Tolkien fanfic writer sues Tolkien estate over copyright

[Snarf Zagyg]

What got me is that he's suing the Tolkien Estate. The Tolkien Estate. A group notorious for IP litigation. Dude, they have a bevy of lawyers ready and waiting for you. The only way this could have been worse is if he sued Disney for infringing on his Mickey Mouse fanfic.

 

[Zubatcarteira]

 

[Dausuul]

Ugh and double-ugh! Even aside from the plot sounding terrible, the sheer hubris and moxie of trying to write a sequel to Lord of the Rings is unimaginable.

Tolkien himself tried and couldn't do it. He started a manuscript titled "The New Shadow," set 100 years after Aragorn's death in the reign of his son:

"Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)"

He got all of 13 pages in before concluding that it was "not worth doing."

Somewhat off topic: Looking over the history of Middle-Earth, one sees a repeating pattern: A period of terrible struggle and tragic sacrifice, followed by victory over evil and a golden age, which decays into a long, slow decline. People grow complacent and corrupt, the fruits of those hard-won victories are squandered, and finally evil bursts forth once more and a new struggle is joined.

Furthermore, each struggle takes a toll on the powers of both good and evil. Each golden age is less golden than the previous one, and each struggle pits lesser heroes against lesser villains: First the Valar battling Melkor at the height of his power, then the Noldor in their full glory attacking the corrupted and weakened Morgoth, then Sauron wielding the One Ring against the Last Alliance, and finally the surviving heirs of Numenor and the few remaining Elves fighting to hold back a maimed and Ringless Sauron.

Seen in this larger context, the mostly-happy ending of LotR is somewhat illusory: Because the book opens at the tail end of a decline, and concludes with the start of the next golden age, things seem to have gotten better. Any sequel -- if it remained true to the overall arc of Middle-Earth's history -- would destroy that illusion; first, because it would reveal how Aragorn's golden age fell into decline, and second, because any struggle it depicted would have to set lesser heroes than the Fellowship against a lesser foe than Sauron.

I think it would be possible to write such a sequel and do it well, but it would not be a heroic fantasy tale. It would be grim to the point of despair, the heroes would tend to destroy themselves, and the ending would be horribly bleak. Tolkien was certainly capable of writing grim stories with self-destructive heroes and bleak endings (as a certain T. Turambar could attest, not to mention Feanor and his epically dysfunctional family), but I'm not sure he could have forced himself to stretch out one such story to novel length*, and I don't blame him for not wanting to. Particularly when most of his audience would hate it.

Someday after LotR passes into the public domain, perhaps someone will write that sequel. I feel on pretty solid ground to say the "someone" will not be Mr. Polychron.

*Yes, the Silmarillion was novel-length, but it was a compilation of many stories written separately over many years, with endings ranging from the bittersweet union of Beren and Luthien to the utter soul-crushing despair of Turin and Nienor. Moreover, it was Christopher Tolkien who did the actual compiling.

 

[Ryujin]

Tolkien himself tried and couldn't do it. He started a manuscript titled "The New Shadow," set 100 years after Aragorn's death in the reign of his son:

"Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)"

He got all of 13 pages in before concluding that it was "not worth doing."

Somewhat off topic: Looking over the history of Middle-Earth, one sees a repeating pattern: A period of terrible struggle and tragic sacrifice, followed by victory over evil and a golden age, which decays into a long, slow decline. People grow complacent and corrupt, the fruits of those hard-won victories are squandered, and finally evil bursts forth once more and a new struggle is joined.

Furthermore, each struggle takes a toll on the powers of both good and evil. Each golden age is less golden than the previous one, and each struggle pits lesser heroes against lesser villains: First the Valar battling Melkor at the height of his power, then the Noldor in their full glory attacking the corrupted and weakened Morgoth, then Sauron wielding the One Ring against the Last Alliance, and finally the surviving heirs of Numenor and the few remaining Elves fighting to hold back a maimed and Ringless Sauron.

Seen in this larger context, the mostly-happy ending of LotR is somewhat illusory: Because the book opens at the tail end of a decline, and concludes with the start of the next golden age, things seem to have gotten better. Any sequel -- if it remained true to the overall arc of Middle-Earth's history -- would destroy that illusion; first, because it would reveal how Aragorn's golden age fell into decline, and second, because any struggle it depicted would have to set lesser heroes than the Fellowship against a lesser foe than Sauron.

I think it would be possible to write such a sequel and do it well, but it would not be a heroic fantasy tale. It would be grim to the point of despair, the heroes would tend to destroy themselves, and the ending would be horribly bleak. Tolkien was certainly capable of writing grim stories with self-destructive heroes and bleak endings (as a certain T. Turambar could attest, not to mention Feanor and his epically dysfunctional family), but I'm not sure he could have forced himself to stretch out one such story to novel length*, and I don't blame him for not wanting to. Particularly when most of his audience would hate it.

Someday after LotR passes into the public domain, perhaps someone will write that sequel. I feel on pretty solid ground to say the "someone" will not be Mr. Polychron.

*Yes, the Silmarillion was novel-length, but it was a compilation of many stories written separately over many years, with endings ranging from the bittersweet union of Beren and Luthien to the utter soul-crushing despair of Turin and Nienor. Moreover, it was Christopher Tolkien who did the actual compiling.

So you would end up with "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever" instead of "Lord of the Rings."

 

[Dausuul]

So you would end up with "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever" instead of "Lord of the Rings."

Er... no. Not at all, actually. "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" is another story of epic struggle against a Big Bad ending in bittersweet triumph. Yes, you've got a self-destructive and generally unpleasant* protagonist, but otherwise it's very much in the LotR mold.

The closest thing I can think of offhand might be "The Lions of Al-Rassan" by Guy Gavriel Kay, but that still isn't very close.

*And in one instance going beyond "unpleasant" to "criminally vile." I get the metaphor Donaldson was going for, but some metaphors are better left unused.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think it would be possible to write such a sequel and do it well, but it would not be a heroic fantasy tale. It would be grim to the point of despair

I don't think this necessarily follows. Tolkien was going off of a then-popular cyclical view of history. In that view, the heroes of Ancient Greece were heroic, as were the heroes of Rome an age later (which saw a decline and rise after Greece), as were Charlemagne's paladins (same cycle here).

Heroism isn't dependent on the state of the world being shiny and beautiful, but rather how they rise against the challenges of the day. I seem to recall Gandalf expressing a similar view ...

 

[Deset Gled]

Any sequel -- if it remained true to the overall arc of Middle-Earth's history -- would destroy that illusion; first, because it would reveal how Aragorn's golden age fell into decline, and second, because any struggle it depicted would have to set lesser heroes than the Fellowship against a lesser foe than Sauron.

Nothing against you personally, but I find this mentality extremely offputting. It's the lowest side of Hollywood that says the next movie always has to be BIGGER and FLASHIER, and MORE MORE MORE. It's simply not true. Some of the best sequels ever made are when someone isn't afraid to take it down a notch.

Take the Star Wars EU. The Thrawn Trilogy was, in every way, shape, and form, a smaller emergency than the original trilogy. Thrawn was no Emperor; he had no force powers, and he had no Death Star. OTOH, the Jedi Academy Trilogy had a new Sith threat, a new Death Star, and the Sun Crusher. And Thrawn was so much better than Jedi Academy. Better plot, better writing, better characterizations. In every way a better sequel, even though it was "less". All of the best EU stuff was smaller, like Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina. The stuff that tried to be bigger, like Darksaber, was generally crap.

And there are lots of other examples. Wrath of Khan. Silence of the Lambs. Buffy Season 6. The bigger bad is not always a better story. Not everything has to be an epic.

There are a ton of ways that a sequel to Lord of the Rings could work. It could be about the generation after Aragorn stuggling to keep the peace - and succeeding. It could be about a small band of characters uncovering a lost Elven relic. There are endless possibilities. Now, if Tolkien just didn't feel like writing those stories, that's fine. It's his perogative to write the stories he wants to. But there's no reason the sequel would have to escalate, and there's no reason a competent writer like Tolkien couldn't write a story that maintained the ending of LotR if he wanted to.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Tolkien himself tried and couldn't do it. He started a manuscript titled "The New Shadow," set 100 years after Aragorn's death in the reign of his son:

"Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)"

He got all of 13 pages in before concluding that it was "not worth doing."

Somewhat off topic: Looking over the history of Middle-Earth, one sees a repeating pattern: A period of terrible struggle and tragic sacrifice, followed by victory over evil and a golden age, which decays into a long, slow decline. People grow complacent and corrupt, the fruits of those hard-won victories are squandered, and finally evil bursts forth once more and a new struggle is joined.

Furthermore, each struggle takes a toll on the powers of both good and evil. Each golden age is less golden than the previous one, and each struggle pits lesser heroes against lesser villains: First the Valar battling Melkor at the height of his power, then the Noldor in their full glory attacking the corrupted and weakened Morgoth, then Sauron wielding the One Ring against the Last Alliance, and finally the surviving heirs of Numenor and the few remaining Elves fighting to hold back a maimed and Ringless Sauron.

Seen in this larger context, the mostly-happy ending of LotR is somewhat illusory: Because the book opens at the tail end of a decline, and concludes with the start of the next golden age, things seem to have gotten better. Any sequel -- if it remained true to the overall arc of Middle-Earth's history -- would destroy that illusion; first, because it would reveal how Aragorn's golden age fell into decline, and second, because any struggle it depicted would have to set lesser heroes than the Fellowship against a lesser foe than Sauron.

I think it would be possible to write such a sequel and do it well, but it would not be a heroic fantasy tale. It would be grim to the point of despair, the heroes would tend to destroy themselves, and the ending would be horribly bleak. Tolkien was certainly capable of writing grim stories with self-destructive heroes and bleak endings (as a certain T. Turambar could attest, not to mention Feanor and his epically dysfunctional family), but I'm not sure he could have forced himself to stretch out one such story to novel length*, and I don't blame him for not wanting to. Particularly when most of his audience would hate it.

Someday after LotR passes into the public domain, perhaps someone will write that sequel. I feel on pretty solid ground to say the "someone" will not be Mr. Polychron.

*Yes, the Silmarillion was novel-length, but it was a compilation of many stories written separately over many years, with endings ranging from the bittersweet union of Beren and Luthien to the utter soul-crushing despair of Turin and Nienor. Moreover, it was Christopher Tolkien who did the actual compiling.

I'm torn between wishing Tolkien had drafted more of The New Shadow versus being very glad he did not. Following up on a masterpiece is no easy thing.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There are a ton of ways that a sequel to Lord of the Rings could work. It could be about the generation after Aragorn stuggling to keep the peace - and succeeding. It could be about a small band of characters uncovering a lost Elven relic. There are endless possibilities.

The Shire cries out for a cozy fantasy novel with low stakes that feels like a warm hug.

 

[ichabod]

The Shire cries out for a cozy fantasy novel with low stakes that feels like a warm hug.

Samwise, Rose, and the Disappearing Took