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New Tolkien Book Released 'The Children of Hurin'
Zoolander writes "Christopher Tolkien has completed the last book of J.R.R. Tolkien from notes left from his father." The ultimate question is how much of a quality difference will there be; for instance the difference between Dune and Dune: House Atriedes is a pretty big gap. But in my experience, Christopher Tolkien has always taken a good, cautious approach when it comes to his father's work so here's to hoping.
I have always thought Chris has done a good job compiling his father's stuff. I can't wait to pick this up!
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
I always liked the Hurin's Children story, the one in Silmarillion, and also the version with more details in the collection "Unfinished tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth".
:)
Anyway, the story has quite a lot of similarities with the Finnish folklore Kalevala, spefically Kullervo's story. Knowing how much Tolkien liked Finnish, some of the stuff might be intentionally taken
From the wiki article:
Cantos 31-36: The Kullervo cycle: Untamo kills his brother Kalervo's people except for the wife who begets Kullervo; Untamo gives Kullervo several tasks but he sabotages them all; Kullervo is sold as a slave to Ilmarinen; after being tormented by Ilmarinen's wife, he exacts revenge and the wife gets killed; Kullervo runs away and finds his family unharmed near Lapland; Kullervo seduces a maiden and later finds out she is his sister; Kullervo destroys Untamola (the realm of Untamo) and upon returning home finds everyone killed; Kullervo kills himself.
Well... parallels to Túrin are there.
Heard about this on the radio. According to 'the experts' it features several large battle scenes, and "would make a good movie".
Go figure.
I read the three Lord Of The Rings books and The Hobbit. Can someone tell me what other Tolkien books take place in the same Middle Earth "universe", and how do they relate to the ones I read? That is, are they prequels, sequels, or parallel stories?
Do any of the hobbits, Gandalf, the Shire, or any other "Rings" characters appear in the other books?
She's his sister.
(Oh come on, you weren't expecting to get through this discussion without finding that out.)
Good analogy. The difference between, say, The Fellowship of the Ring and any Christopher Tolkien followup (except perhaps the Silmarillion) is about as big.
JRR Tolkien and Frank Herbert were visionaries. Their books are legendary because they're so complete, so consistent, they're practically holographic. While those authors were also brilliant editors, especially Tolkien whose main gig was (as is well known) Oxford English Dictionary editor. Their (genetic, and thereby literary) heirs are undistinguished from a vast host of other second or lower tier of "visionary" authors, and have no special editing talent - nor have acquired any at their cashin publishers. While they also operate at a disadvantage while writing outside the original cultural contexts that produced those seminal works for a different audience.
Ironically, both Middle Earth and Dune are epic tales of the original forefathers of our times (Dune less obviously, sorry for the spoiler). A magical time when a unique individual arrived to set the worlds on the path that led to today's mundane, if relatively safe, existence. Both Tolkien and Herbert themselves portrayed themselves as mere humble quoters of the original stories, originally told by the great actors themselves. Their stories resonate with generations of the public partly because we understand that great storytellers are part of great stories which are part of great ages, come once in a long while, and cannot bequeath their talents and opportunities to their children.
On the bright side, both The Lord of the Rings and the Dune trilogies are so good that they can be reread often over a lifetime, delivering new rewards each time. Reading those later "extensions" is a waste of time that could better be spent rereading the original.
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Well, I think Brian Herbert needs to learn the difference between "character" and "caricature". I admit I did read *all* of the BH Dune books nevertheless, because I'm a sucker, but Frank Herbert's most offhand scribbles are worth more than that crap.
Oh no... it's the future.
A much better combarison would be the new Dune novel, Hunters of Dune, rather than the Dune prequels, since it's supposed to be based on the notes by Frank Herbert, while the prequels (Dune: Houses and Butlerian crap) were written completely from scratch and are often contradicting the original Frank Herbert books. I find that Chris Tolkien has really done as much as possible to preserve his fathers legacy, which cannot be said for Brian Herbert, who is trying to ruin his fathers franchise by putting out large numbers of half-baked books.
