[1][2] Mordor is home to an "amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic", posing a threat to the war-mongering faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude is described by Saruman as "crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem") and the Elves.

[1] Macy Halford, in The New Yorker, writes that The Last Ringbearer retells The Lord of the Rings "from the perspective of the bad guys, written by a Russian paleontologist in the late nineties and wildly popular in Russia".

[4][5] ...that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.

Haladdin is chosen as he is a rare individual in whom there is absolutely no magic and has a tendency to behave irrationally, for example joining the Mordorian army as a medic to impress his girlfriend and almost dying as a result, instead of putting his talents to better use at home in the university.

[2] The American journalist Laura Miller praises The Last Ringbearer in Salon as "a well-written, energetic adventure yarn that offers an intriguing gloss on what some critics have described as the overly simplistic morality of Tolkien's masterpiece.

In her view, there are "still some rough edges", such as the mix of present and past tenses at the start, and what she calls the "(classically Russian) habit" of adding sections of political or military history to the narrative.

[1] Benedicte Page, writing in The Guardian, states that the book is well-known to fans in Russia, and that it is based on "the idea that Tolkien's own text is the romantic legend of the winning party in the War of the Rings, and that a closer examination of it as a historical document reveals an alternate version of the story.

"[2] Terri Schwartz, writing on MTV, describes the book's take, with a warmongering Gandalf who seeks only to "crush the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor", while a forward-thinking Sauron passes a "universal literacy law", as "certainly a different take on the story, to say the least.

"[12] Journalist Luka Ivan Jukic asserted that Yeskov attempted to refute what he perceived as the "simplistic Western notion of the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil".

[13] The scholar of English literature Catherine Coker describes the novel as "transparent revisionism" and "a Russian parody" which repurposes the characters' ideologies "so that the heroic epic becomes a critique of totalitarianism".

[14] Mark Wolf, a scholar of video gaming and imaginary worlds, calls the work a paraquel, a narrative that runs at the same time as the original story, with a different perspective.

[15] The independent scholar of culture and comparative literature Greg Clinton, noting that Yeskov depicts Sauron and his industrial realm of Mordor as "not 'evil', but ... working to modernize production", comments that the book sees something that he believes Tolkien missed, namely that destroying technology in favour of nature as The Lord of the Rings suggests would itself be "a totalitarian move".

"[17][18] Eliot Borenstein comments that Eskov's book says little about real-world politics, despite possible allusions to a "final solution", but that it does support an idea from Russian science fiction, namely that if "American exceptionalis[ts]" like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush want Russia to be their "evil empire", then fine, "but we'll do it with an irony and pride that you'll never entirely comprehend.