New Tolkien Book Released 'The Children of Hurin'

Zoolander writes "Christopher Tolkien has completed the last book of J.R.R. Tolkien from notes left from his father." The ultimate question is how much of a quality difference will there be; for instance the difference between Dune and Dune: House Atriedes is a pretty big gap. But in my experience, Christopher Tolkien has always taken a good, cautious approach when it comes to his father's work so here's to hoping.

Aaa...Narn Hin Hurin

[Zarhan]

I always liked the Hurin's Children story, the one in Silmarillion, and also the version with more details in the collection "Unfinished tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth".

Anyway, the story has quite a lot of similarities with the Finnish folklore Kalevala [wikipedia.org], spefically Kullervo's story. Knowing how much Tolkien liked Finnish, some of the stuff might be intentionally taken :)

From the wiki article:

Cantos 31-36: The Kullervo cycle: Untamo kills his brother Kalervo's people except for the wife who begets Kullervo; Untamo gives Kullervo several tasks but he sabotages them all; Kullervo is sold as a slave to Ilmarinen; after being tormented by Ilmarinen's wife, he exacts revenge and the wife gets killed; Kullervo runs away and finds his family unharmed near Lapland; Kullervo seduces a maiden and later finds out she is his sister; Kullervo destroys Untamola (the realm of Untamo) and upon returning home finds everyone killed; Kullervo kills himself.

Well... parallels to Túrin are there.

Re:question about the "other" Tolkien books ...

[Zelos]

The Simarillion deals with the ancient history which is referred to in LOTR - the time of the elves and where they are returning to, who Sauron is, the history of Numenor etc. There are some interesting parts, but it's for hardcore Tolkien fans only.

Re:question about the "other" Tolkien books ...

[FooAtWFU]

The big Tolkein book, outside of the Lord of the Rings, is The Silmarillion. It's basically, like, the Elf-Bible. It's got some funky creation myth from before the dawn of time which occupies the front, and then proceeds to chronicle history thenceforth. It's... very dense, in some places - sort of like the regular Bible, except perhaps more so. The main Lord of the Rings characters also appear in it, because the entire Lord of the Rings saga forms the last chapter of the book. (it's covered in like, what, ten pages?)

There's also some spiffy appendixes, I believe; place-names and things like that.

There are a few other short stories floating around, which others can tell you of better than I. I think there's one or two either involving Tom Bombadil, Farmer Maggot, or both.

Re:question about the "other" Tolkien books ...

[voice_of_all_reason]

Sort of.

The Silmarilion details the events of the First Age of Middle Earth, from the beginning of time to Melkor's defeat (he was Sauron's boss). It also skims over the Second Age -- the rise of fall of the kingdom of Numenor (where Aragorn's ancestors were from) and the making of the Rings of Power through the first 3000 years of the Third Age. It is written in a much different style (often compared to a history book) and was pieces together by Christopher Tolkien from his father's notes (like everything post-LOTR)

After Silmarilion is Unfinished Tales, expounding on parts of Silmarilion. Narn I Hin Hurin - "The Tale of Hurin", Tuor and his coming into the hidden city of Gondolin, and more background on the second and early third ages.

After UT is The Books of Lost Tales (1 and 2), part of The History of Middle Earth, which is 12 (!) books of research on all parts of the story hiterto. Letters, extrapolation, essays. Really deep stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Middle -earth [wikipedia.org] has a complete list.

Re:question about the "other" Tolkien books ...

[grimJester]

To add to the previous posts, the only LOTR characters alive in the times the Silmarillion (mainly) covers are Sauron, Galadriel and Elrond. Gandalf in the form of a maia (demigod, angel, something like that) but no more than a short mention if even that.

Re:question about the "other" Tolkien books ...

