THE CHILDREN OF HURIN by JRR Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

HarperCollins £18.99

Mim’s house on Amon Rudh is given the name Echad i Sedryn. The sword Anglachel is forged anew in Nargothrond and called Gurthang. Turin (the story’s irascible hero) is known in Middle-earth as Neithan, Gorthol, Agarwaen, Adanedhel, Mormegil and Turambar. A taste for this kind of stuff is as innocuous as collecting train numbers or cricket records, but, although JRR Tolkien aficionados will be thrilled, others will find The Children of Hurin barely readable. Fifty pages of explanatory material, crammed with chronologies, genealogies and lists of battles, topographical details and more-than-human powers, merely create a miasma of allusion and demand a loyal acceptance of the myth.

The book is the “artificial” reworking of Tolkien’s many abandoned attempts to tell this tale, including 2,000 lines of lacklustre alliterative verse, some of which is unwisely quoted here. Versions have been published before; what is new is a continuous narrative devised by the author’s son.

Nothing really happens, although there is a tedious succession of events. Turin leaves home and slaughters large numbers of baddies. Time and again we read that “he struck down all before him” or “slew the last of the Easterlings that remained”. He also wears the Helm that “guarded any who wore it from wound or death”, kills a dragon and marries his sister. These events can, of course, be matched in Wagner or the Finnish epic of the Kalevala. In the Ring Cycle, however, every bar contributes to a constantly shifting alteration of mood and meaning, whereas here we are too often escorted through monotonous passages of annalistic prose.

The characters are straightforwardly conventional. The wise are wise; the brave, brave; the noble, noble; and the wicked, wicked. A girl’s “laughter was like the sound of the merry stream”. Turin’s face is “more beautiful than any other among mortal men”, and a girl who loves him is “golden-haired after the manner of the house of Finar-fin”. When, after a long separation, he meets and falls in love with his sister, she is “tall, and her eyes were blue, her hair fine gold” — now there’s a surprise. Lineage is all and virtue is hereditary.

Turin is captivated by “the Sindarin tongue”, “older, and . . . richer in beautiful words”. Tolkien endorses this equation of archaism with beauty, but doesn’t show why it is more desirable to write “dwelt” than “lived”, to describe a sword that “would cleave all earth-dolven iron” or to have people say, “Await me here until haply I return.” Phrases such as “the dark lord upon a dark throne” or “their dark doom’s shadow” recur with wearisome insistence. Sentences with a gnomic brevity derived from the sagas are overwhelmed by pages of self-indulgent feebleness. Fans will doubtless read on with passionate piety, but for others it is an act of painful penitence.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £17.09 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist