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.'"
I guess outrageously long copyright terms really do encourage artists to produce more work after they die.
for they have largely been found to be "tricksy", not to mention "false".
I think I speak for all true Tolkien fans when I say; This book will give the conclusive, irrefutable evidence that Balrog's indeed have wings. Namely, there will be one with wings on the cover.
May the Maths Be with you!
We now have the Really Lost, Unfinished Tales of J.R.R. Tolkien
At last, the true secrets of the Bene Gesserit line of Noldor will be revealed! I LOVE pre-quels!
Look, the guy chose to die rather than have it published. I don't see how anyone could send a clearer signal, sheesh.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
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.
This is the first part of a trilogy, actually. Chris Tolkien is co-writing them with Kevin J. Anderson, who is widely regarded as the finest science fiction and fantasy author in the history of either genre.
Disturbance, not tremor, you fucking philistine!
"Dwarfs" is only the plural form of dwarf stars. The plural for dwarf people is "dwarves". Yes, English major.
.. that "hurin" doesn't mean "corn". Cuz that would just be sad.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Now, that's what I'm Tolkien About!
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
wasnt Christopher Tolkien in that pulp fiction movie?
"he hid that book up his ass for 30 years."
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."
He could have engaged in spontaneous human combustion while holding the original manuscript.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
So, the son of a man so brilliant in imagination, his entire lifespan was not enough to finish his own work, cleans up, releases and generally attempts to carry on his father's work. Yeah, really sounds like a greedy asshole.
And quite frankly, I cheer CT's opinions of the movies. I found myself able to stomach Jackson's Fellowship, at least.. I can see the reasoning for Bombadil's disappearance, and I can even stow away sufficient ire to forgive Xenarwen. (It's a movie; one can only have so many minor characters, after all.)
Jackson's The Two Towers and Return of the Horrible, Hackneyed Fantasy Plot were horrible butchery of Tolkien's work. One must understand that in translations from book to film, things will change. There is absolutely no excuse for the wanton and brutal destruction of characters that Jackson is guilty of. Destruction of characters.. it stretches even far worse. Tolkien devoted a paragraph to describing the crown of Gondor, and Jackson couldn't even manage to get that even remotely correct. My god, when one can't translate a simple prop from book to film, how can one manage to translate the important things, such as the story?
CT is no JRR - there was only one JRR, and unless the world is very fortunate indeed, we'll likely never glimpse another so brilliant. Regardless of this, CT does damned fine work. You claim The Silmarillion lacked editting? Why, pray tell, would it need editting? It was quite obvious in line with what JRR wanted - he had taken it to publishers, who refused it effectively on the grounds of 'people are stupid'. I certainly won't argue with the publishers, but The Silmarillion was JRR's true masterpiece. The Hobbit is a mere children's story, and The Lord of the Rings was 'dumbed down' (for lack of better words) to appeal to a broad audience.
If you want to see a son doing horrible things, go talk to Brian Herbert. CT is far removed from the accusations you baselessly spew at him.
So the question is, will there actually be anything new in here that readers haven't seen before, or is it merely pulling bits from various texts and stitching them together in a fresh binding? Sounds like the latter to me...
Considering he is somewhat of a Tolkien scholar and has worked on this 30 years, I doubt that it is just a hodgepodge of works. There probably is a bit of truth to the money grab in that the recent success of the LOTR movies probably encouraged him to finish editing and/or publishers to publish the work.
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.
Most of the books released by Christopher Tolkien since his father's death have been predominantly 'new' material. There are meant to be many, many files full of manuscripts that J. R. Tolkien wrote but never published in book form.
I'm extremely glad to see that some more have been put together into what I'm sure will be another amazing book.
I'm struggling through it right now... my problem is I only really get a chance when I take my son to martial arts and wait for him. I get about two hours a week to read, excepting when I'm on vacation when I might get a little more.
The problem with the Silmarillion is that each character has like 10 names that are used interchangeably, most parts read like the worst, most dry history book you've ever read, there's no contextual maps (my book has two maps... but as time changes, so do the names of cities, towns, and natural landmarks, so you can hardly figure out where anything is taking place unless your mind is a steel trap and you're taking notes (and come on, I'm not being tested on it, I'm not taking notes).
