The Last Ringbearer: Middle Earth according to Mordor

Gonzalo said:
To be honest, I can understand why the Tolkien estate would try to prevent its publication under copyright legislation. Regardless of the quality of the fiction (and the premise does at the very least sound interesting), if you allow one piece of ‘fan’ fiction set in your world, you open the floodgates to all sorts of cr*p…

I don’t think that’s true. I was a Buffy fan and Whedon allowed/encouraged all kinds of fan fiction which only made the fans more rabid. After the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel I was involved with a lot of other fans in a long virtual series about the vampire Spike. Star Trek fan fiction had a similar effect. For a while Rowling would not allow Potter fanfiction then she relented and it didn’t hurt the franchise. If anything it helped it.

What all this fan fiction has in common is no one made any money from it so the fans got something to read but it didn’t hurt the creators’ income.

I think the Tolkien estate would do well to allow this book to be out on the internet for free or published (if they got a, say, 90% cut). It’s not like Tolkien is gonna write any new books. It will get people interested again, in the original and will probably help the Ring series sell more.

Gonzalo said:
To be honest, I can understand why the Tolkien estate would try to prevent its publication under copyright legislation. Regardless of the quality of the fiction (and the premise does at the very least sound interesting), if you allow one piece of ‘fan’ fiction set in your world, you open the floodgates to all sorts of cr*p…

Whether derivative works help or harm the original is a large, and interesting subject, and I don’t think anyone has reached any definitive conclusions as yet. That said, I don’t buy the slippery slope argument that you are essentially making here. It is both possible and reasonable for the copyright holders to licence some derivative works and not others – and this happens all the time.

expatpaul said:
Whether derivative works help or harm the original is a large, and interesting subject, and I don’t think anyone has reached any definitive conclusions as yet. That said, I don’t buy the slippery slope argument that you are essentially making here. It is both possible and reasonable for the copyright holders to licence some derivative works and not others – and this happens all the time.

I agree with you – I think I didn’t make it clear in my original post that I could see the estate’s reasoning for insisting that the work was a breach of copyright (which legally, it is) rather than agreeing with the general argument.

It is indeed perfectly reasonable for the authors of the work (or more accurately, as you point out, the copyright holders) to license derivative works as they see fit. My point about the floodgates was that in law, if you do not challenge derivative works that you have not explicitly licensed, this can be seen as setting a precedent (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and any understanding I have of copyright law in various territories has been gleaned from reading about it rather than studying it)

the english assassin said:
I don’t really get the artistic impulse of fan fiction or pastiches. It seems anti-art to me. Certainly much of the Lovecraft rip-offs haven’t helped his legacy.

Yep, with you here.

Also the Tolkein as-anti-science-pro-woo has been done to death. Was it not Greg Bear who p—–d off the entire Tolkien fanbase when he wrote a very good essay along these lines? (And yeah it was a good essay even if I disagreed with his analysis.)

And here’s some Charlie Stross on his faq about fanfic…

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/faq-fanfic.html

I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon who lived in a storied-past but I am one. I’m speaking here entirely about fanfiction, not the Tolkien-based revision that started this thread.

My first writing was fanfic. It was wretched. Of course. It was bound to be. It was trying too hard to be THEM-Not-Me. I was grafting myself into someone else’s world and riding the skins of their characters. I did bad-Bradbury, bad-Heinlein, bad-Anderson. I even wrote bad-Flash Gordon plays (based on the Buster Crabbe serials, not the Raymond comics) and actually performed a few of them in my grade-school playground. I built a hand-puppet theatre and performed adaptations of some of my worst Lovecraft stuff. Yes, I was reading Lovecraft at age 10. You should have seen my puppet version of THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE! I told one of my stories at a playground story-telling contest and won, but that was it, the height of my acclaim, the extent of my fan-work that was broadcast into the living world. Of course, I grew into myself in a time when you could be – indeed, HAD to be — a fanfic “author,” or any kind of burgeoning writer, and do it in secret. No internet could spread my shame and allow me to display my shortcomings to the world.

Later in life, I saw art students in museums copying Rembrandts, Titians, et al. Learning to handle brushes, of course, to mix and apply color, organize the space before them. Learning. Building muscle-memory.

I suffered in secret. And, perhaps because I got almost no feedback, negative or positive, I had to learn to edit myself, to look at my work honestly, to find the right word for that one moment, to see where the work succeeded and where I failed as compared to my models, my heros, the Bradburys, Andersons, Heinleins, and Flash Gordons.

So I understand when authors, their heirs and assigns try to stop the spread of the dreck that streams forth, splashing about in their ponds. And I understand the urge to be part of the dreck stream. It’s necessary.

What is not necessary, is for the world to see it. It is enough to have been done, to have learned from it.

Somewhere during that long time of silence, I found myself.

Hey there! Sorry for being so quiet lately. Thanks for the shout-out, Fred. The short answer is that you’re right.

To say Christopher Tolkien is made of fail, at least in fulfilling his father’s designs, might be an understatement. But that’s a soapbox for another day. (At least he’s not Brian Herbert. Did I just say that out loud?)

Tolkien did object to his novels being published in pirated, unauthorized forms. And when scriptwriters and filmmakers approached him with works in progress, he felt very free to tell them how terribly they’d missed the point and how poorly they’d adapted his ideas. That said, he collected Middle-earth inspired art and music created by others.

Tolkien saw his work as a mythology for England (which implies participation and reinterpretation). And, in a letter to Milton Waldeman probably written in 1951, he spells this out. Tolkien describes the dream he had held “once upon a time” for his Middle-earth fiction, that “body of more or less connected legend”: “I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama…”

J.R.R. Tolkien was still alive in 1969. (There was also fan fiction in the official Tolkien Society newsletters/publications then, too.) The current litigiousness – and unwillingness to allow access for scholars, I should add, which would’ve been antithetical to J.R.R.’s academic mindset – of the Tolkien Estate is mostly due to Christopher.