Guy Gavriel Kay has given the 2021 Tolkien Lecture

Fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay has given the 2021 Tolkien Lecture, at the invitation of Pembroke College, Oxford.

Kay started his fantasy career in 1974 when he was asked by Christopher Tolkien to assist in the editing and preparation of his late father's book, The Silmarillion, for publication. Kay worked on the project in 1974-75, providing editing assistance and helping write a few passages to link areas of Tolkien's material which had no such material. The Silmarillion was published in 1977 to success.

Kay later became a highly acclaimed fantasy writer in his own right, penning a trilogy called The Fionavar Tapestry, a duology called The Sarantine Mosaic and numerous standalones, comprising Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, The Lions of Al-Rassan, The Last Light of the Sun, Ysabel, Under Heaven, River of Stars, Children of Earth and Sky and A Brightness Long Ago. His next novel is scheduled for publication in 2022.

RIP Christopher Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien, the third son and literary heir of J.R.R. Tolkien, has sadly passed away at the age of 95.

Born in 1924, Christopher was the youngest of J.R.R. Tolkien's three sons (he is survived by a younger sister, Priscilla, born in 1929) and the most like his father in character and interests. J.R.R. Tolkien had already begun writing stories about Middle-earth in 1917, but it was his decision to write a children's book set in the same world - The Hobbit - around 1929-30 which attracted the interest of his children. Christopher was particularly taken by the story, keen to hear how it ended and helping his father type up the manuscript when it was accepted for publication in 1937.

It was Christopher whom his father confided in during the writing of The Lord of the Rings. In 1944 Christopher joined the RAF and was sent to South Africa for his flight training. His father had been struggling with the huge book but Christopher's absence inspired him to write the sequence which became the second part of The Two Towers, charting Frodo and Sam's journey to Mordor. He wrote up each chapter and sent it (with notes and annotations) to Christopher as a serial to help him pass the time between training operations.

With the end of WWII and his return to the UK, Christopher studied English Literature at Trinity College, Oxford, and joined the Inklings literary group, of which his father had been a founding member. In the 1950s, Christopher acted as an informal editor and map-maker on The Lord of the Rings, producing the maps of Middle-earth and the Shire that accompanied the novels (at one point staying away for twenty-four hours solid to hit a production deadline). He continued to act as his father's advisor and confidante during the extremely long gestation of The Silmarillion. In the late 1960s, when J.R.R. Tolkien realised he might not live long enough to complete the book, he granted Christopher permission to complete the book for publication.

After J.R.R. Tolkien passed away in 1973, Christopher set about preparing The Silmarillion for publication. Assisted by future fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, Christopher combined several of his father's manuscripts into a working outline which then formed the basis of The Silmarillion as published in 1977. During this process Christopher collected a number of other manuscripts, essays, short stories and notes written by his father about Middle-earth that were not part of The Silmarillion proper. Christopher edited and released these in 1980 as Unfinished Tales, the fourth and final of the canonical Middle-earth texts.

Despite the monumental achievement of assembling and understanding J.R.R. Tolkien's often-contradictory and confusing morass of drafts, partially-completed manuscripts and half-scribbled maps into working texts, Christopher continued to second-guess and worry about his editorial decisions. In the interest of maximum transparency, he decided to make all of his father's Middle-earth material publicly available so that other Tolkien scholars could look through the manuscripts and see if they came to different conclusions. This resulted in the massive, twelve-part History of Middle-earth series, which assembled every single one of J.R.R. Tolkien's extant writings on Middle-earth with extensive analysis and commentary (including four volumes dedicated almost entirely to the writing of The Lord of the Rings). The series was published between 1983 and 1996.

Christopher Tolkien was sceptical over the value of film, television and video game adaptations of his father's work. As his father had sold the TV, film and media rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in 1969, Christopher was unable to prevent such projects from moving forwards, but as the head of the Tolkien Estate he barred other Estate members from approving of or supporting these endeavours. When his son Simon travelled to New Zealand and visited the set of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, Christopher disowned him and the two did not speak for many years, although they eventually reconciled.

