The Children of Hurin
 

just wondering if anyone else has picked this up yet...i just got it today, and am going to try and start reading it a little everynight. from the preview i read about it, the first chapter is pretty hard to get through, but after that the story is supposed to be as good as anything else in the Tolkien universe. Seeing as i thought the first chapter of the Lord of the Rings was brutal to read, i am gonna make the effort if for no other reason than...Its a NEW JRR Tolkein book!!

I think its awesome to get an entire novel out of a guy that has been dead for decades.

I think I'll wait for the movie

Explain.

It was written but from the sound of things unedited at his death.

His son has done the editing and tidying and not its out ..

(its on my amazon 'possible' list currently - I know I'll end up getting it at some point)

hella. I'm gonna pick it up tomorrow.

I haven't heard or read much about it, but I thought it was more along the lines of the son discovering a bunch of pages, but with lots of stuff missing and incomplete, and he pasted it all together and filled in the gaps. That's how it sounded when I heard them discussing it on tv a few weeks ago anyway.

~ 75% of it was already published material from Unfinished Tales, Silmarillion, etc. But there's ~ 25% new material, and it's all linked together. Apparently according to Amazon-reviews by Tolkien-geeks, even those who have read all the existing material and are hardcore geeks were moved again by the tale (and let's be honest, who wouldn't be) and how well it was presented

Ah well, I'm one of those heretics that just couldn't even get through the first Lord of the Rings book anyway, so this doesn't really interest me so much. It had the effect of turning me off all fantasy books, which I imagine is probably the exact opposite of how it worked for just about everyone else who read it.

HERETIC!!!!!:eek:

I suppose it depends if it's more like Two Towers or more like Return of the King (in terms of how it's written). I enjoyed reading The Hobbit and LOTR and TT but ROTK really killed me...I couldn't make it more than halfway through.

I'll probably pick it up at some point, but I'm so backlogged on reading right now it might not be for a little while. Maybe after the 7th Harry Potter.

/tk

I've been told that the first half of the first book is the worst part, but I had no desire to go any further. It was all just too jolly and merry for my tastes.

God if it is anything like the Silmarillion which I read a long time ago I won't be getting it.

Man, the Silmarillion rocks. I love that book. Granted it is difficult reading, but I still love the narrative.

it gives me serious nerd-wood

Silmarillion rocks. I'd love to see a movie adaptation of Beren and Luthien, or the entire story of the Silmarils through Feanor's creation, the destruction of the trees, etc... *drool*

see, and i thought the two towers was very difficult to get through, as was the first 100 pages of the fellowship.

the silmarilion is some of the hardest narrative i have ever read, short of Le Morte de Arthur written in Middle English, so i am hoping the new stuff will be a little easier to get through.

My favorite bit of writing by Tolkein are both from the Silmarillion, the Narn i Narn Hurin where Turin goes to fight Glaurung and where Fingolfin goes to fight Morgoth I absolutely love. The Fall of Gondolin is good as well.

Plus Feanor is a bad ass character.

the fall of gondolin gives me chills. Everytime. I get these amazing mental pictures about Gondolin and what it must have looked like...and *drool*

grrr...my copy of "Children" is in my bag over here...can't wait for the train-ride home!! I might not put it down till I finish it.

I just started and finished the book in two days. For anyone still interested in this book, here is my take -



First ten pages - tons of names tossed at you. Then it slows down. Sorta. It never really goes slow. This ain't no Clancey novel, where nothing happens for four chapters, and it doesn't have a cast the size of a Robert Jordan novel either/

According to the appendix written by Christopher, this was originally written by Tolkien in the 1920's as an epic poem, and he got really far into it before dropping the project. When Christopher mined his dad's stuff for info in the later books, he used this. Now he is publishing it as one novel.

It is way more indepth than the Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales, which can literally move from an era in a chapter or two. However, it definitely moves at a quicker clip than a modern novel. It actually reads at about the same pace as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so if you are familiar with its pace, then this book seems similar.

I liked it, and I got into it really quickly. I found it the best read by anything Tolkien related outside of LotR, and I liked it better than The Hobbit or Farmer Giles of Ham and so forth.

Anyway, that's my take. The map is fold out, in the back, and you can open it out and keep it handy beside you as you read the tale. The page that stays in the book is all blank, and I think its a neat feature that I've not seen before.


That's my take anyways. It's only about 260 pages long, so don't buy it expecting an epic tale in the vein of modern fantasy following hordes of characters. Instead buy it expecting to spend a lot of time following the four family members of Hurin. (Himself, wife, and kids). In fact, most of it is spent with his son.

Good luck!

I have the JRR Tolkien "The Children of Hurin" UNABRIDGED audio book recording which comes on 8 CDS (10 hours listening) for sale.

After spending some time thinking about it, and seeing the Necro by Galaril, I am about to make some Tolkein fans upset

I think this work has more literary value that LotR because it reads very similar to the sagas it was based upon. I;ve recently been reading some of the Icelandic sagas and Children reads like one of them, only better, if that makes sense.

So, the more time I have since reading the book, the more and more I appreciate it.

Yes, the book was surprisingly good at least the audio version which is for sale in my previous post:)

that doesn't make me upset. i agree with you Abe, it is very reminiscent of an Icelandic saga.

My impression of "The Silmarillion" was that it was written in a high-level style, almost like a summary in a way, especially in comparison to the LotR trilogy (not surprising given the huge difference in time scale between them).

My question is this - does "The Children of Hurin" read as a more densely described tale similar to the style used for LotR, or is it similar to the style used for "The Silmarillion"? Many of the tales told in that book, if broken out into distinct tales, would rival the plot lines in LotR (and make for good source material for further Middle Earth movie treatments...)

more like the latter dawgfan

Hmm, so not a significant amount of difference from the version in "The Silmarillion" then?

no no. much different and much improved. sorry guess i meant the former! was thinking the former was more like your first paragraph, not the two different things in your second paragraph.

The Children of Hurin, as a novel, is basically taking a vignette out of The Silmarillion and expanding it to novel size. Now usually this is an exercise by the author in adding in a lot of extraneous bullshit (see classic SF short stories later turned into novels). Not in this case, however. Children of Hurin is a fully realized, richly described, epic story.

I'd agree with Abe that it differs in style from LoTR and reads more like one of the old sagas (as indeed does, in my opinion, The Silmarillion). However, I'm not sure if it has more "literary value". A better piece of literature? Maybe. But one shouldn't discount the absolutely massive influence LoTR has had on fiction in general and fantasy in specific.

Edit: The Children of Hurin makes me sad that Tolkein couldn't have lived longer. Given that it is only one of dozens of such stories in The Silmarillion and given that they all could be expanded out into their own epics, there's clearly a huge collection of rich stories that we'll now never see.

I'm not discounting it, I'm simply saying that I think Children is even better from a literary perspective. Children is so similar to the Icelandic Sagas, in a very good way, and yet more readable, that I see significant literary merit for the work above and beyond what the LotR already has.

LoTR = GREAT
Children = GREAT
Silmarillion = GREAT

Chances are, this idea will die like all of our other "writing contests", but it would be kinda neat for a few of us to take Silmarillion stories and write expanded versions of them (not novels, of course, but longer short stories perhaps). Any who wanted to participate could take one, and the others would pick from what's left, first come, first serve.