The Children of Hurin

[Akash]

Umm...no. I don't get that feeling at all. People say the same thing about Frodo and Sam, but Tolkien never meant for it to be interpreted that way.

Does it really matter how he "meant" it? That's kind of the point of literary interpretation.

[MovieWes]

Second of all, I know there's a talk of Brotherly love all through the books, but I'm getting the strong feeling, especially from a passage in the chapter on Mim the dwarf, that Bereg and Turin are in love (not brotherly, but manly).

Umm...no. I don't get that feeling at all. People say the same thing about Frodo and Sam, but Tolkien never meant for it to be interpreted that way.

[OscarGuy]

Ok, so I bought and am reading this. Is anyone else?

First of all, if you've read the Silmarillion and Lost Tales, you know the stories told in Children of Hurin well.

Second of all, I know there's a talk of Brotherly love all through the books, but I'm getting the strong feeling, especially from a passage in the chapter on Mim the dwarf, that Bereg and Turin are in love (not brotherly, but manly).

[MovieWes]

Tolkien novel published 34 years after his death
Mon Apr 16, 2007 3:37PM EDT

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON (Reuters) - More than 30 years after his death, a "new" book by J.R.R. Tolkien goes on sale on Tuesday which may well be the author's last complete work to be published posthumously.

Tolkien's son and literary executor Christopher, now in his eighties, constructed "The Children of Hurin" from his father's manuscripts, and said he tried to do so "without any editorial invention".

Already told in fragmentary form in "The Silmarillion", which appeared in 1977, the new book is darker than "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", for which Tolkien is best known.

"It's not Harry Potter," said David Brawn, director at Tolkien publisher HarperCollins, a division of News Corp.

The story is set long before "The Lord of the Rings" in a part of Middle-earth that was drowned before Hobbits ever appeared, and tells the tragic tale of Turin and his sister Nienor who are cursed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord.

Brawn said the initial worldwide print run for the new book, featuring illustrations by Oscar-winner Alan Lee, was 500,000.

He told Reuters that Christopher, who does not give interviews, wanted to put the spotlight back on Tolkien's writing after Peter Jackson's hugely popular film trilogy based on "The Lord of the Rings".

The Hobbit" is also likely to be made into a movie.

"As publishers we've been through the most extraordinary time with the films," Brawn said. "They created this parallel strand of publishing and exploitation and once we had gone through that we said, 'How do we get people back to the books?'

"When I became Tolkien's publisher ... one of the first files I came across was a proposal for 'The Children of Hurin', but it got buried."

MEGA-SALES

Brawn estimates that 150 million copies of "The Lord of the Rings" have been sold worldwide, 50 million of those since Jackson's films were released from 2001, plus 50 million copies of other Tolkien works.

He tried to counter any impression that "The Children of Hurin" was an attempt to cash in on the Tolkien legacy, after the posthumous "The Silmarillion" was mockingly dubbed "The Sellamillion".

"One of the things preventing 'The Children of Hurin' being published in recent years is that there will always be a slightly ungracious segment out there saying it is another 'cash-in'," Brawn said.

"I hope people don't see it as a 'cash-in' as that was never the intention when publishing it."

Hollywood studios are eager to buy the film rights of the new book, according to Brawn.

"We all want this first and foremost to enjoy life as a book," said Brawn. "No one's saying never to a film (but) the film rights are reserved by the estate. We want to see what reaction it gets and then let it run its course."

Asked if it was fair to assume "The Children of Hurin" would be the last "new" Tolkien work to be published, he replied:

"I think it is a reasonable assumption. There are other tales in 'Silmarillion' that could stand alone in this manner, but none of them have attached to them this amount of developed text."

[MovieWes]

J.R.R. Tolkien tale, completed by son

BY BRUCE DeSILVA, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Tue Apr 17, 12:30 AM ET

"The Children of Hurin" (Houghton Mifflin, 313 pages, $26, or $75 for a deluxe slipcased edition) — J.R.R. Tolkien: Six thousand years before the Fellowship of the Ring, long before anyone had even seen a Hobbit, the elves and men of Middle-earth quaked at the power of the dark lord Morgoth.

Hunted by easterlings and orcs, they fled to the fastness of Nargothrond and to the deep forests of Brethil and Doriath. Among them, a hero emerged. Strong and courageous he was, but foolhardy and impetuous. His name was Turin, son of Hurin.

His story, released today by Houghton Mifflin, is a publishing event: It is the first new book by the creator of "The Lord of the Rings" in 30 years. The publisher calls it the culmination of an effort to bring to the public the vast body of work J.R.R. Tolkien had left unpublished, and largely unfinished, when he died in 1973.

Tolkien began writing "The Children of Hurin" 99 years ago, abandoning it and taking it up again repeatedly throughout his life. Versions of the tale already have appeared in "The Silmarillion," "Unfinished Tales" and as narrative poems or prose sections of the "History of Middle-earth" series.

But they were truncated and contradictory. Outside of Tolkien scholars and Middle-earth fanatics, few read them.

These works were, after all, largely unreadable — dense, hard to follow histories and legends of Tolkien's vast, imaginary world, crammed with complicated genealogies, unfamiliar geography and hard-to-pronounce names. Readers who took up such books hoping for another Rings saga or charming yarn such as "The Hobbit" abandoned them after a few pages.

"The Children of Hurin" is the book for which these readers have been longing.

It is the fruit of 30 years labor by Christopher Tolkien, the author's son, who has devoted much of his life to editing and publishing the work his father left behind. By meticulously combining and editing the many published and unpublished versions of the tale, he has produced at last a coherent, vivid and readable narrative.

Houghton-Mifflin has treated the work well, hiring Alan Lee, who won an Academy Award for art direction for "The Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King," to create stunning color illustrations.

The story unfolds in a region far to the west of where Frodo and Samwise would later roam, in a land destined to be swallowed by the sea in the cataclysm that would end the first age of Middle-earth. But even then, it was an ancient land, filled with legends and half-remembered histories.

As the tale begins, Morgoth has destroyed a vast army of elves and men and taken one of its leaders, Hurin, prisoner. The dark lord tries to bend Hurin to his will, but the great man defies him. So Morgoth pronounces a curse on Hurin's children, Turin and his sister Nienor.

The first chapter resembles "The Silmarillion," dense and confusing enough to discourage casual readers. But stick with it and the story soon becomes readable and engaging.

Don't expect an uplifting ending like the one to "The Lord of the Rings," however. This is a gloomy tale, Hurin's children doomed to failure by Turin's hubris and, of course, the curse.

The story is told in the archaic style to which Tolkien fans are accustomed, from a man who admired old Anglo-Saxon and Norse sagas. A sample:

"In this way, before the summer had passed, the following of Turin had swelled to a great force, and the power of Angband was thrown back. Word of this came even to Nargothrond, and many there grew restless."

The story is short by the standards of "The Lord of the Ring," covering just 259 pages, the rest of the book consisting of an introduction and appendix in which Christopher Tolkien explains how he went about his work. The details are unlikely to be of interest to the casual reader, but the bottom line is this:

Christopher Tolkien says that in reconciling the various versions of his father's story, he added no new material, save for an occasional transition. The words, he says, are virtually all his father's.

[MovieWes]

J.R.R. Tolkien's "new" Middle-Earth book, "The Children of Hurin", came out today, so I'm going to pick it up after class.

Anyone else planning on reading it?