The Last Ringbearer (58 page)

Umglangan
– a reference to Umglangani, King of the Zulu during the Boer wars.

PART III

“He was a self-made counter-terrorist”
– John LeCarre,
Little Drummer Girl.

CHAPTER 36

Rostrum
– the ram bow of a naval ship.

Smoked beer
– an actual brewer term, the German Raushbier.

CHAPTER 37

“… to get rid of a caravan trade competitor for good”
– a reference to the Fourth Crusade, in which Venice succeeded in siccing the Crusaders on Constantinople rather than Palestine, becoming the dominant trade power in the Mediterranian after Bysantium’s demise.

CHAPTER 38

Umbarian fire
– a reference to the ‘Greek fire’ of Bysantium.

“Gentlemen don’t read each others’ mail”
– the words with which General Robert E. Lee supposedly refused to read the materials collected by Confederate intelligence.

CHAPTER 40

‘Umberto’
– a deliberate play-of-words reference: Umbar/omerta/Umberto Eco.

‘Zamorro’
– a reference to Neapolitanian
camorro
that sounds like the famous soccer player Bobby Zamora.

The names of Umbarian citizens are meant to convey the melting-pot character of Umbar by sounding derived from various Mediterranean and nearby cultures.
E.g.
, Almandin sounds Arabic (a garnet-like mineral), Makarioni – Italian/Russian (
macaroni
/Admiral Makarov), Carnero is Spanish (‘fish’), Yakudze
– Georgian (the original uses Jacuzzi, which I replaced due to reader comments on its ingrained brand image).

CHAPTER 41

‘Skuas’
– a kleptoparasitic species of seabird, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skua
.

‘Rosette’
– the closest slang equivalents I was able to find for this weapon (improvised out of a broken bottle) were “tulip” and “nigger knife”; the former appears unpopular while the latter would not have fit the milieu.

CHAPTER 42

Vaddari
– this name derives from
wazari
, a judo term for a good move that nevertheless did not result in a clear win (earns half a point).

“The winner is always right”
– this was the formula with which Empress Catherine the Great released General Alexander Suvorov from court martial. The general’s crime was a swift capture of the Turkish fortress Turtukai despite the orders of his indecisive superior, Field Marshal Rumyantzev.

CHAPTER 43

Hakimians (adherents of Hakima)
– the name of this invented religion derives from Louis Borges’ “Hakim of Merva, the masked painter.”

CHAPTER 44

The story of pro-Elvish underground
in Umbar is intended to evoke the history of the Communist International in Europe and the USA of the 1920’s and ‘30’s.

CHAPTER 46

Vivino
– a fictional bird.

CHAPTER 47

“The magic phrase ‘there’s such a thing as necessity’”
– this turn of phrase was a Soviet propaganda favorite.

CHAPTER 48

Iguatalpa, Uraupan, etc.
– these are actual names of places in mountainous areas of Mexico.

Hachipuri (Georgian)
– cheese-filled bread pockets.

Basturma (Armenian)
– raw-smoked meat.

Pifos (Greek)
– a large ceramic jug. Some are large enough to admit a man (compare the finale of the tale of Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves). The opening process described is still in use in western Georgia.

CHAPTER 50

Ash-Sharam
– an invented name.

Mangal (Turkish)
– an outdoor wood-fired grill or a barbecue prepared on one.

Caravan-bashi (Turkish)
– leader of a caravan.

Lagman (Uzbek)
– a kind of Asian spaghetti.

CHAPTER 54

Ulshitan
– a derivative of sumpitan, the blow tubes used by Dayaks

Anchar
– a mythical super-poisonous tree of Oriental legend. The paralytic action described is that of the curare poison.

PART IV

“Make ye no truce with Adam-zad”
– Ridyard Kipling,
Truce with The Bear.

CHAPTER 56

Ichiga (Siberian Russian)
– a soft-soled tall boot for swampy forests.

Ponyaga (Siberian Russian)
– an actual load-carrying device.

Kumiss (Mongolian)
– a mildly alcoholic drink made from horse milk.

CHAPTER 57

Grizzly
– the name of Dol Guldur’s commandant was chosen to echo that of General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project.

Fire jelly
– an actual Molotov cocktail recipe.

Weapon of Vengeance
– a mythical super-weapon trumpeted by Nazi propaganda during the last year of WWII.

“An honest division of labor: clean hands for the mastermind, clean conscience for the executor”
– a quote from a book by Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet spy.

CHAPTER 60

The description of Lórien
is intended to echo the style of Orwell’s
1984
and portray a totalitarian society.

“Never as united as now”
– a Soviet propaganda cliché.

“This is a great mystery”
–
Ephesians 5:32
; intended to hint at something both secret and dangerous to know.

“Experts who had tried, year after year, to divine the internal politics of a certain powerful and enigmatic state”
– a dig at the Western Sovietologists who had regularly failed spectacularly in their attempts to predict Soviet policy, and especially at the mythical struggle between the “hawks” and the “doves” in the Politburo they have theorized.

CHAPTER 63

Sponge steel
– the author’s invention.

CHAPTER 64

“Donkeys and scientists to the middle”
– during the Egyptian campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte traveled with a large group of scientists in his train, from which he formed the Institut de L'Égypte. The command “
Forméz les carrés, les anes et les savants au centre
” was reportedly sounded before every battle, most famously before the Battle of the Pyramids on 7/21/1798.

CHAPTER 66

“Idiot of the shining helmet”
– a reference to Hector’s description in Homer’s
Iliad
.

CHAPTER 67

Vakalabath’s prophecy
– the author’s invention.

