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.'"

Comments

expected criticism

[acvh]

and yes, Chris Tolkien has fed off the teat of his late father's creativity for a long time now. still, the literary joy of reading The Silmarillion, The Narn i Hin Hurun, The Lay of Leithian, and more, far outweighs whatever motives young Tolkien may have in editing and publishing these many works.

Prof. Tolkien, while living, tried and failed to publish the Silmarillion. The other works were never even close to publishable. yet he often talked and wrote of these tales having a life of their own, and I don't think he would object to their being shared with millions of fans.

I, for one, am grateful for the opportunity to have read of the First and Second ages of Tolkien's world.

Re:expected criticism

[professorfalcon]

Nicomachus published his father's (Aristotle's) notes into a book, Nicomachean Ethics, that is part of the foundation of the western world.

Tearing arms off and beating people to death it?

[sir_montag]

Personally, any epic tale that has the main character tearing someone's arm off and beating them to death with it has got some serious literary merit in my book!

The story really does have a lot going for it, once you get past the language barrier - Old English really does read a lot more like German than modern English. It was one of the coolest books I'd ever read - full of adventure with tons of gruesome details (like the whole 'tearing someone's arm off and beating them to death with it' bit) that you'd never seen in any other piece of classical literature aside from Dante's Inferno.

The end kind of sucked, as I recall, but as far as adventure and ass-kicking go, Beowulf was one of the best, if not *the* best.

Re:Greedy Children

[DrJimbo]

I've only read the Silmarilion, ... However sometime after that, the seemingly endless stream of variant versions of the same stories seems to have crossed over the line of honouring his legacy to ruthlessly exploiting, and diluting, it.

I realize this is Slashdot and we have a glorious history here of commenting on articles without reading them but I must ask you how you can reach the conclusion that the volumes that followed the Silmarillion were exploitative and a dilution of the earlier works when you haven't even read them?

I've read most, but not all, of the volumes of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle Earth and I've enjoyed them greatly. I felt no hint of exploitation or dilution. I'm very grateful to Christopher for taking the time and effort (and flack) to make all these parts of his father's work available to the rest of us.

If you are interested in exploring these other works, you might want to start with "Unfinished Tales" which provides a nice bridge between what happened in the Lord of the Rings and the larger world of the Silmarillion.