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Book Description
Return to Middle Earth.....
The Children of Hurin is full of magical Tolkien trademarks you'd expect,
elves, eagles, dwarves, rampaging orcs, swords that glow and fire breathing
dragons, not to mention epic battles between good and evil, rich
landscapes, lifelong friendships and forbidden love, this book will appeal
to MiddleEarth fanatics and families alike.
Illustrated by Alan Lee, who won an Oscar for his artwork on The Return of
the King. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Synopsis
Painstakingly restored from Tolkien's manuscripts and presented for the first time as a fully continuous and stand alone story, the epic tale of The Children of Hurin will reunite fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, dragons and Dwarves, eagles and Orcs, and the rich landscape and characters unique to Tolkien. There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before The Lord of the Rings, and the story told in this book is set in the great country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West: lands where Treebeard once walked, but which were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the First Age of the World. In that remote time Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in the vast fortress of Angband, the Hells of Iron, in the North; and the tragedy of Turin and his sister Nienor unfolded within the shadow of the fear of Angband and the war waged by Morgoth against the lands and secret cities of the Elves. Their brief and passionate lives were dominated by the elemental hatred that Morgoth bore them as the children of Hurin, the man who had dared to defy and to scorn him to his face.

Against them he sent his most formidable servant, Glaurung, a powerful spirit in the form of a huge wingless dragon of fire. Into this story of brutal conquest and flight, of forest hiding-places and pursuit, of resistance with lessening hope, the Dark Lord and the Dragon enter in direly articulate form. Sardonic and mocking, Glaurung manipulated the fates of Turin and Nienor by lies of diabolic cunning and guile, and the curse of Morgoth was fulfilled. The earliest versions of this story by J.R.R. Tolkien go back to the end of the First World War and the years that followed; but long afterwards, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, he wrote it anew and greatly enlarged it in complexities of motive and character: it became the dominant story in his later work on Middle-earth. But he could not bring it to a final and finished form. In this book Christopher Tolkien has constructed, after long study of the manuscripts, a coherent narrative without any editorial invention.

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48 Reviews 5 star:  (24) 4 star:  (9) 3 star:  (10) 2 star:  (4) 1 star:  (1)           Average Customer Review (48 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   152 of 156 people found the following review helpful: Marvelous novel, stylistic bridge between THE SILMARILLION and the Hobbit Cycle., 19 April 2007 By  Mike London "MAC" (Oxford, UK) - See all my reviews    This review is from: The Children of Hurin (Hardcover) A fan once wrote to Tolkien, saying that he only read THE LORD OF THE RINGS during the Lent season, because the novel is so hard and bitter. For those unfamiliar with the storyline of THE CHILDREN OF HURIN, many will be surprised at how dark the "new novel" actually is. CoH is much bitterer than its famous predecessor. The literary world was shocked at the announcement a new Tolkien novel was being published. After all, Tolkien died 34 years prior to CoH's publication date. Reactions varied from trepidation and fear, to charges that the Estate is trying to milk the pubic for more money, to sheer excitement that, beyond all odds, we're getting new Tolkien. Hollywood is eying it greedily, though the Estate is not interested in selling the film rights any time soon. Depending on where you stand in Tolkien fandom will largely define your reactions to the story. First, some quick facts: *CoH can be read independently of Tolkien's other works, thanks to C. Tolkien's excellent introduction, which explains the context in which the novel occurs in Tolkien's universe. Though an overall knowledge of Tolkien's legendarium is helpful, due to the story's strength it's not required. *CoH is much darker than the Hobbit Cycle and is tragic on a Shakespearin level. Even Shakespeare's characters have a better fate than the Children of Hurin. *CoH's principal plot focuses on the dark lord Morgoth's curse on Turin and Neinor, the Children of Hurin, for Hurin's defiance against Morgoth. Morgoth is Tolkien's equivalent of Satan, who Sauron is a mere servant too. *CoH is easier to read than THE SILMARILLION, though CoH still employs in places the archaic style found in that book. Stylistically CoH bears similarities to both LOTR and THE SILMARILLION, mingling the archaic style of the later with the more conventional novelistic approach of the former. *Although the novel has been "reconstructed" by Christopher Tolkien, unlike certain elements of the published SILMARILLION, there has been no editorial interpolation or invention. Other than minor grammatical errors and some brief transitional passages, the text is entirely as Tolkien