I recently failed to complete two novels: James Michener’s The Source and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t finish The Source because I was reading it at the time of my father’s death. Afterward I couldn’t concentrate on it. As of now I don’t think I’d be able to read certain sections of it without hearing in my head the phone ring and my mother’s voice telling me that she was driving to the hospital. There were large sections of Gravity’s Rainbow that I loved, but there were also sections I found horribly impenetrable and frankly overwritten and obscene. Even Freud didn’t call everything a phallus. I was sad to put it down because the parts that worked did so at a level few novels can reach. I just wish Pynchon did some more editing. Perhaps I’ll return to both of these novels one day.

I did recently finish J. R. R. Tolkien’s posthumous Middle Earth narrative, The Children of Húrin. His son, Christopher Tolkien, edited the work as he has done to all Tolkien publications since his J. R. R. Tolkien’s death in 1973. The basic story of The Children of Húrin has been published before and I read one version in The Silmarillion. But knowledge of The Silmarillion is not necessary as Tolkien had planned on fully elaborating this narrative along with a few others before he died.

The Children of Húrin tells the story briefly of Húrin, and focuses more on his children. For the fans of The Lord of the Rings, the characters here are far different. The races are the same: elves, men, dwarves, orcs, etc. The geography is different for the story takes place in Middle Earth before the great flood that destroyed much of the land and shaped the Middle Earth with which most people are familiar. Christopher Tolkien has written an excellent introduction, guiding fans of the trilogy into the larger history of Middle Earth, but the beginning of the novel feels like one is entering entirely new ground. All the names are different and readers cannot initially anchor themselves onto familiar characters or places such as Bilbo or the Shire (Hobbits don’t even appear in this tale). It is worth it, however, to make it through these initial difficulties for the story of Túrin and his sister Niënor is grand and tragic. Tolkien shows us again how indebted we are to his vast imagination. The story sits well with our ancient myths: it feels both old and extremely immediate at the same time. The Children of Húrin revisits important themes of Tolkien’s works: the worth of valor and loyalty, the evil of pride.

But I suppose the most important question is how does it compare to The Hobbit, the trilogy, and perhaps The Simarillion? The Children of Húrin most resembles The Lord of the Rings. Unlike The Hobbit, the story is not for children. Tolkien is at his darkest and most violent here. Fans of Smaug from The Hobbit will gladly celebrate the return of a dragon into the tale. Unlike The Simarillion, this novel is far easier to read. The Simarillion’s scope from the creation of the world to the last events of The Lord of the Rings make it difficult to hold everything together and it reads much more like ancient history than a modern narrative, which is precisely the point. The Children of Húrin works as a self-contained narrative and goes into its characters psychology much more like the trilogy, though not as in depth as the trilogy. The characters here are exciting to follow, but I did not grow attached to them as I did with Gandalf, Aragorn, and Sam. That perhaps has to do with the scope of the story. Unlike the trilogy, which fully elaborates just a couple of years in the lives of its characters, in The Children of Húrin, we follow Túrin over his lifetime from boy to an adult.

I know that there has been some criticism that Tolkien took it too easy on his characters in The Lord of the Rings. (I don’t agree, but that is for another day.) Those critics will likely be silenced with The Children of Húrin. Tolkien has devised believable but horrible tortures for his characters, much along the same psychological lines we find in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Characters here have to face an evil that can destroy them in more than physical ways. The main villain is Morgoth, who was Sauron’s boss, and who, we are told, is so evil that he swears by himself because there is no greater evil to invoke. The Children of Húrin follows these heroic and tragic characters as they try to stand against the tide of evil in their day.

For those who want more of Middle Earth, but were turned off by the density of The Simarillion, The Children of Húrin is a great and entertaining tale of the land long before the Rings of Power existed.