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 McKellan - 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.

Quick, where's this NPC from?

This started as list of replacement mission control nationalities for 60 Years in Space, which is why the distribution is uneven. Roll 1d6, then again as directed.

1
Atlantis

2
Carcosa

3 (1d6)
1-2: Mu
3-4: Thuria
5: K!n-Yan
6: Tsan-Chan

4 (1d6)
1: Y’ha-nthlei
2: Atvatabar
3: Pegana
4: R’lyeh
5: Barsoom
6: Pnakotus

5 (2d6)
2: Caspak
3: Satanazes
4: Opar
5: Averoigne
6: Xebico
7: Zothique
8: Dylath-leen
9: Oriab
10: Oz
11: Tsalal
12: Kadath

6 (3d6)
3: Sannikov Land
4: Xuchotl
5: Ulthar
6: al-Waqwaq
7: Onigashima
8: Lyonesse
9: Laputa
10: Celephais
11: Erewhon
12: Kitezh
13: Brob Ding Nag
14: Libertalia
15: Ooth-Nargai
16: KwaKukuana
17: Patusan
18: Leng

Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources: Part 2

Arthur Rackham

Part 1, Part 3

As before, I’m letting things grow organically. No real order besides the order ideas come to me.

Housekeeping

Before I get started, three things.. 

#1: A few of my real-life friends said it’d be helpful to have a list of references, since they’re more familiar with Tolkien than the works I’m pulling for the experiment, so here’s the list for part 1:

• Middle Earth = Various (To be determined)
• 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)
• The Nazgul = The 12 Paladins of Charlemagne (Orlando Furioso, etc)
• The Witch-King = Alexander the Above-Average (The Alexander Romance)
• Orcs = Tharks / Green Martians (A Princess of Mars + sequels)
• Sauron = Nyarlathotep (Cthulhu Mythos, various)
• Mount Doom = Mt. Elbrus (Real world + Zoroastrian mythology)
• Numenor = Atlantis (The Lost Continent, etc)

#2 is I learned about Tales Before Tolkien, which is a collection of 21 pre-Tolkien fantasy stories compiled by Douglas Anderson (did the annotated Hobbit, got to see him give a talk once, that was fun). Most if not all of those are PD; I haven’t properly dug through it yet, but I’m going to keep it as a nice backup resource for the future.

#3: Morgan Long pointed out in the comments to the Part 1 that I skipped over Der Ring des Nibelungen, and while my initial response had been “using Alberich’s ring itself is a bit on the nose and I just don’t care for the Cycle as a whole”, thinking about it more has opened up a very good path forward, and since I have no better segue let’s get into that.

Boromir

Siegfried / Sigurd, as portrayed in Der Ring des Nibelungen. My initial resistance fell off on further review, because he’s some of the rawest antagonist potential possible. The guy was raised in isolation as a human-shaped guided missile aimed towards a dragon’s hoard, and is easily read as a sociopath, and his parents were siblings, and he fucked his half-aunt and he’s a stooge of German nationalism. He’s the hero and he’s going to make it everyone else’s problem. Even if we're purely going on the first point and ignoring everything else, a human being raised to adulthood by an abusive parent with 0 other social contact is going to be absolutely fucked in the head. 

What happens when the great golden manchild convinced that he's fated for age-defining greatness is put into a story that doesn't revolve around him? When the mask finally drops and the rest of the characters realize too late who they're working with, oh buddy that's where the drama lives. Chef's kiss.

• Q: How much of Der Ring can I offload to the background?
• Q: What happens after his betrayal of the fellowship? 
• Q: How is his crusade to defeat Alexander going to backfire terribly after he steals the Seal?

• Addition: Mime the dwarf, Fafnir the dragon, a good number of the rest of the cast.
• Addition: The fortress of Valhalla and its king who started this entire mess by trying to get out of paying the contractors he hired to build it.

Treebeard

I had been combing Wikipedia for mythical and magical trees, but then remembered that ents in the books are tree-like but not necessarily trees themselves. So why not go with the OG forest guardian, Humbaba? (There is no reason why not)

• Q: So what else have Gilgamesh and Enkidu been doing? I suppose they didn’t kill Humbaba this time around - what sorts of injuries does he have?
• Q: Is he related in any way to the giants who built Valhalla?

• Addition: Cedars of Lebanon used in construction of Solomon’s Temple, which would provide some connection to the Seal.

Theoden

Hrothgar would be the obvious choice, but Hrothgar loses the horses and without horses it’s hardly Rohan. But! You know who has horses? Amazons. They also had a shit-ton of queens if we go by just the Greek sources, but Hippolyta is the main one and comes with some extremely fruitful potential expansions.

• Q: Is Hippolyta actually on the throne, or has the abduction-by-Theseus plot happened and Antiope or Penthesilea is ruling in her stead?
• Q: Speaking of which: what else has Theseus fucked up beyond all repair?
• Q: Well he did kill the Minotaur which means he now has a connection to Atlantis; how’d that turn out for him? Find any other treasures while looting the ruins?

• Addition: Herakles and/or Theseus, fucking around as usual.
• Addition: The Attic War
• Addition: Queen Calafia / any number of additional Amazonian monarchs
• Addition: Assorted cities / islands of women etc.

Eowyn

There’s no shortage of ladies in armor to choose from, but I think I’m going to go with Bradamante from the Orlando duology. It’s a bit of a double-dip since I’m sourcing the Nazgul from the same texts, but Bradamante has the bona fides to justify it:

• Accomplished knight on her own merit
• Equals-on-the-battlefield enemies-to-lovers plotline with the Andalusian warrior Ruggiero.
• Rescues Ruggiero from the evil wizard Atlantes by using a magic ring to break into his tower.
• Refuses to marry a man who can’t match her in combat (so as to counter her father’s attempt to marry her off to the prince of Byzantium)
• Sister of Rinaldo the paladin (and so would be related to one of the Nazgul in this version)

Pretty stacked resume. Absolute crime that she doesn't show up more often.

