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New Tolkien Story To be Published
vingilot writes "CNN reports that Christopher Tolkien has edited and will release a new book by his father. From the article: 'Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on "The Children of Hurin," an epic tale his father began in 1918 and later abandoned. Excerpts of "The Children of Hurin," which includes the elves and dwarfs of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and other works, have been published before.'"
"Dwarfs" is only the plural form of dwarf stars. The plural for dwarf people is "dwarves". Yes, English major.
Now his greedy kid is capitalizing on his fathers name just to make some cash and hurt Tolkein's reputation by publishing a book not up to his usual quality.
Uh, we're not talking about a snot-nosed punk trying to make a quick buck. The guy's eighty years old and has dedicated much of his life to his father's literary legacy, trying to make sense of his notes and half-finished stories (see the Silmarillion.) Whether his efforts have literary merit is one thing-- I personally think a dead author's notes and partial works should be buried with him-- but he's hardly trying to "make some cash."
Wormtalk
And here's what he says:
He mentions several previously published versions of the tale and points out: "From the press release, it seems as if these variants will be stitched into a coherent whole in the same the way that Christopher Tolkien brought together disparate texts to create the 1977 The Silmarillion."
Prof. Drout is also the editor of The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, which due out this October. It's a scholarly reference, which must explain the $199.95 price tag on Amazon. (Maybe you can get your public or school library to get a copy.) Since I contributed several articles, I'm hoping all contributors get free copies.
--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien (The only book-length, day-by-day chronology of LOTR.)
If that were the case here, I would agree. I would also agree if this were just any person doing the editing.
However, that's not the case. It isn't that JRRT didn't want these books finished - indeed he specifically etrusted his son with doing just that - he just didn't manage to get it done before he died. Many an author has that problem, and JRRT had it in spades. The man was a professor of the highest calibre, and a perfectionist to boot; he left nearly unimaginable amounts of work unfinished. There is far more than the aging CJRT will ever be able to bring to publishable form, especially given that his standards seem to be, if anything, even more conservative than his father's.
As others have noted, it was these works, the histories of the first and second ages of Middle Earth, that were JRRT's life's work. It was these works which he truly longed to bring to finished form. "The Hobbit," and TLOTR were mere side stories, writen at the behest of publishers, and never meant to be the main story. "The Silmarilion" was the main story, and the publication of the other works is in part an attempt by CJRT to flesh out that story; which, sadly, was completed in more of a rush than might have been. If it had been known in the early '70s that anyone would still care about J.R.R. Tolkien in 30 years time, I think the finished "Silmarilion" would have been better for it.
Besides, this isn't some hack, pulp-paperback writer writing new stories to milk a popular series, this is the world's foremost scholar on JRRT - a man with a personal relationship to the author which allowed him to see much of the story as it developed - painstakingly piecing together decades of manuscripts and notes into some semblence of coherence. If anyone, ever, was qualified to finish the work of another, it would be Chistopher Tolkien being qualifed to finish his father's work.
Only one chapter of the Silmarillion had to be penned outright by Christopher Tolkien, and it is the shortest one.