave than expected, and perhaps stronger than if I had made them up on my own.

While I’m satisfied with this as an endpoint for the experiment (no outline for the story, at least not now), I really want to keep going and I probably will. There’s so much out there to play with, but few people do and more people should. I want to encourage as many folks as I can to do stuff like this. Pardon this box of soap, no idea how it got here…

We live in a world where less than a dozen companies control the overwhelming majority of media you encounter. If they had their way, there’d be even fewer companies and they’d control all of it. They benefit from making people think that stories are objects to be owned, that there’s only one way for them to be, that there is a canon to be clung to with all the dogmatic fervor of an early church father. Making a silly public domain mashup isn’t going to change that, but it’s going to be better for you as an artist and as an audience. It's self-care, a little moment of freedom where you can fly above the powers that want to own the thoughts of every synapse in your head.

You don’t have to go watch a version of the Odyssey subsidized by Morocco’s colonial engine in Western Sahara. You own the Odyssey as much as Christopher Nolan does. What makes his version special, that there’s money in it? You don’t need money to make a good version of the Odyssey. You don’t even need to write it down. 

Give yourself a little freedom today.