I have to constantly refer to the indices to see what things are and how they're pronounced...
I'm about 4/5 the way through, though, so won't give up this time (last time I tried I was in high school, about 20 years ago).
Stupid sexy Flanders.
We have to wait 30 years for his son to edit....
emt 377 emt 4
"...the CG was obvious..."
As opposed to all those movies starring REAL balrogs and cave trolls?
Blog -
"Wow, that's great," I thought, as I read the title of the article. Then I made the mistake of clicking on "Read more..."
:)
Man are you lot ever a bunch of depressed, jaded people. Almost every single comment has been attacking Mr. Tolkien for doing homage to his father's work. How sad...
(Please, no "You must be new here" comments..
CJRT is "somewhat of a Tolkien scholar". The Pope is "a well-known Catholic". The Sun is "a nearby star". Michael Moore "is not entirely pleased with the Bush administration". Slashdot "occasionally posts dupes"....
And the brethren went away edified.
Tolkien was a notorious procrastinator, leaving pieces of his work alone for 20 or 30 years at a time before picking it back up.
JRR specifically left his son Christopher in charge of his estate after his death to continue, finish, and document his lifetime's work. The Silmarillion was an early compilation, based on his father's outlines, of a variety of tales -- the Tale of Hurin is mentioned as one of those texts. IIRC, JRR specifically tasked his son with completing the Silmarillion.
Christopher Tolkien has been exceedingly honest in his attempts, documenting divergences and inconsistencies with his father's intentions, and getting help (Guy Kay) when possible. He also doesn't present it as his own work, its usually "JRR Tolkien, edited by Christopher" etc. The Tale of Hurin will clearly be presented as a 'best effort' recovery from notes and incomplete texts.
Given the choice of a) no material, or b) Christopher's best interpretation of the material, I'll take 'b' every time. If you want to see butchered work after an author's demise, look to Robert E Howard's Conan stories, or the latest 'additions' to the Dune series.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I don't really see any easy answer either way, actually.
This dilemma happens to every popular artist after they die. (Obviously, if they're not popular, there won't be any demand anyway and no dilemma) Often they didn't publish the stuff because it they didn't consider it 'done', or they didn't feel it was 'good enough'. Many (most?) great artists have very high standards in that respect.
The problem is that while those concerns may have meant a lot to the artist, they mean nothing now. If people are still interested long after their death, then their reputation is beyond tainting. There is absolutely nothing Chris Tolkien could release, no matter how bad, that would taint J.R.R.'s reputation, since everyone will know that the man himself considered it to be sub-par. Nobody is going to judge him by it.
Now, to take another example: Franz Kafka. He published little during his life, and wanted all his writings destroyed after his death, at which time he was virtually unknown. Obviously that didn't happen, since he's now regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest writers.
His friend Max Brod was the one who published the material. Who is prepared to condemn him? I'm not.
I guess the ethic that I'm suggesting is this: You can't blindly obey someone's wishes, even their last wishes, without considering the motives. There are a lot of possible ones for wanting something to go unpublished. The artist might've considered it too personal, and I think that might be grounds for obeying. But if the motive was a concern the work wasn't up-to-standard, then you might be able to disregard it.
In Kafka's case, I think it suffices to say that the guy had enough self-loathing and self-destructive emotions to fill a Goth club several times over.
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).
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.
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.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Better buy it now. I hear in the Extended Version, the Mouth of Sauron shoots first.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
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.)
While I would love to believe that this is not a ploy for more money, I find it hard to swallow.
Christopher Tolkien is 82 years old-- do you really think he's plotting to make millions?
Tolkien's children were actually involved with many of the Tolkien's legendarium. One of my copies of the LotR contains an essay by Tolkien where he talked about his family. Tolkien would discuss ideas with his children, let them read early drafts, they would point out inconstancies... I don't think Tolkien did this for all off the works, but this tradition started young-- The Hobbit was originally written specifically for the Tolkien children.
Christoper Tolkien probably understands the Tolkien legendarium more then anyone in the world-- and probably read the notes for "The Children of Hurin" 50 years ago.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.