Estate not all that happy about Lord of the Rings Rework

A Russian reworking of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has been made available as a free download, following a loving translation of the rework from Russian into English by a Tolkien fan. However, Mark Le Fanu, the Society of Authors General Secretary has warned that even non-commercially distributed titles must be licensed by the copyright owner, and in this case that means by the Tolkien estate.

The Guardian reporter Benedicte Page reported that, 'The Last Ring-Bearer, by palaeontologist Kirill Yeskov, retells Tolkien's epic story from the perspective of the region of Mordor, from where Sauron, the Dark Lord, waged war on the free peoples of Middle Earth in the War of the Rings, eventually to be defeated by Gandalf. The 140,000-word novel, published in Russia in 1999, takes as its hook the idea that Tolkien's own text is the romantic legend of the winning party in the War of the Rings, and that a closer examination of it as a historical document reveals an alternate version of the story.

The Last Ring-Bearer is well-known among Russian fantasy fans, but according to translator Yisroel Markov, publishing houses have not been prepared to publish an English translation because of legal concerns. He himself had been "impressed enough by this work to spend a few dozen lunch hours translating it to English", and the novel has now been downloaded from file hosting sites thousands of times, he said.'

In addition, David Brawn who is the estates publisher at HarperCollins stated that: "To my knowledge, none of us have ever been approached to publish this book." Russia has operated outside copyright "for years", Brawn added, though the situation is now changing.

Mark Le Fanu put out a final warning about fiction that is available non-commercially, stating that, "if the book's available in English without a licence from the copyright owner, that's copyright infringement."

Becareful what you download, and importantly, what you write!

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