• Q: So how’d she end up as the foster daughter of the queen of the Amazons?
• Q: What’s her relationship with Rinaldo like?
• Q: So is Atlantes intentionally invoking a connection with Atlantis in his name? Like calling himself “the Atlantean” or something like that.
• Q: I guess his tower would probably be the equivalent of Isengard, then.

• Addition: Ruggiero, obviously
• Addition: Using the Seal to rescue Ruggiero from the Atlantes’ tower.
• Addition: Probably need a stand-in for Islam, now. Or at least a faction to stand in for Andalusia. Iram of the Pillars would be the obvious choice but I’m not making that call just yet.

Shadowfax

Rakhsh, steed of Rostam in the Shahnameh. If Rohan = Amazons and Amazons = Scythia, that's right next door. Rakhsh also has the “legendary horse who can only be ridden by a legendary hero” thing going on, though he also died alongside Rostam in the story. So either a surviving (and potentially wounded) Rakhsh, or a descendant. Either way, it should be a Big Deal when he chooses a rider.

• Q: Who does Rakhsh permit as his rider? One time deal, or no? 
• Q: It’s probably going to be Bradamante, so what circumstances lead us to that point? Would it be the mission to rescue Ruggiero, or a later battle?

• Addition: Rostam & his seven feats, Zahhak, Div-e Sepid
• Addition: Indo-Scythian peoples (since that territory would overlap with Samangan and that's where Rostam's wife Tahmina is from, boom there’s a Rostam > Amazonia link.)

Fun fact: Rakhsh is Aramaic for “horse”, so he’s the horse named Horse.

Gollum

It’s gotta be Caliban: Classic fucked-up little dude who has connections to at least two powerful magic users and is part of a plot centered around imprisoned spirits. Easy pick.

• Q: How did he get the Seal? Inherited it from Sycorax? How'd she get it?
• Q: What else is on that island?
• Q: How does Prospero get entangled in all this?

• Addition: Ariel and the spirits of the island
• Addition: Sycorax, who is clearly not on good terms with the rest of the wizards 

Tom Bombadil

An Elder Thing with old hippie professor energy. Could probably pull double duty as Dr. Doolittle (an Elder talking to humans is kinda like a human talking to animals, from their point of view) or Professor Challenger (banger name; also, I like the premise of Elders as Victorian gentleman-scientist-explorers)

Since Goldberry doesn’t have much to her beyond “some sort of river spirit”, we’ve got more nymphs, naiads, nixies, undines, rusalkas, and so, so many others to choose from. But Nimue / the Lady of the Lake has the most connective tissue to draw on and I’ve yet to find an alternative of similar caliber (though Jenny Greenteeth has “spooky monster with a fun name” covered.)

• Q: All right, who’s she throwing swords at this time?
• Q: Are we going to keep in the Lancelot connection?
• Q: What do people think about the Elder? What do they think he is?
• Q: Are there any other surviving Elders on the planet?
• Q: What’s his beef with the mi-go about?
• Q: Actually, wait, hold up; Wagner’s ring is made from gold stolen from the spirits of the Rhine, Goldberry-Nimue is our resident water-spirit, did the Seal get stolen from her in parallel? Would that imply that the Seal is an Elder Thing artifact? Or did it just fall into Nimue’s possession for a while?

• Addition: So about those shoggoths…
• Addition: Cambrian sea life, as a treat

Elrond

Elrond’s a problem child in this experiment: his primary role in the narrative could be fulfilled by any old wizard, but his primary relationship is bound up with Arwen, and Arwen is tied up with Aragorn, and I still don’t know what I want to do with Aragorn.

The three of them basically come as a package deal, and the two main packages that I know of are:

• Alveric, Lirazel, and the King of Elfland from Dunsany’s King of Elfland’s Daughter
• Pwyll, Rhiannon, and Arawn from the Mabinogion

I like the Pwyll triad better, but it’s also definitely a major direct inspiration of Tolkien’s, which I have generally been trying to avoid. So I’d either need to tie in some wildcards or learn to suck it up and deal. I mean I already used Der Ring the glass on that box has been broken.

I’ll come back to this, see what I can do with it later. How elves are actually going to be situated is still very much in-progress.

Galadriel

The Lady von Willendorf herself, a pick that will not surprise regular readers of the blog but may require a hear me out for folks just wandering by, so hear me out:

Galadriel is extremely powerful, extremely beautiful, and extremely old. And while there are plenty of powerful + beautiful + ancient women in myth and literature to choose from, I don’t think many of them can brag about being an instantly-recognizable sex icon 20,000+ years after their creation. This also throws a fun wrench into the genre by portraying one of the OG ur-elves that everyone ripped off afterward as short, brown and fat instead of tall, pale and thin, while still presenting her with the dignity and respect that she’s owed. 

As a bonus, the Venus gives us an entirely different direction to approach elven melancholy: Galadriel’s depressed because she remembers when there used to be mammoths, and now the mammoths have gone and they will never return. 

• Q: Is she actually an elf in this anymore, or an immortal human living among the elves? 

• Addition: Okay well now I gotta have one last mammoth show up. There will be waterworks.
• Addition: Of course the mammoth remembers her, whose blog do you think you're reading?  Man might forget, but the elephants do not.
• Addition: And you’d best believe she was one of the painters of Lascaux. Like her house is just built on top of or right beside the entrance. 

