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Christopher Tolkien: Dark Lord
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The Independent is reporting (in " Tolkien Jr completes Lord of Rings") that Christopher Tolkien has finished work on a new novel by his father, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Children of Húrin. Set to be released by HarperCollins on April 17th, the book
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Christopher Tolkien brought his father's life-work, The Silmarillion, to publication in 1977, four years after J.R.R. Tolkien died. In 1980, the younger Tolkien published Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, a collection of stories, story fragments, notes, and essays drawn from the immense archive of material left behind by the elder Tolkien. From 1983 through 1996, Christopher published the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth, which followed in painstaking detail the evolutionary development of the stories which eventually gave rise to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
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Tolkien fans are sure to treasure this tale of Middle-earth's First Age, which appeared in incomplete forms in the posthumously published The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. Those earlier books... edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher, only hinted at the depth and power of the tragic story of Túrin and Niënor, the children of Húrin, the lord of Dor-lómin, who achieved renown for having confronted Morgoth, who was the master of Sauron, the manifestation of evil in the Lord of the Rings. The lengthy and fatiguing battle against Morgoth forms the backdrop for the moving account of the life of Húrin's eldest son, Túrin, a valiant but proud warrior whose all too human frailties augur an unhappy end. Perhaps Tolkien's most three-dimensional figure, Túrin flees from the elven kingdom where he has grown into manhood, sheltered from the forces of evil, after he's unjustly judged responsible for another's death. He hides his true identity as he begins a new life as leader of a band of outlaws, a choice that has dire consequences when he crosses paths with a family member after many years of separation. Deftly balancing thrilling battles with moments of introspection, Tolkien's vivid and gripping narrative reaffirms his primacy in fantasy literature.
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Christopher Tolkien has spent the past 30 years working on "The Children of Hurin," an epic tale his father began in 1918 and later abandoned. Excerpts of "The Children of Hurin," which includes the elves and dwarves of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and other works, have been published before.
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'The Children of Hurin' takes place 6,000 years before the Council of Elrond (a pivotal event in 'The Lord of the Rings'), as Christopher Tolkien points out in his useful introduction. Its setting is not your great-great-grandfather's Middle Earth, but the forests and mountains of Beleriand, a country that was drowned, like Atlantis, eons before various Bagginses and their ilk populated the Shire.
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The War of the Ring: The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Three (HoMe Vol VIII), by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 1990. This includes some words and explanation of material that is seen in LotR including a little more Dwarvish and some Orkish. Abbreviated: WR
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