Banewreaker & Godslayer - Jacqueline Carey
These two books were published 2004 & 2005 but I've only just read them. They are clearly reacting to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (which is why Pp recommended them to me).
He suggested them as 'Lord of the Rings from the other side' but I don't think that's quite correct, because the narrative doesn't really support the Dark Lord whose name begins with S (Satoris, not Sauron, though clearly it was supposed to suggest Sauron) as being In the Right Really. The Elves-and-Humans faction didn't really appear to be the bad guys. In fact, the more the story went on, the more I was thinking, OK, Satoris started this whole thing with a justifiable grievance, but he's not exactly trying to make things better, is he? He could try initiating peace and friendship! It's an option untried! The Fjelltroll are lovely, but it's reasonable for that to be not obvious to people who are 1/4 their size and without tusks!
I think I was probably supposed to find Tanaros Blacksword, an immortal general, to be a more sympathetic character than I did. Tanaros killed his wife and his boss for sleeping together, then went over to Satoris's cause to spend a thousand years brooding on it. Perhaps I find jealousy a particularly unlovely vice, but honestly I was rooting for the wife/boss pairing within about five minutes of learning about them.
Honestly, Tanaros's problems would have entirely gone away if he had just gone for the threesome. Or taken up a hobby other than murder and stopped thinking about other people as his possessions. That would also have worked.
Cerelinde, the Celebrian-and-Arwen analogue, clearly feels some sympathy for Tanaros, and... I could see where she was coming from, in the sense that 'all people are human'. His tiredness and desire to just get the job (of being Leader of the Forces of Darkness) done was sympathetic, I suppose, but I was looking sideways at him even before the 'just following orders' massacre.
The Sauron-archetype, Satoris, who Carey makes into a wounded sex-god of the Fisher King type, seemed intriguing: I liked the backstory about him being betrayed, wounded, and his friendship with the dragons. But then he retreated into a giant mountain-fortress, and stopped doing anything other than being an archetype. And we never got his Valar-sibling-enemies perspective, and I was really hoping we would.
The water-bearer Dani, his uncle Thulu and the Yarru people made intriguing and likeable substitutes for Hobbits.
I absolutely loved the not-orc Fjelltroll. They were brilliant. The idea of a people who are sapient but not problem-solvers, creative, but without a lust for power, friendly and fiercely loyal - and making them the soldiers of evil was really interesting. They were like enormous, deadly, talking dogs. And I was intrigued by their creator, Neheris-of-the-Leaping-Waters. Wish we'd got to meet her.
It was a story that kept me reading with enthusiasm, and I think a lot of it will stay with me, even if I found the ending rather unsatisfying, and the writing was sometimes a tiny bit more purple than it really needed to be (you could do a nice drinking game just with the word 'aught'. ) A solid 4/5.