‘Children Of Hurin’
Six thousand years before Bilbo Baggins found the ring of Sauron, Turin and Nienor were born to Hurin, called the Steadfast, lord of Dor-lo-min, husband of Morwen. Turin waged war against Morgoth and slew Glaurung, the first of the dragons of Morgoth. That is how the story begins.
The plot of JRR Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin will thrill and intrigue millions. It has an initial print run of 500,000 worldwide, but that will be just the beginning. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has sold 150m copies, 50m of those since Peter Jackson’s films were released. Another 50m copies of other Tolkiens, primarily The Hobbit, have also been sold. It is safe to say that the “great tale” of Turin is about to become a global myth.
The book has been retrieved by Tolkien’s son Christopher from his father’s assorted writings. It was begun in 1918, but never formally organised into a novel. Christopher has now done this, using, it is said, only his father’s words, with few grammatical changes. In theory, this raises the possibility of the retrieval of other great tales from this period, The Fall of Gondolin, Beren and Luthien has been suggested, and The Lay of Leithian, but, in practice, none of these seems to be in the complete, though dispersed, state of The Children of Hurin. This will probably be the last finished Tolkien tale.
The films completely changed the status of the books. As Alan Lee, the illustrator of The Children of Hurin and Oscar-winning art director of the three movies stated, there is something literal about film. In designing for Jackson, he found himself having to flesh out every nuance. Whereas Tolkien might sketch in a page of prose, the modern cinema audience wants the whole thing on screen. Furthermore, a generation of Lord of the Rings fans was created, but not necessarily Tolkien readers. The emphasis had shifted from the books.
This seems, at least in part, to explain the timing of The Children of Hurin. Christopher first told David Brawn, publishing director of HarperCollins, about the book two years ago, when the film fuss was ready to die down. It was, Brawn believes, a clear attempt to return his father’s work to the printed page. And, indeed, for Lee, it has been a chance to escape the literalism of the movies and to get back to his haunting, suggestive and very English fairy-tale style.
A new posthumous Tolkien is a risk, however. In 1977, the publication of The Silmarillion was criticised because it included interpolations by Christopher. The charge was that the estate was exploiting the legacy. It was lampooned as “The Sell-a-Million”. The implication was that Tolkien was becoming a brand rather than an author, a process surely accelerated by the films.
On the other hand, it is the job of literary executors to find good unpublished material. If Christopher has, indeed, done no more than string together a coherent story from his father’s prose, I can’t see much of a problem. He has done only what his father intended and he has done it well.