Hi! Hope you had a good weekend! Over the weekend, I learned that today (September 22) is “Hobbit Day,” as it’s Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, so I’m sharing a Lord of the Rings story today.

A quick programming note: I won’t be sending an email tomorrow or Wednesday; I’m taking it off for the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. שנה טובה to those who celebrate! — Dan

If you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings or watched the movie adaptations, you’re missing out — the story is fantastic and the movies are among the best ever made. Today’s Now I Know may contain some spoilers, but as the last of the three books, The Return of the King, has been out since 1955, you’ve had plenty of time to become familiar with the story.

Unless you were in the Soviet Union. And that’s where the world of the hobbits and the One Ring gets a little tricky. And why in some adaptations, Sauron isn’t all that bad.

More an 150 millions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy books have sold since they were first published. Fans of the saga follow Frodo Baggins, a hobbit, as he carries a ring across the lands of Middle-earth in a seemingly doomed effort to destroy it. The ring was created by an evil, god-like creature named Sauron, and Sauron’s life force is tied to the ring; as long as the ring exists, Sauron is a threat to conquer all of Middle-earth. It’s a classic tale of good versus evil, with the good guys — hobbits, elves, dwarves, humans, and a wizard — teaming up to stop darkness from spreading everywhere.

And that’s probably why, if you were living in the Soviet Union, you couldn’t read the story. While not formally banned by the government, the Soviets saw The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for Western idealism triumphing over the so-called evil behind the Iron Curtain. Few English novels were imported into the USSR or translated into Russian in general, and The Lord of the Rings was anything but an exception. It wasn’t until after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, that J.R.R. Tolkien’s works were widely translated and published in Russian. But once they were, both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit catapulted Tolkien onto the list of the most often read authors in Russia.

But then, something strange happened — something Tolkien did not intend. The story fell into the hands of a strange post-Soviet counterculture that had a fondness for alternate histories. And the story became something new — and something you won’t often find in English. It became a story about hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men, oppressing the not-so-evil Sauron and his nation of Mordor.

History books in the Soviet Union were typically filled with propaganda and misinformation, recounting world events in a way that emphasized Soviet greatness and castigating the West as evil imperialists. After the fall of the USSR, Russians were able to access history books written by outsiders, and learned that the old adage “history is written by the victors” can be very true. In the 1990s, as Russians became aware of this, the literary community there became fond of “alternate history,” a genre of writing where the author takes the position of the “other” side of the story and retells the same tale from that point of view. (If you’re interested in a deep dive on this, here’s a study from 2012 on the phenomenon.) As The Lord of the Rings became increasingly popular in the 1990s, it received this same treatment. And in 1999, a Russian paleontologist named Kirill Yeskov wrote The Last Ringbearer, a version of The Lord of the Rings from the perspective of Sauron. Here’s a brief summary, via Salon:

The story was “wildly popular” in Russia, according to the New Yorker, but if you want to read it in the United States, it’s going to be a chore. As the above-linked Salon article notes, “translations of the book have also appeared in other European nations, but fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English.” In 2010, a Russian speaker named Yisroel Markov (with Yeskov’s help and approval) shared his translation of the story on his LiveJournal site. The links there are adead but it’s not all that hard to find a copy. if you’re truly interested, but as it hasn’t been given a proper editing by a formal translation service, it’s often described as clunky and hard to read. (If you can get past that, though, it’s generally praised as a great story.)

And if you’re waiting for the movie? Good luck — one does not simply adapt unauthorized novels into films without permission from the Tolkien estate.

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Today’s Bonus fact: Tolkien created many fictional languages as part of his Middle-earth worldbuilding, including the “Black Speech,” the language used in Mordor and inscribed on the One Ring. In the stories, he describes the language as evil and not to be spoken — and in real life, he took that to heart. Per Wikipedia’s editors, “from a fan, Tolkien received a goblet with the Ring inscription on it in Black Speech. Because the Black Speech in general is an accursed language, and the Ring inscription in particular is a vile spell, Tolkien never drank out of the goblet, and used it only as an ashtray.”

Extra bonus!: If you Google “the one ring,” the search engine suggests that you may have misspelled your query — it asks, “Did you mean: my precioussss”

From the Archives: Why We Give 21-Gun Salutes: This really isn’t about The Lord of the Rings, but I make a passing reference to the movies, and I don’t have anything better to link to!

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And thanks! — Dan