JRR Tolkien fans will be rushing to the bookstores over at London a few hours from now to get their hands on a copy of the latest Tolkien book – The Children of Hurin – which was slated for a Tuesday release according to Yahoo! (read the news here).A couple of minutes after reading the Yahoo report, I went over to the Fully Booked and Powerbooks sites to see if both bookstores have it forthcoming – nil. I don’t think the book will be available here in P.I. until probably several more months.
Of course, this book by the Father of Modern Fantasy, is being published posthumously as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien has been dead for 34 years. The Children of Hurin is being published under the graces of the Tolkien Estate and the book itself wasn’t really published by JRR but by his son, Christopher Tolkien, who had spent almost his entire life making sense of the scraps and pieces of fiction left by his father and churning them out to something resembling readable books.
In this latest Tolkien fiction, Christopher constructed the book from manuscripts written by his father “without any editorial invention.” Meaning, the son made sure he didn’t put in his own imaginings on the book and worked only to make sense of the manuscripts his father left.
The Children of Hurin is not your Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. It’s darker and grimmer and tells the tragedy of Turin and Nienor, the children of one of Men’s greatest heroes of the second age – Hurin. The story has appeared in a condensed narrative in The Silmarillion and if it’s any indicator, this new book is sure to fire-up the imagination of the millions of Tolkien fanatics all over the world as we will be introduced once again to the magic of JRR Tolkien.
Expect to learn more about Middle-Earth circa Second Age as we will probably get a more in-depth look into Beleriand, the lands of Middle-Earth west of the setting of Lord of Rings which was destroyed in the earlier Age.
We will also get to know more about Beleg Strongbow as well as get introduced more to Thingol, the Elven lord of Doriath and his Maian wife, Melian as well as to the host of other Elven and Mannish characters.
Geesh … my Tolkien-geeekeness is starting to exude! Can’t wait for this book to arrive in the P.I.!
