The Return of the King

The elves have returned. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit, are some of the best-selling and best-loved novels of all time. But the relatively small body of work published during Tolkien’s lifetime describing his remarkably rich and cohesive Middle-earth world of men, dwarves, elves and orcs has left fans rabid for 404 Not Found

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) any scraps of the voluminous unpublished writings the master of myth and fantasy left behind.

So hobbitheads worldwide broke out flagons of mead in celebration after Houghton Mifflin’s announcement that, next spring, it plans to publish Children of Hurin, a tale that Tolkien tinkered with throughout his lifetime but never finished. The story follows two human siblings and their attempt to evade their tragic fate by overcoming a heavenly curse. Abandoned and resumed several times by Tolkien, some parts of the story were written in alliterative long-line poetry (a form in which he became interested in the 1920s), others were buried within larger compilations of fragmented stories, journals and miscellaneous other jottings.

Over the past 30 years, several volumes of Hurin segments have been published, but to read through them was an ordeal that rivaled the heroes’ own epic quest. “There were all these pieces and different versions of the story that didn’t agree with each other,” says Michael Drout, Prentice associate professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

This version, however, is a definitive, coherent text. Credited as the book’s editor, the force behind the volume is Tolkien’s son Christopher, who spent the last 30 years collecting and synthesizing the fragments and binding them into a seamless narrative, one that will make Hurin accessible both to casual readers and to those who speak Elvish in their sleep. Christopher Tolkien has long been a caretaker and editor of his father’s work. Exceedingly close to his father growing up, he became the keeper of all things hobbit upon J.R.R.’s death in 1973.

This is not the first J.R.R. Tolkien book that Christopher has had a hand in. In 1977, he published The Silmarillion, an esoteric compendium of his father’s stories that continues the Middle-earth mythology and is a required text for Tolkien scholars and enthusiasts. A quiet, private man, Christopher is now 81 and lives in France, where he has sought to evade obsessive fans and media pressure. There, he has had ample time to work on Hurin, which is something of a prequel to the classic Tolkien tales.

“It’s the first complete tale from the early mythology,” says T.A. Shippey, humanities professor at St. Louis University in Missouri. Its antihero is a dark lord and ancestor of Sauron, the evil figure who torments Frodo and Gandalf aeons later. It also focuses on the interaction between humans and elves, a theme which returns in the hobbit books. And at least one Rings denizen — the elf Galadriel — makes a cameo. Some English professors have been frustrated by Tolkien’s reputation as a weaver of children’s stories, and they hope the new book will bolster their belief that Tolkien is a literary heavyweight worthy of serious academic study. “The perception is that he was just an eccentric don who wrote fantasy,” says Alfred K. Siewers, assistant professor of medieval literature at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

But Tolkien was a linguist and a historian who derived much inspiration for his novels from medieval sagas. “Hurin is a very serious book,” says Wheaton College’s Drout. “It doesn’t have any of that lighthearted patter between the hobbits. It’s going to show this man was a much more nuanced and complex and deep-thinking writer than he’s been given credit for.”

And fans who think Tolkien was not just a great storyteller but also a great stylist are similarly excited about Hurin. They expect it to be the best example of his mature, fluid prose since The Lord of the Rings. “He wrote [parts of Hurin] after finishing Rings and by that time he had developed a full narrative style,” says Carl F. Hostetter, co-editor of Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-earth. Which is fitting. One of Tolkien’s most famous characters, Bilbo Baggins, did some of his best writing in his later years, too.