And, having said all that, I could very easily invoke many of the elements I used for the Great Lady for the "instead of a dark lord you would have a queen" bit. Works out nice, especially since Nyarlathotep = Sauron. Never met a good idea I wouldn't use twice.

 

Bilbo Baggins

Nathaniel Chanticleer from Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist. Fantasy-English small-town burgher whose life is normal and regular and entirely un-adventurous up until magical adventure barrels into his life and turns it upside down. 

• Addition: Fairy-fruit and its importation into the human world

Gimli and Legolas

Conan and Zorro, no contest. Got the heavy fighter and the finesse fighter, got the opposed personalities primed for a mild antagonism > grudging respect > unbreakable friendship storyline. Howard’s Picts are basically Frazetta-style cavemen, you already know I’m going to use neanderthals as dwarves, the numbers check out.

Bonus: since they both have terrible vulture estates who love suing over trademarks, both of them need makeovers and new names. Conan’s easy, already did him: Spakāya of Cimmeria, or we can just call him “The Hound”. Zorro is “fox” in Spanish, which is “Rusc” in Sindarin (fun fact: only materials about conlangs fall under copyright, since you can’t copyright a language) and while Fox and the Hound isn’t public domain, it is a funny little reference.

(Note: Zorro was actually a suggestion from skullelongator on bluesky, who got it from their mother. Thanks, skullelongator’s mom.)

• Addition: Side characters, etc. Leaving this part open, since the advantage of long-running picaresque pulp heroes is that you can drop them in just about anywhere without worrying about connections.

Barad-dûr

The Tower of Babel is the perfect fit, especially if I weave in its historical inspiration, Etemenanki. Its name is literally “Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”, it’s located at the seat of imperial power, it’s dedicated to the usurping god of kingship who built the world out of a corpse, historical Alexander the Great ordered it rebuilt. Throw in the “everyone spoke one language” with an implied “by force” and you’ve got the axis mundi of mythic oppression.

• Q: Can I resist the urge to go “invading the heavens wasn’t an exaggeration, they built a fucking space elevator”?
• A: No, probably not.
• Q: Can I resist the urge to go “and it was built on top of Çatalhöyük because I know authors who use subtext and they are all cowards? (Mysteryspice suggested this)
• A: Again, probably not.
• Q: Alexander’s obviously using it as a base of operations - why?
• Q: What connection, if any, between the Tower and Atlantis? 

• Addition: Marduk, Tiamat, the Enuma Elish etc
• Addition: Oh hey Gilgamesh, how’s it hanging, man?
• Addition: The confusion of tongues (yay linguistic diversity)

The Council of the Wise

There’s a passage in Fellowship where Gandalf describes Saruman as “...great among the Wise [...] chief of my order and the head of the Council.” and that really makes it sound like there are more than five of them. Certainly more than two. I still don’t have a true pick for Gandalf yet, but the shortlist for the wizards’ council includes:

• Archimago (The Faerie Queene)
• Atlantes (Orlando Innamorato)
• Prospero (The Tempest)
• Medea (Medea, Argonautica, etc)
• Circe (The Odyssey, etc)
• Merlin (Arthuriana)
• Morgan le Fay (Arthuriana)
• Väinämöinen (Kalevala)
• Oannes (Sumerian myth)
• Gorice XII (The Worm Ouroboros)
• Oscar Diggs (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) 

Could probably throw in Hermes Trismegistus if I wanted to, but keeping him as fictional in-universe appeals to me, especially if I’m rolling with a layer of obfuscation about the Seal. Or he could be the wildcard that everyone in-universe thinks is fictional.

• Q: So how do these wizards interact with the rest of the world?
• Q: Who has beef with who?
• Q: What do they know of / care about the Seal? Have they done anything about it?
• Q: Has the Gandalf stand-in gone rogue?
• Q: Where do they meet?
• Q: How did the Wizard of Oz get invited, anyway?

• Addition: Lairs, drama, etc.

**

And that’s a wrap on Part 2. This experiment continues to be extremely fun, I've already got some ideas cooking already for Part 3, stay tuned.

Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources

Foot of Mt. Ashitaka, Takahashi Hiroaka

Last summer I had the chance to go see Fellowship of the Ring in concert. Great show, movie still slaps. But I had an odd thought while watching it, brought on by my Leslie Stone transcription project and a slowly-compiling list of inspirational resources I’ve been gathering.

“Is it possible to remake Lord of the Rings using only public domain source material? Like a ship of Theseus type thing, where you replace individual components in the structure. How does it change? What does it transform into? Does it even remain recognizable?”

You know, normal thoughts.

To spoil the rest of this post it turns out you can, thanks to the transitive property of fiction, and the end result is a good deal of fun. Let’s-a-go!

Guidelines

All replacement components must be public domain in the United States at time this post goes up. This encompasses:

• ≤ 1930: Automatically PD
• 1931 - 1963: Published without copyright notice, or published with copyright notice but not renewed within 28 years
• 1964 - 1977: Published without copyright notice
• 1978 - March 1 1989: Published without notice and without registration within 5 years of first publication
• Any: Explicit relinquishing of rights by creator, including Creative Commons 0

There's also the grey area of works that are in the public domain in their country of origin but not necessarily in the US because of course the US doesn't just hold to the Rule of the Shorter Term. I bring it up because the art for this post is technically from 1932, but has been public domain in Japan since 1995 because they're Life+50 and they follow the Rule so [throws up hands]. It's outside the core premise I can have a cheat day.

