The drama of The Lord of the Rings is hobbit-sized compared with the grandeur of the older tales Tolkien worked on all his life, and which his son, Christopher, has devoted more than 30 years to cataloguing and collating.

On the one hand, Tolkien was always the bright-eyed child who thought the branch-cutting army of Shakespeare’s Dunsinane was a con trick, and “wanted to devise a setting by which the trees might really march to war”. On the other hand, he was the Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon frustrated that England didn’t have a proper mythical past and determined to make up the difference himself. The Children of Hurin is but one story from this epic “legendarium”, as Tolkien called it.

Other folklorists

The Finns still hold a holiday to celebrate Elias Lonnrot’s Kalevala epic, collected in the 1830s, while Jacob Grimm tried to recover German roots through a dictionary, a grammar, a mythology and, of course, fairy tales. William Morris wrote an English version of the Volsunga saga, a 13th-century Icelandic prose version of a story thought to be based on happenings in central Europe in the fifth century. Featuring Sigurd the hero and Fafnir the dragon, it was condensed by Andrew Lang in his Red Fairy Tale Book, which inspired Tolkien as a child. In Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Sigurd and Fafnir became Siegfried and Fafner. Although Tolkien disclaimed similarities with Wagner (“Both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases”), there are strong links between Sigurd’s story and The Children of Hurin. Ever increasing circles: JRR Tolkien’s ‘epic legendarium’ is finally coming to fruition

The Inklings
The Inklings were a group of scholarly friends, CS Lewis among them, who gave Tolkien his first excited audience. Lewis, who gave The Hobbit rave reviews, was, according to his biographer, AN Wilson, the “first Tolkien addict”.

The Silmarillion
Published in 1977, this extraordinary book (“mad in the best sense,” wrote The New York Times) is the simplest version of Tolkien’s overall vision and contains the first published account of Hurin and his children. Written in a solemn, insistent, King James cadence, it moves from famously dull creation myth to the relentless and tragic story of how Morgoth, Tolkien’s Lucifer figure, brings evil into the world; how elves and men battle him vainly; and how, eventually, the gods join them, conquer Morgoth and shut him outside the Door of Night for ever. Sauron, the Dark Lord of The Lord of the Rings, was Morgoth’s lieutenant. The human warrior Hurin will not yield to Morgoth, so his children are cursed. Hurin’s son, Turin, is a constant thorn in Morgoth’s side, but the curse follows Turin as he kills friends, unknowingly marries his sister and finally commits suicide.

Christopher Tolkien and the legendarium
Tolkien worked on these stories all his life, leaving behind a corpus of notes and different versions. His son, Christopher, also an Oxford don, has dealt with these like a traditional scholar, evaluating competing versions of different legends. The Silmarillion was followed, questioned and clarified by Unfinished Tales (1980) and the 12-volume History of Middle-earth (1983-96). These are full of scraps, notes and hints of what Tolkien actually intended to say about Hurin’s family. Indeed, Christopher’s son, Adam, recently called The Children of Hurin “the completed puzzle, in a sense”.

What’s missing from The Silmarillion?
Don’t read this if you’re afraid of spoilers: some accounts say Tolkien intended to end with a final battle inspired by the Norse Ragnarok. Morgoth will escape back into the world in the last strand of time, where he will be slain by a returning Turin. It would be a more upbeat ending, certainly.

Who is Turin based on?
Tolkien said that Turin’s story was “an attempt to reorganise the tale of Kullervo the hapless into a form of my own”. Kullervo appears in the Finnish Kalevala. Both characters were born after their fathers were lost in battle (though Hurin, Turin’s father, was imprisoned rather than killed). Both commit accidental incest; and, in both cases, the sister throws herself into a river. Both Kullervo and Turin die by falling on their sentient black swords, both of which speak, and agree to drink their masters’ blood. There are other sources, too: the battles of Turin and Glaurung the dragon echo Beowulf, but they are closer to the Norse saga of Sigurd and Fafnir. Sigurd digs a trench and stabs Fafnir from beneath; Turin hides in a gorge and does the same. Both are abandoned by their fearful companions, Regin and Dorlas respectively.

Is it a tragedy?
Turin has a terrible time, but to be a classically tragic figure, one has to be responsible for one’s own misfortune. While Feanor, The Silmarillion’s central figure, brings tragedy on the elves by swearing a terrible and unbreakable oath, Turin can be seen as the unfortunate victim of Morgoth’s curse. On the other hand, like Feanor, he consistently exhibits the central tragic flaw of hubris. Tolkien’s view may be guessed by his analysis of the word ofermod in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. Byrhtnoth of Essex exhibited ofermod , or “excessive spirit”, which courted and led to disaster in the fight against the Vikings. In Danish, as Tolkien the linguist well knew, overmod means “hubris”.

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