The Children of Hurin will be the first complete novel by J.R.R. Tolkien published posthumously since The Silmarillion. It will be out this year on April 17th. I enjoy reading Tolkien's other books and am looking forward to reading this. Anybody else interested?
Here is a description taken from Wikipedia:
The story is dark and gloomy, with much less of a positive ending than The Lord of the Rings. The Children of Húrin are brave but sometimes rash. Morgoth's traps are subtle and he can trick them into doing wrong things without their intending it. Both the Elves and the Petty-dwarves in the story include some much worse characters than the noble Elves and Dwarves of The Lord of the Rings.
The tale has echoes of the Finnish Kalevala story, with which Tolkien was very familiar. In Tolkien's work, however, The Children of Húrin forms part of a set, along with the tales of Beren and of Túrin's cousin Tuor. Tuor and Túrin have separate fates that oddly complement each other. It seems likely that Tolkien meant something significant when he had Tuor see Túrin during their joint wanderings. Morgoth directs much of his malice against Túrin and seems to overlook Tuor, the indirect cause of his eventual fall.
The relationship between the siblings Túrin and Nienor has a few elements similar to that of Siegmund and Sieglinde in the story of Die Walküre. This relationship is closely related to the Kullervo story of the Kalevala, as Kullervo rapes his sister unawares and later commits suicide.
30-03-2007, 12:00 AM
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