I have written (too?) much about the enduring appeal of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. But Joel Gehrke’s profile for the Washington Examiner of Oleh Feschowetz, founder of Astrolabe Publishing, is worthy of mention here. Astrolabe is a Ukrainian imprint that has published both the complete works of Tolkien in Ukrainian and released “a series of manuals on military tactics and civilian survival in a war zone.”
Gehrke’s profile details how Feschowetz, once a professor at Ivan Franko National University, is on a “mission to return Ukraine to the Western civilization.” In the wake of Russia’s designs on Ukraine, culminating in its recent invasion, Feschowetz’s effort has taken on a wartime urgency. Tolkien is not the only author Astrolabe has published in Ukrainian: There’s also Dante, Chaucer, Catallus, and more.
But Tolkien’s work has a special resonance in Ukrainian’s present predicament, as an underdog nation resists a malevolent would-be conqueror. Ukrainians have apparently begun caricaturing invading Russian soldiers as “orcs.” And in an unsettling development, there is some evidence that aspects of Russian culture have embraced this caricature:
Feschowetz pointed to alternative Tolkien fan-fiction from Russian sources, such as Kirill Eskov’s The Last Ringbearer and Maxim Kalashnikov’s The Wrath of the Orc, to argue that Russian forces have embraced the term in defiance of what they regard as a pro-Western story.
(The Last Ringbearer is an unauthorized abomination that rewrites The Lord of the Rings as though the story we know is fake, and actually Sauron and the Nazgul were the good guys, fighting to bring technology and civilization to a Middle-earth still dominated by a mysticism-ridden tyranny enforced by elves and wizards. I was not able to find out what The Wrath of the Orc is about.)
Herewith the standard caveat that Tolkien did not intend his work to be so easily allegorized. (He claimed to “dislike allegory in all its manifestations,” preferring “history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.”) But still, one can appreciate Feschowetz’s efforts, and how Ukrainians are drawing from them.