You know they have really old out when... ... the crosover books start appearing, how about 'Harry Potter and the Children of Hurin' or 'Dune: House Huffelpuff'.
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Except that Tolkien considered LotR the distraction, and the Hobbit's drawing on his mythos something of an accident. His main concern was the Silmarillion, which he tried unsuccessfully to get published alongside LotR.
The Silmarillion is not LotR, but it is, for those that have the patience and appreciation for that sort of thing, a glorious tale. Unfortunately, the published form is in many cases ripped from the Grey Annals, which were a sort concise historical chronology, and not in and of themselves full narratives. Tolkien planned a rather enormous expansion of the work, of which the Children of Hurin was the only part that approached completion. It, and the unfinished version of "Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin" that is found in Unfinished Tales are very much like LotR in storytelling quality.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Parts of the Simarillion work as good novellas in themselves. I particularly enjoyed the tale of Beren and Luthien.
Where do people take tripe like this from?
"JRR built up a whole mythos to draw from when writing LoTR."???
He didn't build up the stories to have background for LotR. He built the mythos for his own enjoyment, as a background history for his invented languages, and in hope of giving back to the English a mythology of their own that was "lost" when the Normans invaded the Anglo-Saxons.
The Hobbit was a story he made for his children. He spiced it up a bit with details from his mythos. He published it because it seemed publishable as a good children's story. Lord of the Rings was written as a commercial follow-up to The Hobbit. Didn't really end up like that but...
I am not disputing the fact that the huge amount of previous writing and pre-existing mythos gave LotR a backstory of unparalleled proportions. It ended up being a large part of the attraction of the book, that you feel this world has a whole history behind it that is barely hinted at.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I just saw Clerks 2 (b/c sometimes I like to punish the Ebert within) and while it itself is a terrible flick, it has perhaps the most perfect summation of my feelings on the LOTR trilogy, albeit the film form. As far as I'm concerned Tolkien Jr. would do well to stray somewhat and make a good action/adventure story (as TFA hints at) instead of the plodding tale his father took too many pages to tell. It had a great setting/world but god what a dull pedantic road trip LOTR was. We get it, the rings is evil. Really evil. Just drop the fucking thing in the volcano already.
1) Who/What was Tom Bombadil?
2) Do Balrogs have wings?
In other news, Led Zepplin reforms, stating that they have come across some new material.
Task Mangler
OK, I got into trouble by mentioning that aspect of the story, so I'll mention a
SPOILER WARNING
before proceeding. Hopefully this is enough advance/whitespace.
The story is set 100,000 years in the future. But it's the story of a messiah who can see the future, talk with the past, of all humanity. His life's work is to adjust the path of humanity to avert an impending, otherwise inevitable disaster that would destroy us. To do so, he becomes a god-emperor, total control of all our possible courses of action. And delivers us onto a path that leads to today. Dune time is at least spiral, if not entirely cyclic.
This idea is not explicit in the trilogy. It might be explored in some of the later books, which I stopped reading towards the end of the second trilogy, because they weren't that good. It is explored in the Dune Encyclopedia, in particular by the author of one of the "Paul Muad'Dib" entries. Under whom I studied science fiction literature for my English major. His insight was clear, and apparently popular among other Dune scholars by the mid-1980s. It also provokes the question of whether Muad'Dib's life actually steered humanity onto precisely the course he saw as a terrible vision to be averted, or whether it locked us into a loop or spiral that either locked in the eventual appearance of Muad'Dib, or finally excluded it.
Man that story is a mindblower.
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Judging the book by its cover, the book will involve a guy who climbs a hill faster than some other guys who also are climbing that hill. Then, he will look at something. Maybe he will tell us about what he sees. Sounds thrilling!
"It will be interesting to see how it stands up today alongside all the Tolkien-alike literature that we've become familiar with," said David Bradley
In my world there's nothing like what you could call "Tolkien-alike". Many have tried to ride the waves his writings have raised, still very few come even close to what he's accomplished. Maybe it's his background, maybe it's his decades' long knowledge in mythology, languages and literature, maybe it's his natural writing skill, maybe it's the timing, maybe it's all of these together that have resulted in a physical form that it's unique in so many ways. How will this new compilation be judged ? Supposing it's really good, it still will require a great effort to make it stand out from the oceans of fantasy bestseller wannabes these days.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Here is Wikipedia's article on the book.