Christopher also refused to sell the film or TV rights to The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, despite interest from production companies. In the wake of Jackson's movies, Christopher did release "selected cuts" from Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth as three approachable, commercial editions for the more casual reader: The Children of Hurin (2007), Beren & Luthien (2017) and The Fall of Gondolin (2018).

Christopher Tolkien resigned as chair of the Tolkien Estate in August 2017. Shortly afterwards, Amazon and the Tolkien Estate reached a new agreement for the production of a new TV series set roughly 5,000 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings: The Second Age is currently in production in New Zealand for possible release in 2021 or 2022.

Christopher Tolkien spent the latter decades of his life living in France. In 2016 he was awarded the Bodley Medal for his services to literature. He is survived by his second wife, Baille, three children (Simon, Adam and Rachel) and two grandchildren.

Christopher Tolkien is arguably the most important editor of fantasy fiction of the last century. Without his father's trust, it is entirely possible that The Silmarillion and the other writings of his father would never have been published, and a vast swathe of background material about Middle-earth would have been effectively lost forever. Christopher is to be commended for his restraint in only editing and publishing work actually written by his father, when he could have cashed in by writing Middle-earth fiction of his own.

What the future holds for the Tolkien legacy is now uncertain, and with the Amazon TV series we may be seeing a more commercial future unfolding, but Christopher's work in furthering his father's legacy is almost beyond reproach, and he will be missed.

SF&F Questions: What works are part of the Middle-earth canon?

There are few words that strike fear deeper into the hearts of long-established fantasy fans and critics when someone starts asking about “the Middle-earth canon” and “what books are canon?” It’s a simple question, but the answer is long, complex and confusing.

What is a Canon?

In this sense, a canon is the definitive “official” version of what happened in a particular story, world or narrative created by an author. In very simplistic terms, the Harry Potter canon, for example, consists of the seven novels written by J.K. Rowling and other elements that she either wrote or approved of, such as the Pottermore website, spin-off books like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and the Cursed Child stage play. Fanfiction is clearly non-canon and the films represent a separate canon, as they are an adaptation of the book canon rather than a formal addition to it.

The definition of canon can also change. For example, when George Lucas created the film Star Wars in 1977 and then its sequels, he held that only the films were canon and nothing else was: the spin-off novels and comic books written by third parties were not canon and he would not be bound by their events and in most cases did not read them. However, by the late 1980s he had come to believe a single Star Wars canon was more desirable and he hired people to ensure consistency and continuity between all officially-authorised Star Wars products, including novels, video games and comic books. This scheme became known as the “Star Wars Expanded Universe,” with the idea being that if someone just wanted to watch the films that was fine, but if they wanted to delve deeper into the setting, they could find a huge amount of official, canonical material, information and new stories. When Lucas wrote the Star Wars prequel movie trilogy in 1999-2005, he used planets, races, terms, concepts and characters created in prior Expanded Universe work in the films. However, when Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney in 2012, Disney decided that maintaining the Expanded Universe and keeping it coherent with the new films they were planning was impossible, and they declared that none of the material outside of the films and the animated series were canon (to the fury of many fans).

The definition can also be argued. Frank Herbert published his hugely popular Dune series of science fiction novels between 1965 and 1986 before dying unexpectedly. He left behind a very small number of notes and outlines for a possible continuation of the series, leading to his son co-writing and publishing an enormous number of additional books in the setting. The canonical status of these latter books has been hotly debated, especially since it became clear that the depth and detail of Frank Herbert’s notes had been grossly exaggerated.

Tolkien’s Works

In most cases determining which works are canon and which are not is relatively easy, especially if the author is still alive to simply answer questions on this topic. In the case of J.R.R. Tolkien, this is of course sadly impossible, as he passed away in 1973. The complexities of the determining the Tolkien canon are considerably complicated by the fact that Tolkien only published two major (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) and two minor (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and The Road Goes Ever On) Middle-earth works whilst he was alive. After his death, his third son and literary executor Christopher sifted through his files to arrange the publication of The Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales (1980), The Children of Húrin (2007), Beren and Lúthien (2017), The Fall of Gondolin (2018), and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth series (1983-96). However, the publication of the latter series, which effectively presented some 5,000 Tolkien manuscript pages written over fifty-six years, meant that readers could make their own decisions over Christopher’s choices in assembling The Silmarillion and in some cases found them wanting, particularly regarding those papers and notes which came to light only after The Silmarillion’s publication, which in some cases Christopher acknowledged would have resulted in changes to the book if he’d known about them beforehand.