CHAPTER 69

The scene at Orodruin
, including Tzerlag’s loss of fingers, is a paraphrase of Frodo’s final test in
The Lord of the Rings
.

Kurum (Siberian Russian)
– a boulder scree.

EPILOGUE

The format of this chapter
, written from the standpoint of an imaginary modern Gondorian revisionist historian, is intended to cast the entire work as an alternative history written in the real Arda, where
The Lord of the Rings
is the accepted “mainstream” version of actual historical events. See Appendix II for more details.

“What will History say?”
– Bernard Shaw,
The Devil’s Apprentice

“Dare to err and to dream”
– “
Wage du zu irren und zu traumen
,” Friedrich Schiller,
Thekla

“Objective reality perceived by our senses”
– a Marxist definition of matter.

“Operation Sirocco … destroyed the entire Gondorian invasion fleet right at the piers”
– a reference to Sir Walter Raleigh’s raid on the Second Spanish Armada at Cadiz.

“Let justice be done though the heavens fall!”
– the Anglicized version of Friedrich I’s “
pereat mundus et fiat justitia
.”

“… the scale of terror had been greatly magnified by the nobility’s historians”
– a dig at official historians, who had changed the estimates of the number of victims of Ivan the Terrible, Richard the IIIrd, the French Revolution, etc. many times to conform to official propaganda.

Grager of Aran
– a clear and unambiguous reference to Lawrence of Arabia.

Priestess Svantatra
– the author’s joke; Svantatra was the name of a right-wing party in India of the 1960’s.

The story of Éomer’s conversion
echoes both the story of the sudden conversion of several Viking konungs to Christianity in order to rule Russia’s northern tibes, and the official story of Prince Vladimir the Baptist, who supposedly chose a monotheistic faith to convert his country to after an open debate in Kiev between the preachers of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam.

The War of Nine Castles
– a cross between the War of the Roses and the Battle of the Golden Spurs (fought at Courtraj on 7/11/1302 between a Flemish militia and a French mounted expeditionary force, being the first battle in which infantry vanquished armored knights).

“the faithful Hakimians … the schismatics”
– this mix of Islamic and Greek religious terms is yet another deliberate attempt to prevent a too-firm identification of any entity described in the book with any real-world one.

APPENDIX II

Why I wrote an apocryphal treatment of
The Lord of the Rings

An essay by Kirill Yeskov for the
Semechki
fanzine, 2000

F 
irst, a few words about myself. I’m not a writer either in form (no literary memberships; royalties are a negligible portion of my income) or in substance (writing fiction is not my only or even main occupation). I’m a senior researcher at the Paleontological Institute of the Academy of Sciences – the very place where [Russian geologist and science fiction author] Yefremov used to work; professionally I’m known as the author of almost a hundred works on the classification of Chelicerata and historical biogeography. In the last few years I have found it more interesting to deal with living children than with extinct arthropods – I teach electives in high school, summer and winter supplemental courses, etc. I wrote a couple of textbooks, got involved in creating a new natural history school curriculum; if I had to state a preference, it is precisely those activities that I consider my most important. I graduated from the Biology College of the Moscow University (a well-known nest of Voltairians) and have gained most of my life experience in expeditions through Siberia and Middle Asia; I’m an epicurean hedonist in my aspirations and a skeptical rationalist by conviction. Do you get the picture?

I’m saying this to explain that I wrote
The Last Ringbearer
(like my previous novel,
The Gospel According to Afranius
) strictly for my own enjoyment and that of my friends; I can be termed a graphomaniac in that sense. A graphomaniac can be a good or a bad writer (there were some geniuses among them, like Griboedov and Lewis Carroll), but he never writes competitively – that is, to fit the tastes of a publisher or some average book-buying audience; he only writes for his own niche (whether it’s some group or Alice Liddell is irrelevant).

The Last Ringbearer
was written for a very specific audience, too – it’s just another “fairy tale for junior scientists” like myself. It is meant for skeptics and agnostics brought up on Hemingway and brothers Strugatzky, for whom Tolkien is only a charming, albeit slightly tedious, writer of children’s books. Those were the people who got the biggest kick out of the novel; theirs were the reviews that used the expression “sleepless night,” dear to any writer’s heart, most often.

On the other hand, I can somewhat understand the feelings of “professional” Tolkien fans who foolishly parted with their money to buy this… this… whatever. This is not unlike some teenager, besotted with pirate fiction, tricked by the
Corsair
title into buying a book by a certain G. G. Byron, and then inveighing on the Internet: “Total baloney – loads of stupid love stories and not one decent boarding! The name must be there to trick the readers, otherwise who’d buy this crap!” Guys, please understand that this was not written for you! If you do grab something not meant for you – which ought to be obvious after reading about three paragraphs,
n'est-ce pas
? – then don’t whine like an Arkansas bumpkin who got taken by
The Royal Nonesuch
.

However, the reaction of the upset Tolkien fans leads us to a really interesting question of the propriety of utilizing secondary worlds created by one’s demiurge predecessors. (Whether our own world is all that primary – whether Richard III was an evil traitorous hunchback or Alexander of Neva a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche – is another question that is well beyond the scope of this essay.) The founder of this literary tradition of playing with others’ masks and backdrops was one Dio Chrysostomos, a Greek who lived under the Roman Empire; dissecting Homer’s text with the scalpel of irony, while strictly abiding by his “facts,” he had rather convincingly proved that the Greek Achaeans had suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of the Greek Trojans and went home empty-handed, and that the rest was all pure PR, to use a modern term.