When the shops opened in London yesterday, Marcus Harrison and Richard Hayward achieved something special in the annals of fandom.

Not for them the camaraderie of camping out for concert tickets, a Playstation or the latest Harry Potter. They had endured a night vigil for a new book by an author who died 34 years ago: J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Children of Húrin is the first complete book by the writer of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit since The Silmarillionwas published posthumously in 1977. Tolkien’s son, Christopher, 82, has compiled it from manuscripts written by his father over half a century.

Some purist fans disapprove of the son’s attempts to extend Tolkien’s literary legacy but he claims that the 259-page novel is entirely his father’s work and he has intervened only to make grammatical adjustments.

The Children of Húrin is another epic tale of magic and warfare set in Middle Earth, but its central storyline, inspired by the Kalevala, a Finnish folk tale, is unremittingly bleak and features incest and a double suicide. Tolkien started work on it in 1918, while recovering from trench fever contracted during the Battle of the Somme. He later abandoned the work to pursue the stories that made him one of the world’s most popular authors, but he continued to return to the earlier tale, set 6,000 years before The Lord of the Rings. The story was touched on briefly in The Silmarillion.

The new generation of Tolkien enthusiasts created by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy may not all be ready for it. David Brawn, HarperCollins’ publishing director for estates, said: “This possibly isn’t the book to start on but it should perform well.”

Early indications at Waterstone’s bookshop on Piccadilly were encouraging. Mr Harrison, 31, who works in an outdoor-clothing shop in Southampton, had pitched his folding stool outside at 5.40pm on Monday. Mr Hayward arrived from Salisbury two hours later and they were joined by the Harris family from Weston-super-Mare at 2am.

More than 50 Tolkien fans had arrived by the time the shop opened at 8.30am. Five actors dressed as orcs kept them entertained until Christopher Tolkien’s son, Adam, and Alan Lee, the book’s illustrator, arrived for the book signing.

Later, clutching his £60 deluxe slipcased edition, Mr Harrison said he was delighted: “The films jolly everything along but they were simply not dark enough for Tolkien.”

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