For this reason, a simple determination of the Middle-earth canon is extremely difficult and debatable. This is further complicated by J.R.R. Tolkien’s own willingness to adjust even published books to reflect later decisions. Most famously, he rewrote the chapter in The Hobbit where Bilbo Baggins confronts Gollum and finds the One Ring from its original, light-hearted style and tone to better reflect the darker and more sinister atmosphere of Lord of the Rings, and this appeared in a second edition of the book published in 1951. Certainly, some of the changes to The Silmarillion J.R.R. Tolkien was considering in the closing years of his life would have resulted in inconsistencies and incompatibilities with the published Lord of the Rings and Hobbit, suggesting that he may have produced third editions of both novels with revisions to take account of these developments. Thus, the reliance on a “fixed text” that canon usually relies on is absent in the matter of Middle-earth.

This has led to a controversial status for The Silmarillion as published. We know J.R.R. Tolkien was planning extensive, sweeping changes to the book at the time of his death, but these changes were not fully conceptualised or outlined. In the editing of The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien therefore defaulted to the incomplete version of the story his father had developed from c. 1930 to the publication of Lord of the Rings, incorporating some elements from later on but also having to go right back to the original Book of Lost Tales idea (developed by Tolkien from 1917 to c. 1924) since that is the only place where he sketched out the end of the story in any kind of detail, despite the major differences in tone and style to his later writings. The result, it has been complained is a hodgepodge of drafts, ideas and stories and certainly does not reflect J.R.R. Tolkien’s plans for the book at the time of his death. Christopher Tolkien’s point, well-taken, is that it was impossible to create a book compatible with his father’s intentions in 1973, so he defaulted to the most completed and “best-case” narrative he could develop. The debate will no doubt rage on eternally.

So, what is the Middle-earth canon?

Returning to the original question, the Middle-earth canon can be broken down into the following groups:


Primary Canon
These are books published and revised by J.R.R. Tolkien in his lifetime. Despite Tolkien’s willingness to revise and issue new versions of the texts, we can nonetheless declare these as primary canon.

• The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937, revised 1951)
• The Lord of the Rings (1954-55, revised 1965)
• The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962)
• The Road Goes Ever On (1967, with Donald Swann)

It should be noted that although The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (a poetry collection) and The Road Goes Ever On (a musical score inspired by Middle-earth) both contain canonical new information, they are relatively minor works.


Secondary Canon
These are books consisting of material written by J.R.R. Tolkien but not published until after his death, usually edited by his son Christopher. This is material which is coherent and readable as stand-alone works, but some readers may raise concerns based on information from other sources:

• The Silmarillion (1977)
• Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth (1980)

Tertiary Canon 
This is material which was written and created by Tolkien, but was not completed by him or brought to a satisfactory state where it can be reconciled with either primary or secondary canon. However, in isolated moments this material may be argued to be canonical where it does not conflict with established material.

• The History of Middle Earth Volume I: The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1 (1983)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume II: The Book of Lost Tales, Part 2 (1984)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume III: The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume IV: The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume V: The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume VI: The Shadow of the Past (1988)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume VII: The Treason of Isengard (1989)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume VIII: The War of the Ring (1990)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume IX: Sauron Defeated (1992)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume X: Morgoth’s Ring (1993)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume X: The War of the Jewels (1994)
• The History of Middle Earth Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
• The Children of Húrin (2007)
• Beren and Lúthien (2017)
• The Fall of Gondolin (2018)

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Tolkien's FALL OF GONDOLIN to be published as a stand-alone work

J.R.R. Tolkien isn't letting having died forty-six years ago hold back his writing career. In August he will publish The Fall of Gondolin, as edited and compiled by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien.

"The Fall of Gondolin" was the very first story Tolkien ever wrote about Middle-earth, writing it down whilst on convalescent leave following the Battle of the Somme in late 1916 or early 1917. The story was written "in army huts, crowded filled with the noise of gramophones." Sometimes cribbing manuscript paper from any source to hand (part of the story is written on the back of a paper outlining the "chain of responsibility in a battalion"), Tolkien wrote and completed the narrative, the first instalment in a work he called The Book of Lost Tales. This book would collect together various stories from an ancient work between a dark force and the wise and powerful "Gnomes" (named for gnosis, or wisdom) who opposed it, through the framing device of a hapless mariner washing ashore on an island called Tol Eressea and learning about the ancient conflict. The original "Fall of Gondolin" was written in a severely archaic and studied style, which Tolkien later found over-laboured.

By 1930 Tolkien had abandoned the framing device and instead planned to tell the story "straight", under a new title, The Silmarillion, which required a total rewrite (including replacing the name "Gnomes" with "Elves," after the 1930s craze for garden gnomes made the name unbearable to him). However, he was interrupted first by a children's story he had started writing for his children, which became The Hobbit, and then urgent publisher demands for a sequel, which became The Lord of the Rings. Whilst working on both books, Tolkien did continue to develop The Silmarillion, but increasingly came to write the story in very broad brush strokes, lacking the fine detail of "The Fall of Gondolin." "The Fall of Gondolin" therefore only existed as the archaic 1917 manuscript (later amended and edited by Tolkien circa 1920) and a very brief summary of the story that Tolkien had written as part of the Grey Annals of Beleriand (which formed much of the published Silmarillion).

Around 1951, after The Lord of the Rings had been completed but whilst its publication was in question, Tolkien wrote a new version of the Gondolin story. His plan had been to depict the fall of the city in a detailed, more sophisticated mode of writing more akin to Lord of the Rings. However, after depicting the hero Tuor's arrival at the city gates and his first meeting with Ecthelion, Warden of the Grey Gate, Tolkien abruptly broke off the narrative and did note complete this version of the story. This incomplete narrative - totalling just 34 pages and retitled "Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin" - forms the opening part of Unfinished Tales (1980), with Christopher Tolkien noting that his father's failure to complete this story may rank as the greatest tragedy of his literary life.

Christopher Tolkien began publishing all of his father's drafts in The History of Middle-earth series. The original 1917-20 version of "The Fall of Gondolin" finally saw print in The Book of Lost Tales, Part II (1984), the second volume of the series. A 120-verse poem, "The Lay of the Fall of Gondolin," also appeared in The Lays of Beleriand (1985), the third volume of The History of Middle-earth.

The "new" Fall of Gondolin will, as Beren and Luthien (2017) did before it, contain all of the extant versions of the text, collected together with editorial commentary and artwork by Alan Lee. There'll be nothing new here, but it should be worth it for the Lee artwork alone.

The Fall of Gondolin will be published on 30 August 2018.

Christopher Tolkien resigns as head of the Tolkien Estate

In news which suddenly explains a lot of what's been going on in the last week or two, it's been confirmed that Christopher Tolkien, the third son and literary executor of J.R.R. Tolkien, has resigned his position as head of the Tolkien Estate at the age of 92.

Christopher Tolkien has been the literary heir to his father's writings, particularly those set in Middle-earth. However, he has rejected substantial sums of money to continue his father's work and write new material in the setting. Instead, he has restricted himself to editing and presenting his father's unpublished work for public consumption. This has resulted in two further canonical (or mostly so) books in the Middle-earth legendarium: The Silmarillion (1977) and Unfinished Tales (1980). He has also edited and published The Children of Hurin (2007) and Beren and Luthien (2017), episodes from The Silmarillion that Tolkien fleshed out with more detail but had not completed before his death in 1973. Christopher Tolkien arranged for them to be published by combining multiple drafts and narratives into single stories.

Between 1983 and 1996 Christopher Tolkien also published The History of Middle-earth, a twelve-volume series which published every single early draft, fragment and writing of J.R.R. Tolkien's on the subject of Middle-earth and showed the development of the legendarium from the earliest concepts right through to ideas and material Tolkien was working on at the time of his death (including, even, a brief idea for a sequel to The Lord of the Rings which he soon abandoned).

