I read recently that a Russian has written an alternate version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings, with the evil demon-god Sauron as the hero.
In this, Sauron, aided by the evil wizard Saruman, is trying to trying to bring modernity and industrialisation to Middle-Earth, in the face of the medievalist obstructionism of Gandalf, Aragorn. etc.
My first thought was this seemed an entirely appropriate thing to have come from Russia.
It was Russia’s forced industrialisation under Lenin and then Stalin that killed tens of millions of people and ruined the lives of hundreds of millions more.
This however, is not fair to the very large number of Tolkien fans in Russia who have actually built villages etc in the style of Middle Earth.
In August, 1990, 150 Russians gathered in the Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk for a week of role-playing games based on characters from The Lord of the Rings.
It would not, perhaps, be too difficult to write a satire giving Sauron’s point of view. However, from what I gather, this book is not written sarcastically or satirically.
The author is trying to make a serious point – it sounds as if it is the last, or one hopes the last – literary ripple from the blood-red wave of Stalinism.
The devout Christian C. S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, ostensibly advice from a demon on how to corrupt human souls.
But while The Screwtape Letters holds together neatly, no sane person could imagine Lewis meant it to be taken at face value: Screwtape hates everything good and his whites are our blacks.
It ends with a howl of rage and despair when the air-raid warden who Screwtape has been advising on how to corrupt dies bravely doing his duty and is instantly translated into the presence of God: from Hell’s point of view a tragic end and a total defeat.
The Screwtape Letters written by a genuine Satanist would be very different.
There is always a temptation for a novelist to make a wicked character convincing, or to make his case attractive.
Tolkien avoided this by having Sauron say almost nothing, though some of the other bad characters, especially Saruman, speak eloquently.
The Lord of the Rings is so popular and influential a book that one may look carefully to see if there is any case against it as the Russian writer suggests: that it is anti-modern and anti-technology.
I don’t think this is the case although modernity is de-emphasised, and it seems obvious Tolkien himself preferred a rural life.
In The Lord of the Rings the “good side” do use some technology but – and this is the crucial point – they are not dominated by it.
Sauron wishes to use technology (the ring) to give himself god-like power and to be treated as a god.
Of course a writer can use his or her powers and privileges as a “sub-creator” to have the characters in a story undergo moral development. MacBeth begins good and goes bad.
If I had written The Lord of the Rings (Ha! – If) I would have had Sam Gamgee begin whining and resentful of his inferior social position, gradually growing to heroic stature by virtue of the noble examples he sees.
But this is a very different thing to making Sauron the hero.