Middle-earth revisited

A mythological tale written by J R R Tolkien during the First World War has just been published in its full form. Here's a primer on the master's invented universe and the place this "new" story has in it.

THE HYPE
We have a "new Tolkien"! With immense fanfare, HarperCollins has launched The Children of Hurin (originally written by J R R Tolkien; edited by his son Christopher) around the world and in eight different languages, with 15 more translations to follow. An online release was organised at the websites TolkienLibrary.com and TolkienGateway.net, where Tolkien-nerds had a three-day virtual party.

THE STORY
Set during the First Age of the Sun, roughly 6,500 years before the events of LOTR, The Children of Hurin is one of the many stories about the struggles of the Eldar (a race of Elves), the Edain (a race of Men) and others against the tyranny of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Morgoth lays a curse on the family of Hurin, a chieftain who dared to defy him, and thereafter we follow the life of Hurin's son Turin Turambar.

This conflicted young man whose internal nature combines tragically with his circumstances is one of Tolkien's most abiding creations, and his story is as compelling as many of the mythologies it was inspired by (the Norse and Finnish myths, for instance).

THE SCEPTICISM
With the much-anticipated publication of the new Harry Potter book just around the corner, could this be a well-timed marketing gimmick? After all, the film version of The Lord of the Rings brought Tolkien's works to a new, younger market that might be eager for more of the same.

Besides, Tolkien Jr (an octogenarian now himself) has been collating, editing and publishing versions of his father's unfinished manuscripts for over three decades now (the senior Tolkien died in 1973), and some think he has made a cottage industry out of it.

THE FACTS
At one level, the sceptics have a point: The Children of Hurin is not a previously unpublished work (though to be fair, the publishers haven't made that claim for it). The meat of the story can be found in the "Narn I Hin Hurin" section of Unfinished Tales, which was also edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1980.

However, there is a case for presenting it as a composite, fleshed out work. This is the first full-length version of the tale, with fine accompanying illustrations by Alan Lee, and the form it takes here is that of an uninterrupted narrative. (The version in Unfinished Tales was interspersed with editorial commentary and footnotes, which was good value-addition for Tolkien fanatics but didn't do much to retain the story's autonomy.)

THE BACKGROUND
To understand why the bulk of J R R Tolkien's work has been published posthumously, one needs to understand his tortuous writing career. Anyone who's read The Lord of the Rings will know that a large part of that book's charm resides in the many nebulous glimpses of a vast and distant back-story; frequently, characters stop to tell each other about lores from the past, recite songs and seek inspiration in the lives of heroes from a much earlier time.

In fact, Tolkien had already written detailed versions of many of these back-stories long before either LOTR or The Hobbit were published. As a young man in the army barracks of WWI, he began working on his own private "legendarium" "" a collection of myths and folktales that would describe the creation and long history of an invented world. He worked on these tales throughout his life, continually revising them, changing the names of characters and dates, but never completing them to his satisfaction.

After his death Christopher collected the hundreds of pages of manuscripts that his father had left behind, ironed out the inconsistencies, and published a series of books including (most famously) The Silmarillion and the 12-part The History of Middle-earth. The legend of Turin Turambar is one of these stories.

THE VERDICT
Though The Children of Hurin works on its own terms as a high tragedy, full of interesting characters and twists of fate, it's much more satisfying and contextual if you're already familiar with "" or willing to become familiar with "" Tolkien's mythological world.

Suggested supplementary reading: The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales, Vol 2. Also see The Encyclopaedia of Arda (http://www.glyphweb.com/arda), an exhaustive and ever-growing online resource on Tolkien's world.

STATUTORY WARNING: Before you pick up this book and toss it to your younglings, a word of caution: small children will struggle with the language, which is in the dense, archaic style one associates with myths. (It isn't as difficult as The Silmarillion, but it's a level above LOTR; that said, it's always fun to see the repeated use of such words as "verily" and "smite"!)

There are many character and place names, which can be confusing. And some of the content is adult: incest plays a role in Turin's tragedy, which has shades of the Oedipus myth and the Kullervo story from Finnish mythology. But it's definitely not "X-rated", as an article in the Sunday Times suggested.