Christopher Tolkien's position as head of the Tolkien Estate and Trust means that he has made all of the major business decisions related to the properties of J.R.R. Tolkien. J.R.R. Tolkien sold the film, TV and merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in 1969 (from which New Line and Warner Brothers got the rights to make the Peter Jackson movies), but Christopher has refused to sell similar rights to the other Middle-earth books despite some very generous offers from studios. Other senior members of the Tolkien trust include his younger sister Priscilla, his nephew Michael and his second son Adam, along with Christopher's second wife, Baillie. Christopher Tolkien famously disapproved of the Peter Jackson movies and even ostracised his eldest son Simon and his nephew Royd when they approved of the films and even accepted cameo roles during filming (Simon has since reconciled with his father and is now formally part of the Tolkien Estate).

Christopher resigned from the Tolkien Estate on 31 August 2017. The proposed Amazon television series has been in the offing for at least a couple of months, so Christopher's retirement seems to have coincided with a desire by the Estate to be more open to the idea of adaptations: Priscilla Tolkien approved of the 1978 Ralph Bakshi animated movie and even provided some advice to the film-maker, whilst the other members of the Estate seem to have wanted to take greater oversight to, amongst other things, avoid the legal problems that cropped up several times between 2004 (when they began legal action to get the film finances properly audited) and this year, when they concluded a legal action begun over the use of Tolkien characters in slot and gambling machines, rights which were not included in the original 1969 deal.

The question now is if the Holy Grail - the rights to The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales - will be made available. They haven't so far and it might be disrespectful to Christopher Tolkien to discuss this whilst he remains alive (due to his staunch opposition in the past), but it might be now that doors that once seemed firmly locked and closed are now, at least, slightly ajar.

One thing is certain: that all fans of fantasy literature owe Christopher Tolkien a tremendous debt and thanks for ensuring his father's work reached appreciative readers and in a way that was respectful and of the highest integrity.

J.R.R. Tolkien to release new book, despite deceased status

J.R.R. Tolkien will release a new book in 2017, despite having died in 1973.

An illustration of Luthien by Ted Nasmith.

The new book is entitled Beren and Luthien and relates the story of the star-crossed lovers from the First Age of Middle-earth.

The news has caused brows to furrow across fantasy fandom. The story of Beren and Luthien is one of the central legends in Tolkien's The Silmarillion and Tolkien wrote several extended versions of it whilst he was alive, but nothing on the order of the story of Turin Turambar which allowed that story to be published as a short book in 2007, under the title The Children of Hurin.

Indeed, a more likely candidate for the same kind of treatment would be The Fall of Gondolin, the very first full-length narrative of Middle-earth that Tolkien wrote in 1917. Not only is there there original prose story (albeit in a very archaic form), previously published in The Book of Lost Tales, but there is also an updated (if incomplete), post-Lord of the Rings version from Unfinished Tales and the unfinished poem The Lay of the Fall of Gondolin.


Beren and Luthien will open with the Tale of Tinuviel, the very first version of the story written circa 1917-18 and previously published in The Book of Lost Tales. It is expected that the book will also contain The Lay of Leithian, a nearly-finished poem version (previously appearing in The Lays of Beleriand), the summarised version from The Silmarillion and the account that appears in The Lord of the Rings. It will still be probably quite a short book, but will be fleshed out with new illustrations by master Tolkien artist Alan Lee. As usual, Tolkien's son Christopher is on editorial duties.

Ending The Lord of the Rings

After seeing an interesting thread on SFFWorld about this, I thought it was an interesting point to explore.


For most people, The Lord of the Rings ends with Sam riding home to Hobbiton and saying, "Well, I'm back,". Both the movie and the main text of the novel end at this point. However, both the book and, much moreso, the movie get some criticism for having 'too many endings', with quite a few moments before then where it feels like the end credits/appendices should have rolled instead. The book mostly gets around this by having the thematically vital 'Scouring of the Shire' chapter at the end, featuring the final confrontation between the Hobbits and Saruman.

However, what is interesting is that the ending of the book would have been significantly longer if Tolkien himself hadn't actually edited several more sequences out. Something that concerned Tolkien during the latter phases of writing The Lord of the Rings was reconciling the book's darker and more serious tone with the earlier, somewhat more frivolous text of The Hobbit. A second edition of The Hobbit was issued which used the darker, more murderous incarnation of Gollum from Rings rather than the more amiable trickster of the first edition, but Tolkien also felt that the underlying premise of The Hobbit, that thirteen hardcore dwarven warriors would want or need the help of a Hobbit to help them out to kill a dragon, was somewhat odd. To account for this he wrote a chapter for Rings called 'The Quest of Erebor' in which Gandalf sat down with Frodo in Minas Tirith and explained to him how he found Thrain dying in Dol Guldur and recovered his map, then many years later met Thorin and arranged the quest and why he through Bilbo could help with the mission. However, during the writing of the chapter Tolkien realised it was going off on a massive tangent from The Lord of the Rings and set it aside, finished but not rewritten to his normal exacting standards. Many years later he went back to redraft it as one of several essays he was writing on the subject of Middle-earth, and it is this version which eventually appeared in Unfinished Tales.

Tolkien also wrote an additional chapter that came after the "Well, I'm back," moment and explained in some detail what happened to each of the members of the Fellowship after the War of the Ring, and ended with Sam listening to the sound of the sea washing on the shores of Middle-earth. Tolkien, suspicious of over-sentimentality, decided this wasn't really appropriate either and pulled it out of the book, although it was finished. Christopher Tolkien eventually included it in Sauron Defeated, the ninth book in the History of Middle-earth series and the last one dealing with the Lord of the Rings era of his father's writing.

A lesser-known fact is that at some point after Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien actually started writing a sequel, which he called The New Shadow. Tolkien's idea in this book would be that evil would return to Middle-earth and engulf the kingdom of Gondor in the Fourth Age, creating a crisis that one of Argorn's descendants would have to deal with. However, this idea does not seem to have fired his interest, possibly as it would deal with purely human villainy (so as not to contradict Rings' ending which had most of the supernatural and non-human elements of Middle-earth slowly fading away to make room for the age of men), which did not interest him as much as more mythic elements and material. The few pages that survive eventually appeared in the final book of The History of Middle-earth, The Peoples of Middle-earth.

Then of course are The Lord of the Rings' lengthy appendices, which a lot of readers skip. The first appendix deals with side-elements, such as the story of Aragorn and Arwen's relationship, whilst the second is the most interesting to a general reader, featuring as it does a lengthy timeline of the history of the Second and Third Ages (Tolkien didn't include the First, feeling that it would spoil The Silmarillion, which he was still working on) and a detailed timeline of what events took place in relation to one another in the book. Peter Jackson laudably paid attention to this timeline when making the movie trilogy, which is why some events in the second and third movies are moved around to their chronologically correct positions. Unfortunately, this did also less laudably require Jackson to introduce some weak 'filler' elements in the second movie, such as a pointless side-trip to Osgiliath, to fill in the resulting diminishing of screentime for Frodo and Sam. The later appendices mostly contain information on the languages of Middle-earth and form probably the most frequently-skipped part of the book (possibly after the poems).


Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings' appendices (which take up well over a hundred pages of the published book) were supposed to be considerably longer and more detailed, and Tolkien despaired over their 'truncated' state. At one point he considered expanding them into a companion volume to the series and started writing a series of essays on various elements of life and history in Middle-earth, but did not get far with them before he passed away. However, many of these essays, on such fascinating subjects as the Blue Wizards, the Palantiri, the military organisation and history of Rohan, the (sadly incomplete and self-contradictory) history of Galadriel and Celeborn, and a detailed report of the Battle of the Gladden Fields (where Isildur lost the One Ring), were recovered and published in Unfinished Tales, which Christopher Tolkien published in 1983 as a sort of replacement for the mooted companion volume.

It is interesting that Tolkien did produce a lot of extra material for The Lord of the Rings which didn't see the light of day for some considerable time, and did eventually address a number of questions people had left over from the end of the book, so if you can't get enough of the original book there's still a fair bit of additional material you can track down.

