Posted on 09/24/2006 4:02:42 AM PDT by MadIvan
A DARKNESS is once again descending on JRR Tolkien’s fabled land of Middle-earth. An unfinished work completed by the writer’s son is such a departure from the world of hobbits that it may merit an X-certificate.
The manuscript for The Children of Hurin, to be published next spring, contains incest, suicide and a multitude of violent deaths. Any film version is likely to have restricted audiences because of the subject matter.
Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on the epic tale that his father began in 1918 while on leave from the army. JRR, who was recovering from trench fever contracted during the battle of the Somme, later abandoned the work.
Its publication 90 years on follows the success of The Lord of the Rings, which has sold more than 50m copies and was adapted into a trilogy of Oscar-winning films.
The “new” work does not include characters such as Arwen, played by Liv Tyler in the movies directed by Peter Jackson, and Legolas, played by Orlando Bloom.
It is much darker and is based on the Kalevala, an epic poem from Finland. Tolkien, who died at the age of 81 in 1973, took the tale and weaved his own magical story around it.
The Children of Hurin will tell the story of the family of an elf warrior taken prisoner by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, held responsible for torturing elves and producing the first orcs, a race of evil goblins.
Hurin, the elf warrior, is given powers by Morgoth to foresee what will happen to his children. “Death you may yet crave from me as a boon,” Morgoth tells him.
One son, Turin, is manoeuvred into having sex with his sister Nienor and becomes a carrier of doom, triggering the death of everyone close to him.
One Tolkien expert, William Ferguson, said this weekend: “Turin makes folks like Othello and Hamlet and Oedipus look like lucky devils.”
A dragon, slain by Turin, causes Nienor to realise that they have committed incest. By then she is carrying his unborn child and commits suicide by throwing herself into a ravine.
Turin finally kills himself with his talking sword. “I will drink thy blood gladly,” says its black blade.
Tolkien touched briefly on the story in The Silmarillion, a compendium of Middle-earth history: “And when all was done, the elves sang a lament for the Children of Hurin.”
His son revisited the story in a chapter of his father’s Unfinished Tales in 1980, but this will be the first time it has been told in detail in one volume.
Christopher Tolkien said this weekend he believed there was a strong case for completing his father’s long version of the legend, “if this could be done without distortion or invention”.
Tolkien experts welcomed its forthcoming publication. Dorothy Heydt, a writer of fantasy and science fiction, said: “Turin had more grief in his life than anybody ought to. The story is based on a Finnish folk tale and is full of incest and suicide and stuff.”
Adam Tolkien, son of Christopher, said: “The book will be the equivalent of a director’s cut of a DVD, except in this case the director is deceased.
“It is a very educated work. My father has been working on these stories for 30 years. What has already been published is a very condensed version of the story.
“The Silmarillion gives a history of Middle-earth mythology. To give you an idea of the scale, the whole story of The Lord of the Rings takes up [only] 15 pages in The Silmarillion.”
Christopher Tolkien is now 81 and The Children of Hurin, which will be published by HarperCollins in Britain, may be the last “new” book to be issued under the JRR Tolkien name.
Writers’ literary estates lose their entitlement to copyright income 70 years after their death.
Next week sees the publication of a sequel to Peter Pan, commissioned by the estate of JM Barrie to raise money for Great Ormond Street hospital before the copyright expires in 2007.
Nicolette Jones, author and children’s books reviewer for The Sunday Times, said: “There is a lot of mileage in reworking books. The Ian Fleming estate asked Charlie Higson to write books about the young Bond, William Horwood wrote sequels to The Wind in the Willows and there have been Winnie the Pooh spin-offs.
“Given the controversy over whether JK Rowling will bump off Harry Potter, where will that leave a sequel? Somebody, some day is going to try to pick up the story again.”
OK, so that's where I had heard the connection previously. Sounds like "The Children of Hurin" is an expansion of the tale mentioned in "The Silmarillion", so that's where the connection to the "Kalevala" must be.
A lot of Silmarillion has Kalevala influences but "Turin Turambar" is the most obvious. It's a very close retelling of one part of the Kalevala.
We live in MA, and one year, our furnace for the downstairs went out in mid-January. We have a separate one for the bedrooms, upstairs, so that was good. It was a couple of weeks before the guy could get the part to fix it, so we relied heavily on our fireplace and I also baked a lot to help keep the heat up downstairs! We also kept the lights going a lot, and SirKit mentioned that was the most cheerful he'd ever felt during the winter since we'd moved here! LOL!
The dreariness is one of the main reasons we're looking forward to moving back to MS before this coming winter!!
Shades of the tale of King Arthur...
JRR Tolkien pingaroo
Loved his Legacy of the Aldenata sequence. Likewise the Prince Roger stories, and his "Fall" books are pretty good, too. Wasn't too fond of Cally's War, though. I don't mind romance in my SF, but I'm not too fond of blatant descriptive sex. (yeah, I'm an old fogie.) I'll probably stay away from his Ghost books, too, for the same reason. He's an excellent writer, IMHO. He's got a couple of others out I've not gotten a look at yet, also. I did just read Princess of Wands. Still haven't made up my mind about it, but I finished it in one sitting, so that must say something...
If that merits an "X" rating, so does Sophocles.
Yep. Just when you think your life is going badly, read deidre of the sorrows, and it puts everything in perspective. =^)
Anyone who's read the Silmarillion is already familiar with this.
I'm half Finnish, but have not read much of the Kalevala. I believe that Longfellow used the rhythm pattern of this poem for his 'Tales of Hiawatha' epic, which is a good way for non-Finns to get the feel of speaking Finnish.
This accidental incest plot of course goes back to the Greek myth of Oedipus Rex, who kills his father and marries his mother, all unknowingly, and in Wagner's Ring Sigemund commits accidental incest with Siegelinde, not knowing she is his sister. The Ring was based in part of the ancient tales of the Niebelungen, which itself is based on the history of the Germanic tribes at the time of the invasion by Attila the Hun. (since the Finns, like the Hungarian Magyars, are related to the Huns, this rather comes full circle.)
These themes are some of the most ancient and powerful themes in human culture. If you get to dwelling on them too much, you must move to the land of the Sun -- Florida.
You guys have your hobbitses mixed up! Pippin wasn't even present at that part of the battle.
Merry stabbed the Witch King - and then Eowyn did the actual killing. I don't believe Merry delivered the killing blow, though certainly he helped.
And I still rather wish Eowyn's dialog there hadn't been changed for the movie, though it still works OK, I guess.
IIRC it was Merry who rode with Eowyn and helped her slay him, not Pippin. Gandalf had taken Pippin with him to Minas Tirith to keep him out of trouble after he looked in the Palantir and left Merry behind with Theoden.
You're right. I keep mixing them up.
If you read the passage at the end of the chapter and parse it the way I did, Merry's thrust unbound the Witch King's spirit from the whatever held him together, all before Eowyn stabbed him. And Hobbits aren't men. Eowyn's weapon was an ordinary sword. So while she was a human female [but not a male], I can't see how she could kill the greatest sorceror of his age, and the greatest of the Nine [bearing in mind that none of the other other of the Nine fell to any agency but the dissolution of the Ring of Power, and the eruption of Mt. Doom].
Yep. As well as Unfinished Tales (which are some of my more treasured books)
Here is some info on the Witch-King:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-king_of_Angmar
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