I dearly hope Christopher, with all the material at hand about Húrin and Túrin, produces a book whose quality is close to his father's writings. If so, the unavoidable buzz that'll happen in our post-Jackson-movies world would be a huge boost to help popularize all books dealing with Arda before the War of the Rings (The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales,...). That'd be nice: too many people watched the movie, eventually read the related trilogy, and then nothing else.
Tolkien even copied the final dialogue between the hero and his sword:
But then, Tolkien never published the story so it's not fair to accuse him of plagiarism.
It's not so much that Bombadil is neutral, just that the affairs of the mortals are so far below his care. It's not that he doesn't care about mortals themselves, he saves the lives of the Hobbits after all, but that they are as children to him with their little squabble over some bauble. Bombadil *could* get involved with the ring issue, but they have a Wizard and some other strong guys, and people can't come running to the gods or the spirits of nature or whatever the heck Bombadil is every time they have a little problem to deal with. They need to deal with this thing themselves. He turns out to right, doesn't he?
It's like how after the Ring is destroyed how Gandalf just laughs about everything. Gandalf *could* help the hobbits with their little problem in the Shire, but he knows they can handle it, and the world can't go running to him whenever it has a problem. He turns out to be right, too.
See, in this mythology that Tolkein put together it's very important that each set of players confront and defeat its own direst enemy. The humans and hobbits must defeat Saruman in the Shire. Gandalf and the humans must defeat Saruman's boss, Sauron. When you start reading the appendices and other materials, you find out how far back this pattern goes. Gandalf's folk were minor players in the fight against Sauron's boss. As the humans are to Gandalf, so Gandalf is to his superiors, the gods.
Thus we see what Bombadil *must* be. He is the corporal manifestation of a god. Supposedly, there are even enough clues to figure out which gods he and Goldberry are.
Only when we see how the pattern of conflict reaches back into deepest history to the creation of Middle earth does it mean anything that it ends in the Shire with the death of Wormtongue.
Gandalf's folk were minor players in the fight against Sauron's boss. As the humans are to Gandalf, so Gandalf is to his superiors, the gods.
Right. In fact, IIRC, there's even something like "THE God", which doesn't interfere in the conflict between the various gods. It's clear from the stories that God (upper-case, THE god) has planned the conflicts to have a purpose which no one but himself can see.
And this is part of why Gandalf holds back his full power. He is acknowledging that he can't just go around solving other people's problems for them, since the problems, conflicts, fighting, and resolution all play a part in this unknown plan. He doesn't know what the plan is, but he knows it exists. This is part of the reason he doesn't stop Gollum, for example. He knows Gollum still has a part to play. It's also very related to the metaphor of the ring, and why Gandalf can't take possession of the ring. He must restrain himself from abuse of power in order to play his proper role. The ring represents undue power and the thirst for undue power, and so taking possession of it would represent the sort of abuse of power many characters in the story are trying to avoid.
When Bombadil fails to be affected by the ring or tempted by it, he is displaying a closeness to God which would be impossible were he not a greater being than he seems. This is also relevant in terms of Hobbits, since they show a remarkable resistance to the ring, indicating that they, too, are greater than they appear.
(Sorry. Geeking out.)
- done the best editing job he was able to and publish them (did he have help? Presumably he has an editor at the publisher's, and I wouldn't hand this project to just anyone.)
- released them as-is (where they would have been ignored as unreadable or mined for ever worse atrocities by ever worse (screen)writers. Better a RingWraith than to be fouled the way the later Dune books did Frank Herbert.)
- shredded them all to avoid being accused of daring to profit from his father's estate (if JRRT had left cash, that would be fine, but writings...!)
Which would you prefer? I'm very happy to get the chance to see Tolkien's remaining writings, but I don't have the time to study the originals and no reason to think anyone else would be better at editing it for me.