Customer Reviews
Correcting Christopher Tolkien's problems with other published works - By: J. W. Treadaway, 06 Jan 2009 
The problem for me with all the posthumously published works of JRR Tolkien is that they have been plagued by two major problems.
Initially the two items first out of the traps - the Silmarillion & Unfinished Tales - both suffered from a lack of faith from the publishers. In consequence, they were a mish-mash of material collectedin an ad hoc kind of way. Elements of JRRT's background materialin the former volume have chunks taken out (for brevity, I would guess) which then appearin Unfinished Tales (in an "Oh - & on his way to Gondolin, Tuor did such-and-such" kind of way). So lack of faith by the original publishers resultedin two, 'bitty' incoherent volumes. So that's problem number one.
But then things got much worse... These problems were then compounded by Christopher Tolkien with his determined effort to garner every single, interminable scraping from his fathers rubbish bins into extra volumes of material - much of which his father had already rejected & which add almost nothing to the overall story & background. And yet - infuriatingly - each of the add on volumes justifies its existence by including the odd nugget, the occasional gem.
Years ago I said to anyone that would listen who was a fan of JRRT's work that what was needed was a separate series of books with the stories & topics collected together properly from ALL of the source material but (and here's the important bit)in a non contradictory way & with some story telling cohesion. Sure if Christopher had to add a few "and then he" type bridging sentences, I largely don't care. If the meat's there, I'll chew through the odd bit of connecting gristle...
So - with thatin mind - what should be done (I usually say) is for Christopher Tolkien to produce several volumes called (for example)
Ainulindale
Valar Quenta
Quenta Silmarillion
Akallabeth
The Rings of Power & the Third Age
The Fourth Age
Other stories & Histories
Lays of Beleriand etc etc
That kind of thing.
And each of those volumes should contain coherent, non-contradictory material culled from ALL of the other works - everything from the LotR indexes to The Book of Lost Tales, Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Lost road... everything that can be made to fit.
And - just when I think no one listens (which I know that they don't, but...) what happens? The Children of Hurin happens. And it's exactly what was needed, I believe: CoH is an assembled, proper 'story' made from components that JRRT actually wrote. I don't care if it was assembled, Frankenstein's monster style & stuck together with sticky tape, it works as a good read & that's the important bit.
All Christopher needs to do is lots more of the same. Stop treating his fathers every scratching as the Dead Sea Scrolls & start ordering it & republishing the best materialin such a way as to correct the publishing gaffs he's made with the rest of his father's legacy to english literature.
If he did it properly - like Children of Hurin - I'd buy the lot.
Again...
It's all been said before - By: Roald Andresen, 21 Oct 2008 
The story has been told, & the critics have spoken!
This is a book that both Tolkien fans & others can very well do without.
It is simple, dull & absolutely not engaging. I was extremely disappointed.
re-hashing for profit - By: J. E. Holmes, 21 Sep 2008 if you already have "unfinished tales" then you already own this book , give or take a few editorial tweaks......Tolkien is become a rip-off industry
Unreadable - By: M. Evans, 30 Aug 2008 Okay, I've read The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings & thought they were fantastic, but this was just terrible. I couldn't get past the first chapter. The prose is dreadful "so & so (unpronouncable name) "was the son of so-and so" (another unpronouncable name) "decended from so-and so" (again unprnouncable) - you get the idea. Just unreadable, turgid rubbish. You'll need the patience of a saint to get through this. Really, life's too short to waste on this ponderous bore-a-thon. Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!
Not Your Father's Hurin - By: Edward Waters, 24 Aug 2008 
This is a tale of unrelenting tragedy. Drawn from the history of the First Age of Middle-earth, it tells of how Morgoth, the original Dark Lord to whom Sauron was but a lieutenant, wreaked appalling vengeance upon the family of the man Hurin, chiefly for his refusal to betray a great hidden city of the elves who were his allies. Readers acquainted with the story from a more summary version published three decades earlierin THE SILMARILLION will have some idea what to expect. They will also understand the part these events ultimately did playin the fall of virtually every elven kingdomin the vast land of Beleriand before it sank beneath the sea, still millennia prior to the events recountedin THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
This new telling, however, differs from the formerin at least two respects. First & most obvious, it greatly develops the details so that we come to know the doomed players more intimately, better appreciating both their flaws & their virtues, & thus feeling the tragedy more personally when it manifests itselfin turn after turn of their lives.
Second & perhaps more subtle is what this version leaves out. THE SILMARILLION continued the story further, revealing later events which, while not negating these present disasters, at least mitigated them somewhat, suggesting that evil's triumph was indeed only for a season. (There were also poignant touches, such as the extraordinary future of a certain gravesite, which lent a melancholy beauty to the sorrow.) Here, however, Christopher Tolkien, the author's son & editor, chooses to end the tale at a point which before had occurredin mid-paragraph. When I first glanced through HURIN & then reacquainted myself with the earlier publication, I seriously questioned this decision.
It has been said that part of Shakespeare's geniusin writing his own tragedies was his choice to abstain from moralization. Rarely did the Bard attempt to explain a character's fatein terms of what he or she ought to have done, or of some divine wisdom which, if glimpsed, might explain or even vindicate the suffering. Shakespeare simply showed tragedy with all the seemingly pointless capriciousness of real life, & left it to his audience to speculate further.
Tolkien was not Shakespeare, however. While even THE HOBBIT & LOTR are haunted by melancholy & a sense of loss, Tolkien believedin a transcendent Sovereignty & argued eloquently for some elementin such tales which, however faintly, foreshadowed a distant 'Eucatastrophe' (i.e., happy ending) to come, 'giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.' By cutting off the story of Hurin's family where he does, Christopher denies it that consolation.
Having said this, I must make a confession: When I had read HURIN through properly from the beginning & came again to the final two pages, I broke down & sobbed. The same juncture had had no such impact on mein THE SILMARILLION. I may prefer the elder Tolkien's tempering of tragedy with hope & question the philosophical implications of ending this story so abruptly; yet I can not deny that doing so made the bitterness of that end immeasurably more powerful. For a moment I FELT the despair of those who had endured such relentless doom, who left the world knowing nothing of some vaguely conceived consolationin the far future. While that moment lasted, for me their suffering had become very real.
If there is, as Tolkien believed, a 'Joy beyond the walls of the world', the heartbreaking fact remains that there are those who live & die and, for any number of reasons, fail utterly to apprehend it. Consolation may be, yet some are never consoled. THE CHILDREN OF HURIN is not a pleasant book, yet it captures something of the seeming futilityin which so many souls have passed through the world. At the least, it reminds those who find & livein hope not to grow callous toward those who are cheated of it.
