protect himself with his plate – if it holds, you’ll get your money, if it doesn’t, you won’t need it. Unsurprisingly, that was the end of the project. I have no idea whether this actually happened, but those who know the CEO of Angmar Aerospace well insist that the joke would be quite in his taste – not for naught does he trace his lineage from the Witch-king.
The story of inoceramium that supposedly served to make the rings of the Nazgul is much simpler, and the reason people don’t often see it is obvious. This metal of the platinum group is not just extremely rare in Arda’s crust (its clark is 4 x 108; compare gold at 5 x 1077 or iridium at 1 x 107) – unlike the other platinoids it is never found scattered, but only in large nuggets. You can figure out the probability of finding one such yourself. Actually, not too long ago a nugget weighing a fantastic 87 ounces had been found in Kigvali mines in South Harad; the headline in the local paper was
But enough about metals.
Alviss never married. She dwelt in self-imposed isolation in her Jasper Street mansion, dedicating her life to raising the son she had at the appropriate time after those events. This boy grew up to be none other than Commodore Amengo – the one whose voyages are universally considered to have ushered in the era of great discoveries. The Commodore had left behind the maps of the shore of a new continent that was to bear his name, wonderful (in a literary sense) travel notes, and a long string of broken hearts – none of which brought him any family happiness. Aside from the great western continent (which was long believed to be the legendary Far West, with resultant attempts to discern Elvish features in its aborigines), Amengo’s list of discoveries includes a small tropical archipelago which he had deservedly named Paradise. The name had been replaced later by the Holy Church (the local girls looked like the living, breathing
By my lights the famous seafarer had immortalized his parents’ names in the best possible way. Nevertheless, the love story of the Umbarian courtesan and the Gondorian aristocrat had been a favorite topic of writers ever since. For some reason these people either turn the protagonists into disembodied romantic ghosts or reduce everything to primitive erotica. Alas, the recent Amengian screen version –
Almandin and Jacuzzi were hanged in the courtyard of the Ar-Horan prison on one of the exhaustingly hot August nights of 3019; Flag Captain Makarioni and seven other officers that had participated in ‘Admiral Carnero’s mutiny’ were executed along with them. This was the
Of course, the people viewed Carnero’s co-conspirators (the admiral avoided court-martial by getting himself killed at Pelargir) as heroes who had saved their Motherland from a foreign invasion, but the fact remained that they had gone against orders. The Republic’s Prosecutor General Almaran had a simple solution to this ethical dilemma: “Winners are always right, you say? Like hell! Either law exists and is the same for everybody, or there’s no law at all.” The pathos of his prosecutor’s speech (quoted in whole or in part in every modern law textbook) can be summed up exhaustively by its concluding statement: “Let the world perish but justice be done!” Be that as it may, the executed officials of the Umbarian secret service should have known that motherland’s gratitude usually takes strange forms… Sonya never found out about Haladdin’s mission (as we already know, this had been his special concern) and remained certain that he and Kumai had perished at the Field of Pelennor. But time is merciful, so once those wounds had healed she fulfilled her life’s destiny by becoming a loving wife and wonderful mother, having married a worthy man whose name is absolutely irrelevant to our story.
In my opinion, royal personages are of much lesser interest, since their fates are well-known. For those too lazy to pick up a book or at least review their sixth-grade history textbook, let me remind you that Aragorn’s reign was one of the most magnificent in Middle Earth history and is one of the watershed events separating the Middle Ages (the Third Age) from modernity. The usurper did not try to win the love of the Gondorian aristocracy (such a project would have been dead on arrival), instead betting correctly on the third estate, which cared for things like tax rates and safety of trade routes, rather than dynastic rights and other such phantoms. Since His Majesty had effectively burned all bridges with the aristocracy, paradoxically this gave him freedom to implement radical agrarian reform, drastically curtailing the rights of landlords in favor of free farmers. These factors were the basis for the famous ‘Gondorian economic miracle’ and the colonial expansion that followed, while the representative legislative bodies Aragorn had created to counterweight the aristocracy have survived to our day almost unchanged, earning the Reunited Kingdom its well- deserved title of Middle Earth’s oldest democracy.
It is common knowledge that the king advanced and supported science, craftsmanship, and sea-faring ventures, appointed talented men to important state positions without regard to their lineage, and was sincerely loved by his subjects. The only dark stain on Elessar Elfstone’s reputation is the early period of his reign, when his Secret Guard (admittedly a really scary outfit) had to protect the throne from the feudal lords with an iron hand; actually, most of today’s experts believe that the scale of terror had been greatly magnified by the nobility’s historians. Aragorn’s famously beautiful wife Arwen (Elven-born, according to legend) played no role in matters of state and only imparted a certain mysterious luster to his court. They had no children, so the Elfstone dynasty ended with its founder, with the throne reverting to the Prince of Ithilien – in other words, things went back to the way they were.
It is rather hard to analyze the reign of the first Princes of Ithilien, Faramir and Eowyn, in political or economical terms – it appears that they had neither politics nor economics over there, but only a never-ending romantic ballad. Nearly all the contemporary poets and painters must have contributed to the creation of the captivating image of the Fairy of the
