Posts Tagged “mashup”

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

— John Rogers

When last we spoke, I had made a shocking scholarly discovery and revealed that Star Wars had been plagiarized from a lost play by William Shakespeare. Well, my literary research continues. As I was leafing through forgotten volumes in a dusty library, I came across the only copy of a lost manuscript. Written in 1944, it predates J.R.R. Tolkien’s series of novels by a decade.

And so it is clear that Ayn Rand, Objectivist philosopher and author of Atlas Shrugged, wrote the first draft of the most beloved fantasy series of all time. I present excerpts from her version of this classic:

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THE LORD OF THE RINGS

by Ayn Rand

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Page 1:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was a great stir in Hobbiton. Friends and relations gathered to pay tribute to this brave individualist. Bilbo was rich and therefore a good person, having gained wealth from a mysterious journey many years before. But the party-goers’ thoughts were occupied with a different mystery, one that had nothing to do with the source of Bilbo’s wealth. There was another question on the lips of the Tooks, the Sackville-Bagginses, the Brandybucks. And that question was this—

“WHO IS SAURON BARAD-DÛR?”

Read the rest of the epic fantasy, where wizards can strike down orcs and letting the poor die is moral. »