For thematic cohesion (and for the amount of resources available), I'm going to predominantly lean towards pre-1931 works. I’ve also added some follow-up questions and potential additions to each entry, just to show how the method can result in a wildly divergent story and setting.

Middle-Earth

Sticking with the premise of “Earth in the mythic past” (something Tolkien gestured at but didn't really dial-in on) leaves us with the Hyborian Age as the primary public domain option. This works, but I don’t think it’s ideal as the primary base: Howard used it mostly so he could evoke whatever broad historical stereotypes he wanted without worrying about actual history / having to do any heavy-lifting with worldbuilding, and I don't roll with either of those. Still good for a bit of cafeteria picking and choosing, though, the Tower of the Elephant is bound to show up at some point.

The option I'm leaning towards now would be something in the general shape of our world (as a great many fantasy worlds are), filled in with various fictional and legendary (and occasionally real-but-mythologized) locations in the generally right place. To keep the vibes of mythic prehistory, I'm leaning towards ~10-8k BCE, because that gives me Doggerland, the African Humid Period, and the Anatolian proto-cities - but I'm not going to be too picky about accuracy. Gotta have mammoths.

• Addition: Filling up the map would probably be multiple posts by itself, so I’m saving that for another day. But it’s going to be chock full of lost cities, pseudoscientific sunken continents, legendary realms, historical misinterpretations of actual places and good ol’ bullshit.

The One Ring

The Ring of Gyges and the Ring of the Nibelung are more or less direct inspirations to the One Ring, so they’re out of the running. Instead, I’ll be going with a move that will have serious ramifications down the line: the Seal of Solomon, asterisk.

That asterisk is me doing that thing I love to do, which is add in a bit of historical metafiction to muddy the waters. (We can all thank Dr. Sledge of Esoterica for sending me down this rabbit hole.)

So the Seal is extrabiblical to begin with, but that’s never stopped anything from becoming extremely popular. When we cut away the cruft built up over the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Seal of Solomon isn’t actually Solomon's Seal, but instead the Seal Famously In the Possession of Solomon: it's God’s signet ring, a bureaucratic artifact given to Solomon that allowed him to act as the authorized representative of the divine. This means that if you aren’t Solomon (an extremely large category of people, or so I am led to believe), possession and use of the Seal is basically stolen credentials. Depending on the status of the original in a given story, the Seal could even be forged credentials. All of this is an extremely good justification for why it brings ruin to its wielder / cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands / needs to be destroyed / returned / otherwise disposed of.

Then on top of that, Sauron’s end goal of “dominate and control all life in Middle Earth” can segue neatly into the historical metafiction layer by mirroring the appropriation of the Seal (and Solomonic magic more broadly) by Christian occultists and its subsequent transformation into what is, if you think about what is actually being described instead of taking a wizard's word for it, the use of supernatural prison slave labor.

• Q: Who was actually supposed to have the ring?
• Q: Who do people believe is supposed to have it?
• Q: Who else has gotten their hands on it? 
• Q: Is it even legitimate in the first place?
• Q: Why hasn’t it been reclaimed yet?
• Q: So what kinds of spirits are we dealing with, and what leftover business do they have to settle?

• Addition: The shamir, because everyone loves a big magical worm
• Addition: The relationship with all the various spirits has changed drastically (for the worse) since the ring was originally handed out.
• Addition: Ancient sorcerer-priest-king, who might have just been a local warlord who got hyped up later on down the line.
• Addition: Demons! Oh, so many demons.

Eru Illuvatar and the Valar

I’m penciling in MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and the Zoa, for the upper echelons of the pantheon, though I want to do a lot more with the lower layers; pre-1931 means we’re still early enough in spec-fic that mythopoeia has some early adopters but the usage of constructed pantheons isn't particularly widespread and there even fewer well-developed ones / ones that are not just used as stock colonialist antagonists.

The new religious movements of the period could potentially provide some good material, though they provide their own barrel of worms to deal with (mostly racism and racism accessories, with the added malus of "now with an organized belief structure behind it".)

The potential shortlist is currently:

• Theosophy, Thelema, Oahspe movement, Mormonism, Aradia / the Gospel of Witches, the Golden Bough, Uther Index of Folklore Motifs, HPL, CAS, REH, rest of the Weird Tales crew and the other pulps as well. Most of them will only provide one or maybe two gods each - weird pattern, I think it's probably to do with serial short stories and whatnot. 
• Spiritualists are unlikely to get much play, because ineffable invisible spirits are visually boring.

If you have any other good recs for "interesting bespoke gods (or really wild takes on classical ones) in PD stories", drop me a comment; this section is where I’m going to greatly diverge from Tolkien simply by virtue of me being a huge fan of some fantasy-ass fantasy religious practices, and that means importing a lot of material.

Mordor

The Land of Darkness from the Alexander Romance, because it’s a big vaguely defined land of badness and narrative convenience called the Land of Darkness.

• Q: Who lives there? What's life like for them?
• Q: How did it become the Land of Darkness? Is there something special about it, or is that just what people call it?
• Q: How has it previously interacted with the known world?
• Q: What does the known world believe about it, falsely or otherwise?

• Addition: Water of Life - The thing that Alexander is out to find, in the Romance. Nice and vague, the Water of Life could have whatever properties you please.
• Addition: Gates of Alexander - Everyone loves a nice "this is the end of the known world" structure.
• Addition: Gog of Magog - This is how it's rendered in the Ezekiel, as I understand it. Gog and Magog slipped in somewhere along the translation chain by the time Revelation was penned.
• Addition: Tied into beliefs about the apocalypse
• Addition: Hyperborea (magical land, far to the north, no sun, lot of bullshit to pick from, etc)
• Addition: There's so much stuff in the Romance, Skerples was way ahead of the curve on this.

