Everything that failed in Ill Met by Moonlight's fan-ficcery of Shakespeare is done gloriously well here. Alas, the better work is unlikely ever to see print, let alone hardback, because it uses characters from The Lord of the Rings.
Well, and also it's naughty, naughty, naughty; Frodo Hill is outright slash. But tasteful! for which it deserves great commendation.
Now, the obvious charm of the work is its consistent writing style:
But to my story -- You must know, that at the time when Gondor and all the lands of Men were under Seige by the Creatures of the Dark Lord, that our fair Country of Ithilien was then nothing like it is now in these happier Days. Now the blessings of Peace smile upon the Land; then the God of War strode angry across it; now Ithilien is a Garden; then it was a Wilderness; now it basks in the Light of Gondor; then it lay in the shadow of Mordor. Nay, Ithilien itself had been long abandon'd by all decent Folk, and was the abode of foul Wraiths and of the wretched Things who served them. No Men would have walked those haunted Woods were it not for the Courage of the soldiery of Gondor. Led by the young Captain Faramir, their Daring knew no Bounds, for in frequent Raids they harried the Enemy even to the very Gates of the City of the Wraiths.
Yet even the greatest Courage will falter with constant and unvarying Exercise; and no Soldier, however bold his Spirit, will continue in the same happy Condition without occasional Rest. And so it was that Captain Faramir and his men would oft resort to the city of Osgiliath and to such Recreations as that Place could afford.
Setting Fanny Hill, q.v., in Osgiliath is an act of minor but undeniable genius. Providing Tolkien's characters with sex-lives as we understand them is clearly not at all a stretch for the modern imagination; plenty of people have more trouble imagining a world without modern sex-lives. But that wasn't all that was missing from ; he had written something like an England without London, even a Europe without cities. I remember hardly any makers and traders; Gondor certainly seemed to me like an institutional city, all government and ceremony. This is no fault in Tolkien; he wasn't writing realism.
Gondor would have to have an economy if it was realistic, but the trades need not have been in the (confined and expensive) City itself. If Osgiliath was the Other Bank for Other Ranks, Osgiliath had the corner shops and tanneries and Times Square and all; so also brothels; so Fanny Hill.
If this sounds amusing, but you don't like explicit sex scenes, I have doublechecked that the first webpage/chapter is strongly suggestive but not explicit. The whole has great fun with suggestiveness, including the extended tease in which Letter the Fifth is followed by Letter the Fifth-and-a-Half, then Letter the Fifth-and-Three-Quarters; finally Letter the Sixth; and even the Sixth and climactic appears in a PG version directly, and a NC-17 version only if you ask. (I think the PG version is better.)
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