[voice_of_all_reason]

Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, while short, does cover some of the hobbit/LOTR timeline (about 5 pages). Also, 4 volumes of HoME focus entirely on the trilogy:

The Return of the Shadow
The Treason of Isengard
The War of the Ring
Sauron Defeated (volumes 6-9)

Re:Same Difference

[SolemnLord]

Tolkien's "main gig" was not editing the OED (hundreds of people edited OED2). It's just well-known because anyone who's dipped their toe into an English class greater than 101 is aware of what the OED is. I'm not disparaging his contributions, I'm just saying that give the man some credit: he was a professor of language and literature at Leeds and Oxford, and a writer to boot. To make things /. compatible, I doubt people would want me typing "Torvalds is that guy who did some work on the Sinclair QL, right?" (I had to check Linus's Wikipedia bio to pull something like that up, FYI)

Re:Excellent!~

[MightyMartian]

You are aware, I hope, that this is actually Tolkien's writing. Christopher Tolkien's role has been as an editor. In only one instant did he actually compose anything for his father's works, and that was The Fall of Doriath for the published Silmarillion, because Tolkien had actually only written one completed version, and that was way back in about 1920, when the mythos was still in a very early stage of evolution, and did not match the post-Lord of the Rings Silmarillion.

Re:Same Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Tolkien worked for the OED for a very brief period of time, just a year or two after he'd finished his own university work. He left to take a teaching position, and the vast majority of his professional career was spent as a professor of philology, mostly at Exeter College in Oxford.

Re:Dull as dish water

[jeffasselin]

Where do people take tripe like this from?

"JRR built up a whole mythos to draw from when writing LoTR."???

He didn't build up the stories to have background for LotR. He built the mythos for his own enjoyment, as a background history for his invented languages, and in hope of giving back to the English a mythology of their own that was "lost" when the Normans invaded the Anglo-Saxons.

The Hobbit was a story he made for his children. He spiced it up a bit with details from his mythos. He published it because it seemed publishable as a good children's story. Lord of the Rings was written as a commercial follow-up to The Hobbit. Didn't really end up like that but...

I am not disputing the fact that the huge amount of previous writing and pre-existing mythos gave LotR a backstory of unparalleled proportions. It ended up being a large part of the attraction of the book, that you feel this world has a whole history behind it that is barely hinted at.

Re:Written to Spec

[Anonymous Coward]

The money he probably got none of, you mean? Aside from possible book sale increases (if he even gets that), he probably saw no money since Saul Zaentz and Tolkien Enterprises hold the rights to film, stage, and merchandising. So, Tolkien's kid probably saw next to nothing.

Re:question about the "other" Tolkien books ...

[MemoryDragon]

Actually the Simarillion is a great book, but you have to read it in conjunction with the various fragment books released, otherwise it becomes to dense.

Re:Same Difference (SPOILER)

[Doc Ruby]

OK, I got into trouble by mentioning that aspect of the story, so I'll mention a

SPOILER WARNING

before proceeding. Hopefully this is enough advance/whitespace.

The story is set 100,000 years in the future. But it's the story of a messiah who can see the future, talk with the past, of all humanity. His life's work is to adjust the path of humanity to avert an impending, otherwise inevitable disaster that would destroy us. To do so, he becomes a god-emperor, total control of all our possible courses of action. And delivers us onto a path that leads to today. Dune time is at least spiral, if not entirely cyclic.

This idea is not explicit in the trilogy. It might be explored in some of the later books, which I stopped reading towards the end of the second trilogy, because they weren't that good. It is explored in the Dune Encyclopedia, in particular by the author of one of the "Paul Muad'Dib" entries. Under whom I studied science fiction literature for my English major. His insight was clear, and apparently popular among other Dune scholars by the mid-1980s. It also provokes the question of whether Muad'Dib's life actually steered humanity onto precisely the course he saw as a terrible vision to be averted, or whether it locked us into a loop or spiral that either locked in the eventual appearance of Muad'Dib, or finally excluded it.

Man that story is a mindblower.

Re:Written to Spec

[meringuoid]

a) Rights the family just gave away gratis, because they love movie projects so much.

Rights the old man sold decades ago for a relative pittance, back when the books were a niche nerdy thing, before the hippies caught onto them and inflicted a generation of kids called things like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild on the world...

Re:Excellent!~

[Grismar]

His wife also added quite a lot to all of his work, though her name is often forgotten.

Good thing you are here to remind us that it's Edith Mary Tolkien (born Bratt) [wikipedia.org].

Oh no, wait, you didn't...

Re:question about the "other" Tolkien books ...

[LurkerXXX]

All my friends really like the LotR movies, and I suppose they're good movies, if you've never read Tolkien's books and/or don't care about Tolkien's world. However I happen to like Tolkien's world, and The Silmarillion, and as a result I don't care for the movies at all.

I think you mean to say, "if you've never read Tolkien's *other* books".

I've read The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings, which are Tolkien's books, and loved the movie. The movie expressed the world fine as it appeared in that set of books.

Re:Same Difference

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, LotR is six volumes in three bindings of a single story. But it's just fine as the familiar trilogy.

Dune was three dependent stories published in three volumes comprising an epic. Then he took the money decades later and screwed it up by extending it into a series.

These distinctions are purely semantic. Unless there's some point about a "trilogy" publication that these books and stories actually defy, other than arbitrary bookbinding conventions.

Word-for-word copying

[Anonymous Coward]

Tolkien even copied the final dialogue [gutenberg.org] between the hero and his sword:

Kullerwoinen, wicked wizard,
Grasps the handle of his broadsword,
Asks the blade this simple question:
"Tell me, O my blade of honor,
Dost thou wish to drink my life-blood,
Drink the blood of Kullerwoinen?"
Thus his trusty sword makes answer,
Well divining his intentions:
Why should I not drink thy life-blood,
Blood of guilty Kullerwoinen,
Since I feast upon the worthy,
Drink the life-blood of the righteous?"

But then, Tolkien never published the story so it's not fair to accuse him of plagiarism.

Re:Excellent!~

[jayemcee]

Here's a quote from Guy Gavriel Kay regarding his work on The Silmarillion in 1975-75. Interesting to know how creative the editing was: GGK: 'Christopher Tolkien's second wife was a Winnipeg woman, and our families knew each other. So when they were visiting her parents on occasion in Winnipeg he and I met -- when I was an undergrad at the University of Manitoba. My usual joke is that we got on about as well as an Oxford don and a University of Manitoba undergraduate are going to get along. When his father died in the winter of '73, he was named literary executor and had the responsibility for putting together The Silmarillion. He invited me to come over in the winter of '74/'75 to work with him on that. I think in the inception the model in his mind was that this would be academic work. The model was the classic senior academic working with the bright grad student who does a lot of the various kinds of legwork and research. The irony is that the Silmarillion editing ended up being at least as much if not significantly more a creative exercise than a scholarly one. The purely scholarly books are the ones that he's been producing subsequently. The difference between those two is a measure of the difference in the nature of what the editing was all about.' http://www.challengingdestiny.com/interviews/kay.h tm [challengingdestiny.com]

Re:Excellent!~

[MightyMartian]

Christopher Tolkien was a philologist at Oxford like his father before him. He had work, he is an old man now.

As to Tolkien's wishes, he made them very clear during his lifetime. He wanted the Silmarillion completed and published. When he knew he could no longer do it, he left it to Christopher Tolkien to complete it.

And I'd love for you to cite where Tolkien despised his greatest fans. Because you know what, he didn't, and spent countless hours answering their letters. You're just talking out of your ass.

Re:Excellent!~

[rhombic]

But it was still incredibly boring (not all of it, of course). It read like a history book.

I don't think it was supposed to read like a history book, as much as an experiment in trying to make a made-up mythology read like the Torah/Bible/Qu'ran. In that respect it succeeds enormously. The writing styles change dramatically between the separate books, to the point where Akalabeth reads like it was written by a totally different author than the Silmarillion proper. Looking at it more in the context of an author playing with the media than as a book written to entertain an audience, I really enjoy it.