The Nazgul

Alexander himself, complete with horns (this isn’t a non sequitur, the Horns of Alexander are a thing), handily fulfills the role of the Witch-King. “Celebrated hero (who might not be all that heroic) rides off with his retainers into the Land of Darkness to defeat a great evil and never returns (at least not until he’s suborned by said great evil)” is just good storytelling. I don’t make the rules. 

The other Ringwraiths are played by the 12 paladins of Charlemagne. I could go Round Table, but the Round Table has hundreds of them to pick from and I don’t want to comb through all those Large Adult Sons. Orlando innamorato / Furioso are as good a place as any for the 12, and gets us Orlando, Oliver, Fierabras, Astolpho, Ogier, Ganelon, Reynaud, Maugris, Florismart, Guy, Naimon, and Otuel.

• Q: How did things break back home when they never came back?
• Q: How are things currently breaking because of them?
• Q: How does the belief in Alexander’s heroic return cause problems?
• Q: What shit has history whitewashed? What actually good stuff did they do back then?

• Addition: Existing relationships / accomplishments / lore of the 12, adjusted as needed. Knights come pre-packaged with a bunch of connective tissue to other characters and quests, so they're high bang-for-buck.
• Addition: Bradamante 

Orcs

The modern orc is a green Klingon and Klingons are tharks with forehead ridges, so tharks it is. I lose the “this is what happens to people under fascism” thematic element of Tolkien’s orcs, and I won’t say the tharks were particularly nuanced in the Barsoom novels, but they’re a pretty easy canvas to add complexity to if you start writing them as people with a culture and history and whatnot.

Tying into the Land of Darkness: tharks would already be adapted to the cold of Mars, and would naturally gravitate towards northern climates. Plus “Gog of Magog” is basically the archetypical orc name so that’s double appropriate.

• Q: What’s the relationship between the tharks, Alexander, and the Sauron analogue?
• Q: How did they get here, anyway? Is other Martian life also transplanted here? Were the mi-go involved? (Yes)
• Q: What happens after this whole plot?
• Q: What relationships do they have with nearby humans?

• Addition: Barsoomian wildlife, since there are now 7 books to pull from and ERB loved him some monsters.
• Addition: John Carter - human warlord who has somehow risen to prominence among the tharks - could be analogous to Alexander, a direct lieutenant to Alexander, or just some opportunist taking advantage of the current political situation.
• Addition: Other inhabitants of Mars, Barsoomian and otherwise
• Addition: Water of Life = River Iss? Oh ho ho, delightfully devilish, Seymour...  

Sauron

Nyarlathotep: Sauron was literally the evil vizier to the last king of Atlantis and was called both “bringer of gifts” and “the wizard”. He's gonna be played by the Crawling Chaos.

Azathoth is then the natural choice for Morgoth, and if I correlate Mt. Etna with Mt. Doom there’s an avenue open to bring in Typhon. Exactly what the relationship is with Nyarly, or what Nyarly’s relationship with the rest of the world is, I am going to leave for later.

• Q: What is Nyarlathotep’s role in all this? How has he interfered in the world?
• Q: What sorts of monsters has Azathoth-as-Typhon spawned?
• Q: What happens if Azathoth gets out from under the mountain? How would that happen?

• Addition: Mythos material directly linked to Nyarly or Azathoth, which actually leans towards the Dreamlands, which can loop right back around and include basically everything Dunsany wrote.
• Addition: Say it with me, everyone: "It's the fucking mi-go, Charlie Brown!"
• Charlie Brown is, unfortunately, unavailable until 2046 thanks to Sonny Bono and the Copyright Extension Act. 

Mount Doom

I had originally planned on Mount Etna for the Typhon connection, but in snooping around for alternatives I stumbled across Mount Elbrus, which hits basically every check every box I want to hit, plus extras: it’s volcanic, it’s fucking huge (largest volcano in Eurasia), it’s erupted within historical record ( ~50 CE), it’s located in the Caucasus (and thus in the same general direction as the Land of Darkness via transitive property) and has mythological importance via Zoroastrianism as Hara Barazaiti.

• Q: Perhaps instead of destroying the Seal, the quest is returning it to the heavens?

• Addition: Hara Barazaiti lore - planets orbit around it, pretty sure Mithra was born there... 

Numenor 

Is literally Atlantis, which means I’m spoiled for choice. There is simply so god damn much available to sort through, those theosophists loved writing some bullshit about Atlantis.  

To start with, I'm going to use the real-world historical Atlantis (the Theran Eruption of ~1600 BCE that obliterated half of Santorini) as my baseline, say Phorenice from The Lost Continent was its last monarch, and I'll pencil in “Minotaur narrative” for later.

• Q: What did Nyarlathotep do in Atlantis?
• Q: Was the Seal known to / in possession of Atlantis?
• Q: What leftovers of the Atlantean empire remain?
• Q: Were the mi-go involved and why is the answer “yes”?
• Q: Typhon/Azathoth the cause of the eruption? Maybe there are two important mountains?

• Addition: Entirely unscientific dinosaurs
• Addition: Atlantean technology
• Addition: Atlantean ruins

**

I’m going to call it here for now; there’s a lot of material to cover and I haven’t even gotten to the Fellowship yet. It’s been an incredibly fun exercise so far, and I think it’s already shaping up to be something special. Experiment successful. The method works. Probably (definitely) going to expand beyond the boundaries of the initial premise, knowing how much my pattern-seeking brain likes drawing connections.