The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

Given that J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, the publication of a 'new' novel by him earlier this year provoked a storm of controversy among readers. Of course, this is not the first time that a posthumous Tolkien works has appeared, but it was the first time that such a work had appeared without Tolkien's express permission from prior to his death (as with The Silmarillion) and shorn of substantial editorial coverage explaining the work's origins (as with Unfinished Tales and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth series). As a result some heated discussion has taken place debating the book's validity and status within the Middle-earth 'canon'.

Despite this, a foreward and afterword by Christopher Tolkien does explain broadly how this book came about, namely through the combination of several distinct narratives that had appeared previously, and indeed all of the work in the book is J.R.R. Tolkien's own, with no linking passages created by his son. As such The Children of Húrin can be enjoyed in its own right, with no concerns over this being a Kevin J. Anderson/Brian Herbert-style cash-in.

The story of The Children of Húrin has been told several times before. A brief form appears in The Silmarillion (1977) whilst Unfinished Tales (1980) contains a much longer narrative, which indeed forms the majority of the work in this book. To anyone who already owns Unfinished Tales, I would suggest borrowing The Children of Húrin prior to purchase as Unfinished Tales already contains the majority of this story and it may be redundant to purchase it again. However, there is a substantial addition of new material near the start of the story and there are of course Alan Lee's gorgeous illustrations, which are worth the price of the book by itself.

The story is set in the First Age of Middle-earth, approximately 6,600 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. Morgoth, the first and much more powerful Dark Lord, has stolen the Silmarils, the great jewels of light forged by the elven master-craftsman Feanor. Feanor's people, the Noldor, have made war upon Morgoth for over four centuries to recover the Silmarils, but after early successes the conflict has turned against them. Feanor and his brother Fingolfin are dead and Beleriand - the subcontinent that used to lie west of the Blue Mountains - is now overrun by Morgoth's troops. In the Battle of Unnumbered Tears the last great army assembled by the elves and their human and dwarven allies is destroyed and Húrin, a great human warrior and leader, is captured by Morgoth. Húrin taunts Morgoth to his face and Morgoth lays down a horrendous curse on Morgoth and his kin. As the story unfolds we follow the fortunes and misfortunes of Húrin's children, particularly his son Túrin, as the curse engulfs them.

This is not a happy story. Even the bitterseet end of Lord of the Rings may not prepare the reader for the sheer tragic power of this tale. Very, very few characters reach the end alive and for all of the victories that are won, the losses are far more vividly described. Those looking for an uplifting story are directed to The Hobbit. In The Children of Húrin we see Tolkien's gift for myth-making in full force. This is a dark, powerful and wrenching tale which is deeply affecting to read.

However, there are some issues. Tolkien wrote the bulk of this narrative after completing Lord of the Rings but it is based on considerably older ideas, conceptions and drafts, and he deliberately employs a prose style even more archaic than some of the later chapters of Lord of the Rings. It is certainly not among Tolkien's easier-to-read works. To those who 'get' the voice Tolkien employs, however, the story is compelling. The other problems are related to the book's length. This is not a long story and despite the publishers going to some lengths to increase the page-count (including putting startlingly large margins around the edges and employing a notably large font size) and throwing new maps, appendices, forewards and afterwords into the mix, it is still a relatively short story (perhaps half the length of The Hobbit at absolute best) for the money they are asking for, especially as the bulk of it can be found in other, longer and more varied works . As I said earlier this is offset by the inclusion of numerous black-and-white illustrations and several full-colour plates by Alan Lee which are incredibly atmospheric and add to the reading experience intensely. Another disappointment is that Christopher Tolkien did not find a way of including the later adventures of Húrin in the book as some kind of postscript (for those inclined, several versions of this narrative can be found in The War of the Jewels, the eleventh volume of The History of Middle-earth series), but arguably this would have been out of place in a book about his children, not the man himsef.

The Children of Húrin (****) is a haunting, gripping story, probably the darkest thing Tolkien ever wrote and it stands alone remarkably well. Those who found The Lord of the Rings not to their liking will probably like this even less and casual fans may find the prose style offputting, but to the serious appreciator of Middle-earth and Tolkien's work, this is a handsome (if rather brief) volume with superb illustrations and is worth a serious look.

The book is available from HarperCollins in the UK in hardcover. A paperback edition will follow on 7 April 2008. The book is published by Houghton Mifflin in the USA in hardcover.