Thursday, April 19, 2007

The Newest (Christopher) Tolkien Novel

The Lost Tolkien Novel
"There are two kinds of Tolkien fans. There are the day trippers, the weekend warriors, who've read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and seen the movies and let it go at that. Then there are the hardcore — the Uruk-hai of Tolkien readers — who have delved further, into The Silmarillion and beyond, who seriously grok the deep history and elaborate geography and endless mystical genealogies of Middle Earth."
I don't know if I'm going to be flattered because I've read the Silmarillon and delved into the Lost tales and Unfinished tales, and the tales of Tom Bombadil, thereby making me superior to the "weekend warriors" or insulted because I was not able to read all the tales in the Tales books or that I found most of the stories in the Tales books (that I own, I did not buy all of them) boring and thereby making me less than a "Uruk-hai". I'm just an ordinary orc I guess. Just take the article with a grain of salt however because it's final paragraph is:
Just heed this warning: The Children of Húrin is a darker, bitterer tale than we're used to seeing from Tolkien. Its hero is proud and imperfect and willful — more Boromir than Frodo — and his story is full of accidents and disasters, poisoned barbs and ruinous betrayals and grievous misunderstandings. Which makes sense: after all, if the good guys had beaten the forces of darkness in the First Age, they wouldn't have been stuck with Sauron in the Third.
Which any Tolkien reader would know is incorrect. The good guys did defeat the forces of darkness in the First age, after all if they didn't, there would not have been a Third age.

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