It’s very refreshing - honestly it feels a little bit like I am almost getting away with something - to do something so purposefully derivative at every step of the process, only to see that it somehow circles back around to feeling new again simply because the strictures of public domain force me to bypass 95 years of genre feeding on itself. I'm rebuilding LotR out of sources Tolkien would have known about, but not limiting myself to the sources he used. Looking at it that way it's almost an alternate history (almost, but not quite, considering all the sources that would have been copyrighted at the time.) of what could have been.

I have a feeling - call it a hunch - this will expand well beyond the boundaries of the initial experiment. 

E: This series has since completed - check out Part 2 and Part 3 

Public Domain Roundup 2026

Let’s get this year started on the right foot (well, as right as we can get given the Circumstances) with more art liberated from the shackles of copyright. All this shit is yours now, do with it as you will.

This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list by any stretch (check out Public Domain Review, Duke University, the Smithsonian, and Wikipedia for more), and will be shaped, as always, by my own foppery and whim.

• Important reminder 1: The public domain elements of a long-running series extend only up to the point of expiry, so characters, plot elements, and whatnot from an installment in 1931 or later are still under copyright (if that story hasn’t fallen out of copyright through other means). Estates love abusing this (“Holmes can’t show emotions yet, that’s still under copyright!”).
• Important reminder 2: Trademarks cover branding, and many of the rights-holders are real bastards about things like names and costumes and whatnot. So it’s in your best interest to shake things up a little & put your fingerprint on your version of the character (makes for better derivatives, anyway)

Anyway, let’s get rolling.

Nancy Drew

Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, The Bungalow Mystery and The Mystery at Lilac Inn are all good to go (in their 1930 versions, not the 1959-1960 reprints). Any PD use of Nancy would have to be based on the contents of just these four works, which probably is in everyone’s benefit because you’ve got less to wade through and it’s yet to become set in its ways.

Relevant: We’re also now up to the first 9 Hardy Boys books. Honestly we are spoiled for choice when it comes to detectives, most of the big names of the era are PD now.

Adaptation: The great thing about a plucky teenage detective is that you can toss them in basically any story with a mystery element and it'll work out fine: Nancy tracking down the rare book thief who stole from the Miskatonic University special collection, for example. Plenty of room for moving her around in time or writing her at different stages of her life, as well: book came out in 1930, Nancy is 16 in it, so she was born in 1913-1914 and so you could feasibly set her anywhere up to the late 90s early 00s if you took this route. (I like this method a lot; rooting the characters in time and place allows you to bring all that historical context to bear.)

Miss Marple

Now, Miss Marple is technically already PD because she first appeared in some short stories in 1927, but those got republished in Thirteen Problems in 1932 so trying to track down the originals will likely be a pain and a half. Anyway, Murder at the Vicarage hit PD this year, and it’s going to be the only one for another 12 years.

Adaptation: Crossover with Nancy Drew, obviously, could get a fun mentor-student dynamic out of that. 

 

The Burroughs Corner

1930 gets us both A Fighting Man of Mars as well as Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s seven Barsoom novels, 13 Tarzan novels, three Pellucidar novels, and one extremely litigious estate that’s never let the reality of copyright law get in the way of picking at a warmed-over exquisite corpse. They’ll let you read the stuff on Gutenberg but heaven forbid you come within nine miles of their trademarks.

Adaptation: Given the quite repetitive nature of these series, adaptations have their work cut out for them as either "just steal the monsters and whatnot and plug them into something else" or "massively overhaul the entire thing into some drastically new form", or some mix between the two. The latter is a safer bulwark against the vulture estate, as it's much more difficult to claim infringement of trademark when there's no way anyone could confuse the derivative work with the original. 

Last and First Men

I read this one last year, and had some sizable thoughts on it: mainly that it was extremely inspiring in those moments when it was not extremely frustrating or dull. It’s a canvas to work from / lego box to loot, not so much something to adapt directly: science has indeed marched on and Stapledon’s knowledge of astronomical, evolutionary and social science is very much limited by time, place and circumstance. Expect a post about this in the future, I’ve been percolating thoughts.

Adaptation: The weirdo future posthumans are the highlight of the work, but they're also something that needs a good bit of elbow grease to use. It's not really a plug and play if you want to do it justice.

Golden Bat

He’s a gold skeleton with a sword and a sick cape. Life goals, certainly, but also part of a cool storytelling tradition that I had only heard about in the lead up to writing about this post.

Golden Bat started in kamishibai, which was a type of street performance during the Depression and post-War period where the storyteller would perform with a little stage they could slot pictures into: it’s basically an analogue PowerPoint party, where you’re ad-libbing something funny with the slides you have available. Absolutely fascinating, definitely worth including wherever it can fit (and of course, include the Golden Bat)

Adaptation: There have been several movie, manga, and anime adaptations, none of which are PD. (Golden Bat being from Atlantis is from this later version). Best play it safe and just have the gold skeleton with a sword and sick cape and work from there. You don't need lore, it's Golden Bat!

Other Noteworthies

• All Quiet on the Western Front (film version)
• As I Lay Dying (plus several Faulkner shorts)
• The Maltese Falcon (book only)
• Rover the dog (he doesn't become Pluto until later)
• Flip the Frog (from Fiddlesticks, first color cartoon with sound)
• Betty Boop ("Dizzy Dishes" only, so she's still in weird dog-hybrid mode) 
• Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (Piet Mondrian) 
• The Sun God's Children (Good writeup here) 
• Folk Tales of All Nations (Good writeup here, same blog as above)

 

** 

Something I've noticed in my occasional visits to r/publicdomain is a trend that a lot of people, when dealing with PD material, seem stuck in Franchise Brain. They want The Thing as a discrete intellectual property, maintaining the shape of what came before - which is fine, though I find it disappointing. PD allows for its contents to be disseminated as part of collective culture, unbound from the strictures of who gets to use what or how they use it. You can just have a sailor named Popeye show up in something else, you don't need to make a New Popeye Thing Featuring Famous Character Popeye. PD detaches the ideas from the source so that those ideas are no longer tied down to a single specific execution or iteration. Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head. 

