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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 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?
I "read" silmarilion when I was in high school, didn't like it at all and failed to spend the time slowly going through it to take everything in. Going through it again in my mid-twenties and having an exponentially greater appreciation of it, even more so than Lord of the Rings.
Like a wine fine, you have to let it age a bit.
TÚRIN TURAMBAR DAGNIR GLAURUNGA
She's his sister.
(Oh come on, you weren't expecting to get through this discussion without finding that out.)
"Like a wine fine, you have to let it age a bit."
Or aging is lowering/fucking up your standards.
By your sixties you may actually like to listen to Barbra Streisand albums...
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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make install -not war
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 are aware, I hope, that this is actually Tolkien's writing. Christopher Tolkien's role has been as an editor. In only one instant did he actually compose anything for his father's works, and that was The Fall of Doriath for the published Silmarillion, because Tolkien had actually only written one completed version, and that was way back in about 1920, when the mythos was still in a very early stage of evolution, and did not match the post-Lord of the Rings Silmarillion.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Over the past three years I've really gotten into Tolkien's writing (The Silmarillion being my fave), but I've never been a big fan of Turin's story. It's certainly tragic, and nothing ends well, which normally I like. It's just that Turin is fairly unsympathetic. He's headstrong, foolish, and something of a prick. Hard to root for, despite his occasional heroic deeds. Now Hurin -- I'd love to see more of Hurin. Anyone who can tell Morgoth off to his face is the very definition of tragically heroic.
Just how much of the History of Middle Earth series have you even read?
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.
I hope you are aware that The Lord of the Rings IS the sequel. Tolkien didn't write LOTR first. It came much later after he wrote almost all of the Silmarillion. He had been working his way up to that novel for years before he ever sat down to write it. His wife also added quite a lot to all of his work, though her name is often forgotten. LOTR was edited and edited until it was something people could try to read in under a month. But the fact is, Tolkien is not that type of writer. If you look at any of his other novels, he meant for the world to take LOTR slow. He wanted you to get lost in the world that he and his wife created. His books should take you years to read, and after you've read them, he wanted you to go back and read them again. At least, that is the impression I got when reading through the histories of Middle Earth. This isn't about opportunism. It's about Tolkien's world. If you don't have the patience for his novels, I don't recommend them.
1) Who/What was Tom Bombadil?
2) Do Balrogs have wings?
I for one am a huge fan of Turin's story. It always gives me the shivers, when I read it anew. And actually Children of Hurin is a story about Hurin also, if I remember correctly, after Turin's death the story talks about the final fate of Hurin and Morwen. I hope that Christopher Tolkien will include it. The last stand of Hurin in Nirnaeth Arnoediad is one of my favorite episodes, along with the Fingolfin's fight with Morgoth. Now then I think about it, without Turin, the Silmarillion would lose some charm, because with this story Tolkien shows the horror of Morgoth.
"You see this ring, kid? It was your father's ring. He had to wear it up his ass during the entire war of Middle Earth. Hundreds of leagues he travelled with this ring up his ass. And now it's yours."
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!
So was his father. That's why you can buy Lord of the Rings in a store. People work to make money...
"Sufferin' succotash."
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
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.
Good thing you are here to remind us that it's Edith Mary Tolkien (born Bratt).
Oh no, wait, you didn't...
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.
Christopher Tolkien was a philologist at Oxford like his father before him. He had work, he is an old man now.
As to Tolkien's wishes, he made them very clear during his lifetime. He wanted the Silmarillion completed and published. When he knew he could no longer do it, he left it to Christopher Tolkien to complete it.
And I'd love for you to cite where Tolkien despised his greatest fans. Because you know what, he didn't, and spent countless hours answering their letters. You're just talking out of your ass.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.)