THE CHILDREN OF HÚRIN by J. R. R. Tolkien edited by Christopher Tolkien

DON’T TURN THE PAGE yet. This is not just another anthology of scribblings from Tolkien’s bottom drawer, scaffolded with annotations and undergirt with footnotes. It is a complete novel, set in an imagined northern landscape; its reworking of myth and folktale is hardly peculiar in today’s literary world, though its diction has the formal archaism familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings. It is worthy of a readership beyond Tolkien devotees.

For sheer length of gestation this book is remarkable. Inspired by the Norse tale of Sigurd and Fafnir, Tolkien first wrote a story about a dragon in 1899, at the age of 7. At school he discovered the Kalevala, a Finnish epic poem, and by 1914 was trying to turn the tale of Kullervo into “a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’s romances”. By 1919 he had combined these elements in what became the tale of Túrin Turambar, the embittered hero who slays the dragon Glaurung, but whose triumph is instantly shattered by the suicide of his wife, now revealed as his lost sister Niënor, whom he joins in death.

These are the children of the title; their father Húrin is another mythic figure, the man who defies a god and watches the resulting curse play out in his children’s fate. When the author died in 1973 he left several versions, all incomplete, from which his son has woven this coherent narrative.

Once the darkness has settled on this tale, it rarely lifts: there are no comfortable inns on the bleak forest ways. Many of the characters die violently, and there is no happy ending (or at least, it is outside this book, in the largely unwritten tale of Eärendel the mariner). In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and friends are preserved from disaster by happy coincidence or the workings of providence — but for the hapless children of Húrin every chance is an ill fortune.

It is strange that Tolkien, a believer in Christian redemption who coined the term “eu-catastrophe” (sudden happy ending), should relish such unrelenting gloom; but as a story-teller he was enthralled by the tale of Kullervo. However much he humanised the characters and transformed the plot, the unknowing incest and the double suicide were inevitable. Túrin’s fate is overdetermined. Like Oedipus, he is doomed by the curse on his father, though the curse here is the personal and seemingly disproportionate malice of a fallen archangel, mediated by a malevolent dragon. Like Kullervo, he is doomed by his own flawed character: reckless, brooding, unyielding in pride.

The book is beautiful, but other than the atmospheric illustrations by Alan Lee, and a (mercifully short) discussion of the editorial process, much of what lies between the covers was actually published in either The Silmarillion (1977) or Unfinished Tales (1980). Yet this new, whole version serves a valuable purpose (beyond pleasing the fans and the publishers). Peter Jackson’s film trilogy raised the profile of The Lord of the Ringsas a book, but there was nothing obvious to read next. The Hobbit is fun, but it is written for children. The Silmarillion is a bit of a hotchpotch, and its hieratic opening sections put many readers off. The 12-volume History of Middle-earth is strictly for the specialist. In The Children of Húrin we could at last have the successor to The Lord of the Rings that was so earnestly and hopelessly sought by Tolkien’s publishers in the late 1950s.

There are flaws, naturally. Occasionally the prose is too stilted, the dialogue too portentous, the unexplained names too opaque: the first mention of Maedhros is wholly mysterious, as the sons of Fëanor are not named in the otherwise useful introduction; a plant called aeglos is never described; and if Lothron is “the fifth month”, as the index says, is that our May or the Roman Quintilis (July)?

There is no list of illustrations, so the reader must guess what is depicted in the plates. But these are trivia. As a nearly finished work by Tolkien, the Great Unfinisher, this book deserves to eclipse almost all his other posthumous writings, and stand as a worthy memorial to the imagination of Tolkien, the Great Subcreator.

Jeremy Marshall is the co-author of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (OUP) HarperCollins, £18.99; 320pp £16.99 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 or buy here

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