The Lost Tolkien Novel

There is a lost work of Tolkien called The Children of Húrin, cobbled together by Christopher Tolkien, son of J.R.R., out of manuscripts left behind by his dad. As it happens, it's got something for both of the Tolkien tribes.

The Children of Húrin takes the reader back to a time long before The Lord of the Rings, in an area of Middle Earth that was to be drowned before ever Hobbits appeared, and when the great enemy was still the fallen Vala, Morgoth, and Sauron only his lieutenant. This heroic romance is the tale of the Man, Húrin, who dared to defy Morgoth's force of evil, and his family's tragic destiny, as it follows his son Túrin Turambar's travails through the lost world of Beleriand.

The hero of Children of Húri is Túrin (son of Húrin), an aristocratic human who has the good fortune to be raised and trained up by the elves into a bad-ass swordsman. Túrin is good-hearted but flawed: he's irascible, quick to anger and quick to act on his anger — he has a bad habit of killing people before he quite realizes what he's doing (though he's always remorseful afterwards).

The villain of Children of Húri is the cowardly and spiteful Morgoth, who's your basic evil incarnate. Tolkien's baddies rarely have much in the way of personality, and Morgoth spends most of his time squatting in his dark fortress of Angband, casting a shadow over the land and generally making war on all that is just and beautiful. He leaves most of the actual scrapping to his lieutenants, most notably Glaurung, a wingless, wormy, and rather sarcastic dragon.

Children of Húri is written in Tolkien's full-on high heroic style, which is light on the characterization and sometimes hilariously dorky. The novel as a short work, never achieves the towering operatic grandeur of the trilogy, but it's a huge pleasure to be back in Middle Earth, and to see people and places that Tolkien only alludes to glancingly elsewhere.

There's plenty of lore for the scholars and superfans, and there's no shortage of elves and dwarves and mighty smiting for the casual fan.

Just heed this warning: The Children of Húrin is a darker, bitterer tale than we're used to seeing from Tolkien. Its hero is proud and imperfect and willful more Boromir than Frodo — and his story is full of accidents and disasters, poisoned barbs and ruinous betrayals and grievous misunderstandings. Which makes sense: after all, if the good guys had beaten the forces of darkness in the First Age, they wouldn't have been stuck with Sauron in the Third.

Tue, Apr 23 2007

Adam says:

The Children of Hurin is a wonderful story for any Tolkien fan, not just the hardcore Tolkienites. There is a much different feel to The Children of Hurin than to Tolkien's more well-known The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It is darker, more distanced in a way, and without the more modernistic hobbits to "mediate" between the reader and the heroic culture. But its also a damn good read, very dark and "mythological" in feel. We feel the doom of its hero hovering over the pages. More info at: http://www.tolkien-online.com/the-children-of-hurin.html

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