Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
No, but it does give some indication of motive. If I'm looking to make a quick buck, I sure don't spend 30 years turning it into a rather slow buck.
It's almost like you're saying Chris Tolkien is only pimping incomplete scraps of his fathers work to make a cheap buck for himself. If that were true, you'd expect him to have written a bunch more books with "Tolkien" in really big print on the back, in an attempt to fool the ignorant into buying what amounts to extremely amaturish fanfict.
(Special place in hell reserved for Chris Tolkien and Frank Herbert Jr.)
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Actually, he added on to the joke by providing a more concrete example that a specific group of people could relate to, therefore making it funny!
Don't be an asshat.
There are a lots of people here bashing the Tolkien works that were released after J.R.R death. Have any of you actually looked any of these books? Given that most of these books are very dense and very scholarly works, it's highly doubtful that Christopher Tolkien edited them just to make a quick buck. The intended audience for these books was just too small for that.
When J.R.R died, he left literally thousands of pages of unpublished pages, many that he had been working on for decades. It would have been a real shame for this stuff to vanish forever. And Christopher Tolkien's contribution is usually just editing. He is generally very careful to separate his father's words from his commentary (usually with a different font).
I agree 100% as far as Frank Herbert Jr. There should be a special space in hell reserved for people like him. For people who shit on everything their fathers built.
Also, It is also quite obvious that Herbert Jr has written his books. They are written using the current modern American literature style which is beaten into kids in college. I still remember by own brush up with this experience with horror 15+ years later. It is the same style as used by Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson and most of the modern American Sci Fi/Fantasy writers. There are lots of repeats and a single idea is reiterated at least 3-4 times to ensure that the dumb reader gets it. The vocabulary is a fraction of the vocabulary of most of the older generation like Herbert Sr, Zelazny, Le Guin, Bradbury (in fact from the old generation - everybody but Azimov). The overall lexical construction is quite primitive as well. It is quite obvious who wrote these books.
As far as Chris Tolkien the situation is not so straightforward. He published at least one clearly and purely J.R.R. Tolkien Book - the Silmarilion. That was J.R.R. Tolkien all the way and if not for Chris Tolkien, it would have failed to see the light of day (it was published postmortem). The Unifinished Tales seem to be what junior sells them for - drafts, notes and unfinished tales. Looking at the style and vocabulary they also seem to be a J.R.R. Tolkien work, just quite what it says on the tin - unfinished.
I have no idea about this new book, but I hope that he does not join Hurbert junior in that circle of hell. He has done not that bad so far. He has shown some his dad's dirty laundry (stuff j.r.r. never intended to be published) but he has not shit on his grave just yet (or I missed that one in the bookshop).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/