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| Tuesday, December 11, 2007 12:04 AM |
| Book Report: The Children of Húrin |
 by Fëanor |
In the interests of having my blog not be entirely overrun by comic book content, allow me to say a few words about The Children of Húrin. This is a book recently released by Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien's son, which is a longer, more fleshed out version of one of the tales told in The Silmarillion. As such, it's a story I've read multiple times in the past, so I was a bit afraid this book would be boring for me, but I couldn't resist the lure of a "new" Tolkien novel, so I put it on ye olde Wish List, and miraculously it appeared in my hands.
And happily I did not find it boring at all, but completely engaging, quite beautiful, and very moving. It is, of course, a tragic tale, set in the First Age of Middle Earth, when the Valar still walked the land. Húrin is one of the great warriors of men who goes out to fight the Battle of Unnumbered Tears and is captured alive by Morgoth. Húrin defies him to his face and Morgoth, a bit piqued, as it were, puts a curse upon Húrin's family so that all they do will go wrong, and then places Húrin on the tallest tower of his castle and forces him to watch the curse do its evil work.
And so we follow Húrin's son Túrin through various adventures, and as is his fate, all he does goes wrong, thanks in part to Morgoth's curse, but thanks mostly to his own pride and stubbornness. But despite it all, he still manages to do great deeds and slay many of the servants of Morgoth, including the great Glaurung, father of dragons. The story is told with rather stylized, formal language that is nonetheless beautiful and poetic, to the extent that certain passages sent a chill down my spine. It has the authentic feel of an ancient myth or legend. Although I was familiar with the plot and knew pretty much how everything turned out, I still found myself riveted, and moved. Adding to the effectiveness of the story are a series of full color, full page illustrations by Alan Lee that are scattered throughout the book at regular intervals.
After the main text are various supplementary materials, including genealogical trees for a couple of the main families of the story, an appendix by Christopher explaining how he pieced this tale together from various versions in his father's notes, an index of names, and a wonderful large fold-out map of Middle Earth as it appeared in the First Age.
The appendix I found surprisingly fascinating, which leads me to believe that I might find Christopher's History of Middle Earth (a lengthy and exhaustive collection of all of J.R.R. Tolkien's notes and half-finished stories about his great fictional creation, accompanied by many explanatory footnotes by Christopher) more interesting than I'd supposed. J.R.R. was not a man who did something straight through to the end and then moved on. He started writing this story many, many times, usually beginning over again each time, and often changing the style or level of detail. Once or twice he tried writing it as a poem in the style of Old English epics like Beowulf, and wrote thousands of lines before setting it aside. Christopher's work of piecing together one whole version of the tale with as much detail in it as possible and as few contradictions as possible was quite tricky, as in different versions lines of dialogue would be placed at different points in the story, and whole new characters would be added or moved about. A later version of the tale might have less detail in certain sections than an earlier version, and so on. But somehow Christopher has pieced it all together, adding new material and changing the original language as infrequently as possible, and come up with a seamless and satisfying whole that definitely seems worth all the time he put into it.
Of course, keep in mind all of this is coming from a self-described Tolkien fanatic, who has a tattoo in Elvish on his arm, for God's sake. There's something about Tolkien's world that is instantly fascinating to me, and that makes me want to learn all I can about it, to submerge myself in its culture and its history, its languages and its maps, its magic and its religion. But I don't think those who don't want to do any such submerging will find The Children of Húrin to be dry and boring. It's not The Silmarillion, and doesn't contain any lengthy recountings of genealogies or long detailed descriptions of ancient battles (well, only one or two). It's mostly just an action-packed melodrama about an incredibly dysfunctional family, and I think anyone who's looking for a little fantasy yarn and doesn't mind some language that might sound stilted to a modern ear will have a fine time with it. |
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