How Soviet artists evaded censors to create their own visions of Tolkien.

Frodo stands before the Cracks of Doom in Sergei Iukhimov’s cover illustration for Volume I of Vlastelin Kolec, Natalya Grigor’eva and Vladimir Grushetskij’s two volume 1993 translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

It has been 20 years since the premiere of film director Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring. As Amazon approaches completion of principal photography on season one of their $465 million TV reimagining of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Second Age, a continuation of the epic neo-medieval visuals that have become synonymous with Middle-earth appears inevitable.

However, the emergence in April of Leningrad TV’s Khraniteli (“Keepers”), a “lost” two-part 1991 Soviet television retelling of Volume I of The Lord of the Rings, has provided Western and young Russian Tolkien fans alike with brief but colorful insight into an alternative vision of the tale. This delightfully lo-fi production, with its earworm opening song, rudimentary special effects, and cobbled together costumes, has been labeled by some as symptomatic of a country on the brink of collapse. But, in fact, Khraniteli represents a rich sub-culture of resourcefulness and creativity in the face of oppression: the world of Soviet Tolkien.