Anyway, all this is still just a starting point. Doubtlessly I will find some more that I've missed (or be reminded of them), and I've got some other PD goodies (Leslie Stone project included) in the works. In a world where the powers that be are trying to own information itself via Azathoth's idiot plagiarist brother, circulating the tapes like this brings at least a little peace of mind.

A Quest for Leslie Stone: Update 1

It's been about three months since I started on this odd little mission, so I figured it's a good time to pop in with an update.

My initial dive into the copyright renewal archives turned up just about as well as I had hoped: of the 20 short stories Leslie had published in the pulps, only one of them had ever been renewed -1937's "The Great Ones", which was also the only story published in Astounding Stories (later the famous Analog Science Fiction, which was generally a lot better at renewing copyright than Gernsbeck was.)

After figuring that out and plugging everything into a spreadsheet, I went and downloaded pdf scans of all the relevant magazine issues. UPenn's renewal archives were an invaluable tool here, as they not only listed which issues had been renewed and which ones hadn't, but included direct links to all the public domain periodicals that had been uploaded onto Internet Archive. Since Leslie was writing primarily in Weird Tales and the other Gernsbeck pulps, basically everything was up there already and all I had to do was download them. The one exception was "The Space Terror", which was published in a very small fanzine called Spaceways that I could only find thanks to the unsung heroes of preservation over at fanac.org.

After that, I ran everything through some OCR software and copied everything over into a big document. The rest is the heavy lifting of making sure everything is formatted correctly.

As of writing this, 10/19 stories have gotten their first pass. I'm focusing mostly on fixing spelling errors and re-adjusting the spacing and paragraph breaks at this stage; second pass is going to be the in-depth line-by-line to make sure everything is exact.

It's remarkably fun to just put a stream on the other monitor and vibe. I would say I wish I could do this for money, but work tends to suck the fun out of things and I like that this is actually fun. Educational, too; science fiction (and fiction, and writing in general) has changed a lot in 95 years.

Some observations: 

• Perhaps the biggest thing is the cumulative effect of all the small changes; shifts in spelling, grammar, word usage. Highlights include: "imbedded" for "embedded", "h'm" for "hm" or "hmm",  ellipses of four dots like this. . . . and using interclausal dashes like-this instead of like - this.
• There's a story where Character A is recounting something to Character B, normal frame narrative stuff, but most of that recounting is dialogue so nearly the entire story is in nested quotes.
• Rays! We love a ray. X-rays, Z-rays, T-rays, any kind of ray you can think of. No such thing as a plot that can't be jumpstarted with the right kind of ray.
• In some of the earlier stories, spaceships are usually called "space-fliers" or just "fliers", and in the very early ones they aren't even rocket shaped - they're spherical in a story from 1930. We're right in that sweet spot between "you can fly between planets with an airplane" and "everything is either a rocket or a saucer".
• Odd scare quotes show up a-plenty, ex. going "through" a portal. I assume this is because the concept was not as blase at the time as it is to readers now, but it has the side effect of making the dialogue sound stilted in a way I can only describe as a robot imitating lower-tier children's educational television with weirdly placed emphasis on key words. 
• Lots of italics for emphasis, too. 
• There are more footnotes than I expected, though I don't know if these were Leslie's or the editor's. Most of them are definitions of alien terminology, or clarifications about science and whatnot.
• Since I'm working off of magazine scans, all the ads are included. Weight loss regimens, get-rich quick classes in chemistry and radio repair, a guy promising the mystic secrets of the universe if you'll just buy his book. Some things never change.
• It's no surprise that there's a fair bit of colonialist fantasy going on in some of these stories, but what's truly wild, and perhaps most educational, is just how dedicated that particular genre trapping is to denying the reality of even the story it's found in. Prime example: the local aliens are continually described as primitive - only rudimentary language, fire but no metalworking - but then much of their part of the narrative is taken up by their elaborate social and religious hierarchy and their copious supply of worked metal goods. And this is in a story where the thesis is "the human prospectors who came to this planet are idiots who got themselves killed because they thought they could take advantage of the locals!" Which, I suppose, might indicate that it is an intentional subversion and this entire bullet point is moot in this particular circumstance. 
• I have finally learned what the HOME key does. 

During this whole process, it's given me a lot more appreciation for the pulps, beyond just a "this is where a lot of things started" level: they served the niche that fanzines played in the postwar decades and that webfiction and fanfic serve today. A place for amateur writers to get out there and just write shit and maybe make some money on the side. Does it mean that a lot of it's bad? Yeah, of course it does. But that's the point of amateur fiction; it's an environment where you can safely write stuff at low investment and both improve the craft in real time and build an audience (I learned more about writing from the SCP wiki and running this blog than I ever did in any of the classes I took in college.)

Anyway, the next update shall happen when it happens. Probably when I get all of Pass 1 done.

A Quest for Leslie Stone

A couple nights ago, as the Youtube algorithm flailed desperately in an attempt to parse my viewing history into something advertisers can understand, I was recommended a video with maybe 200 views about a pulp science fiction author named Leslie F. Stone. I'd never heard of her before, but "sci-fi author I have never heard of" + "public domain" is a guaranteed way to get my attention. So I brought up her Wikipedia page and started digging.