conceived it. *Approx 25% of the text has never been published before. The remaining 75% has been published in THE SILMARILLION and UNFINISHED TALES, though Christopher Tolkien notes there are several changes to the text that do not appear in UNFINISHED TALES *Though widely publicized Tolkien began this in 1918, almost all text used was written AFTER LOTR was composed *There is a swift narrative urgency. While THE SILMARILLION stands as a broad overview of Tolkien's mythology with hundreds of characters vying for the readers' attention, CoH focuses on a well-defined cast of main characters. There are three primary readerships that will be approaching THE CHILDREN OF HURIN. Depending on what group you belong to will largely define your reaction to the work. The first group is that portion of Tolkien's fanbase who has read the Hobbit Cycle, and most if not all the posthumous publications regarding his legendarium (THE SILMARILLION, UNFINISHED TALES, and the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH series). These are the hardcore Tolkien fans. This group will overall be quite pleased with the work. Due to the largely unfinished nature of Tolkien's legendarium, it's nice to read a completed version of one of the First Age's central legends. Most of the text will be known to them, as it has already appeared in UNFINISHED TALES and THE SILMARILLION. There are several stretches that have not been published before, or the material is handled differently than in previous publications. The story is already well known to this group, and there are no plot surprises. I will say, however, even though I knew how the story ended, when I finished reading CoH, I was moved by the sheer pathos of the tragedy, moreso than when I read the other, compressed versions. The second group have largely read only the Hobbit Cycle, and found the posthumous books dry, difficult reading.. It is for this group, and the third group, that C. Tolkien primarily did this project for. Due to the arid, remote style of THE SILMARILLION, and the diffuse, contradictory, and unfinished nature of most of HoME, as well as the heavy editorial content, much of Tolkien's mythology remains unknown to the casual reader. CoH's aim was to make the First Age legends more accessible to the general reader. For those of this group unfamiliar with the story, many will be surprised its darkness. There will be readers who find Turin's tragedy off-putting, but other readers will be very moved. The third group knows Tolkien primarily through the Peter Jackson films. This group will probably have the most far ranging variety of reactions of the three main groups, from sheer delight at the story to utter bewilderment. Those looking for another Hobbit type story will be invariably disappointed. This group will probably be the most surprised at the darkness of the story. Overall, CoH is a fine novel, and a perfect bridging link between his most famous work (LOTR) and, as Tom Shippey says, the work of his heart (the Silmarillion). I also feel that CoH, in terms of style, is, to put it in vulgar terms, Silmarillion light and LOTR heavy, and serves as a primer for what to expect within the Silmarillion. While CoH certainly shares several main hallmarks of the Silmarillion style, especially the beginning chapters, the book reads quite well, and bridges the remote style and wide focus of the Silmarillion with the more conventional novel approach of the Hobbit cycle. CoH also has the benefit of being a product of long study of the manuscripts to produce the most accurate version to Tolkien's intentions, something that cannot, unfortunately, be said of the 1977 SILMARILLION. Will CoH become a major addition to the fantasy canon of literature? Only time will tell. But if I was a betting man, I think time will be very gracious to this last novel from the father of modern fantasy.  Comments (3) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   87 of 90 people found the following review helpful: Good... but..., 27 April 2007 By  T. Edmunds (UK) - See all my reviews    This review is from: The Children of Hurin (Hardcover) I've been a fan of Tolkien for years and enjoyed this book very much. But I think I only did so because I have allowed myself to become some immersed in the Tolkien mythology. For me, I liked the extra richness it brought to stories we already know and reading it had that comforting feeling of slipping under a warm blanket on a cold day. Having said that, I'm not entirely sure that The Children of Hurin actually adds all that much to the story as previously presented in the Silmarillion. Yes, there was a bit more dialogue, but the sweep of the narrative was still very broad and there wasn't actually anything much new here. Perhaps more seriously, one of the reasons I think I liked the book was because I know the mythology and back story from the Silmarillion, including all the different names and characters, inside out. My suspicion is that if I'd come to it 'cold' as it were, the procession of new names and references to other parts of the mythology would have been close to impenetrable - as some of the other reviews on this page suggest. So. Here's the rub. There's not a great deal of 'added value' here if you've already read the Silmarillion, unless you're a Tolkien obsessive like me. But at the same time, you kind of need