Leslie wrote from 1929 - 1940, all of them short stories published across the pulp magazine ecosystem (sans a compilation book published in 1967 and a short autobiographical essay in 1974). Quite a few of these stories are definitely public domain, and the rest are cozy in that grey area of "did it get renewed or not?"

But when I checked Gutenberg, she only had one story to her name - 1929's When the Sun Went Out.

There's a quote (that I can't remember the source of off the top of my head) that's something like this: the  history of women (or queer people, or people of color) in genre fiction has to constantly start over from 0, because they are consistently left out, forgotten, overwritten, sidelined, and ignored by the historical narrative. The same sort of narrative that leads to thinkpieces in whatever thinkpiece magazine du jour is announcing with self-satisfied triumph that science fiction is written by women, now - as if they hadn't been writing it from the beginning.

And once that got in my head, the next thought was "if not now, when?"

I haven't felt this fired up (positive) about something for a long, long while. Let's see if I can sustain it.

Here's Stone's bibliography, sorted according the year and copyright status. Would not have been able to do this without an extremely helpful Kirkus Reviews article which provided the magazine and month for each of her stories (which are left out of her Wikipedia page)

Already on Project Gutenberg

• When the Sun Went Out (1929)

Very Definitely in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (Amazing Stories, Aug-Sep 1929)
• Men With Wings (Air Wonder Stories, Jul 1929)
• Women with Wings (Air Wonder Stories, May 1930)
• Through the Veil (Amazing Stories, May 1930)
  
• Letter of the 24th Century (Amazing Stories, Dec 1930)
  

Very Definitely Not in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (1967 novel version)
• Day of the Pulps (1974) 

Possibly in the Public Domain

• Across the Void (Amazing Stories Apr-May-Jun 1931)
• The Conquest of Gola (Wonder Stories, Apr 1931)
• The Hell Planet (Wonder Stories, Jun 1932)
• The Man Who Fought a Fly (Amazing Stories, Oct 1932)
• Gulliver, 3000 A.D. Wonder Stories, May 1933)
• The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, Dec 1934)
• Cosmic Joke (Wonder Stories, Jan 1935)
• The Man With the Four-Dimensional Eyes (Wonder Stories, Aug 1935)
• When the Flame-Flowers Blossomed (Weird Tales, Nov 1935)
• The Fall of Mercury (Amazing Stories, Dec 1935)
• The Human Pets of Mars (Amazing Stories, Oct 1936)
• The Great Ones (Astounding Stories, Jul 1937)
• Death Dallies Awhile (Weird Tales, Jun 1938)
• The Space Terror (Wikipedia says 1939, Kirkus Reviews doesn't provide a magazine, but searching the name got me a zine called Spaceways, where it appears in Issue #7.)
• Gravity Off! (Future Fiction, Jul 1940)
  

A cursory search through the UPenn periodical copyright renewals database doesn't ping for any renewals of the stories, but since we're trying to prove a negative here I'm going to double-check with New York Public Library's renewals database.

Then once I have a list and find all the scans, I guess all that's left is to start transcribing. Somehow, after over 30 years on this planet, I only learned earlier today about Distributed Proofreaders. 

Who knows how it will go, but let's see where it ends up.

 

 

Three Beasts of the Public Domain

This was actually PKD's first published story.

Wub
HD: 4
Appearance: A flabby, blobby grey thing with big, sad eyes. Reminiscent of waterbear, mole rat, pig.
Wants: Food, lots of it. Discussions of art and philosophy. An easy and peaceful life of pleasure.
Armor: None
Move: Minimal
Morale: 12
Damage: 0
Number Appearing: 1

A single wub contains enough meat for 150 rations. It is delicious and its meat lasts twice as long as normal rations before spoiling. There are several catches attached to this:

1. The wub is both sapient and psychic.
2. The wub will latch on to one or more of its more benevolent captors and strike up conversations of its favored topics, usually philosophy, art, and comparative mythology.
3. The wub will beg for its life in a piteous and fatalist-melancholic manner to anyone intending to eat it.
4. The wub is not actually the creature seen, but the psychic presence inhabiting it.
5. The killer of the wub will become the new host for the wub, and will in a short amount of time devote itself to the lazy life of indolence that wubs favor.
6. Currently unproven: the wub wants to be eaten for this very purpose.

Resisting wub influence requires a daily WIS save. It may potentially be cast out through exorcism or a Remove Curse spell.

W.W. Denslow

Kalidah
HD:5
Appearance: A tiger's head on a bear's body.
Wants: To hunt, to protect its territory, to scare the shit out of people
Armor: As chain (thick fur and insulating fat)
Move: Normal
Morale: 8
Damage: 1d10 claw or bite
Number Appearing: 1-2

Most terrible and terrifying hunters along the Yellow Brick Road. Being the biggest and the scariest, they are remarkably unaccustomed to anyone standing up to them, and so their wills might fail them if their target stands up to them.

Wayne Douglas Barlowe

Swine-Thing
HD: 2
Appearance: Pale and hairless pig-faced humanoid.
Wants: To eat human flesh, to gain entry into the House
Armor: None
Move: Normal x1.5
Morale: 6
Damage: 1d4 claw
Number Appearing: 3-18


The swine-things emerge from beneath the earth and dusk and flee at dawn. While neither particularly intelligent nor possessing of tools, they use their own numbers and the isolation of their victims as their effective methods of attack. In one account of their hunts, it is implied that they are extensions of a greater being from beyond the universe: appendages of some cosmic god. This is unproven.