![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A once-told tale retold
Apr. 5th, 2008 05:23 pmThe Children of Hurin, by J.R.R. Tolkien, with much editorial assistance from Christopher Tolkien, is one of those books that one feels duty-bound to own, but which unfortunately is not quite worth the owning.
As anyone who has looked at the massive volumes of Tolkieniana that have been released by his son is surely aware, Tolkien wrote and rewrote his stories over and over again, often coming at them in different ways, expanding, summarising, ch=changing, trying on many retellings.
Ultimately, it seems that there were two complete versions of the story of the Children of Hurin - the abbreviated one that is interwoven with all the other tales of men and Elves in Middle Earth before the defeat of Melkior that one finds in The Silmarilion, and a longer and more detailed, albeit unassembled one that Christopher Tolkien has now edited into a finished work.
The problem is that the version in The Silmarilion already tells you everything you need to know about the tragic story of Turin and Nienor, and it puts it into the larger context of the battle between Melkior and the combined forces of elves and the select tribes of men who stood with them. If I'd never read The Silmarilion, I'd probably have been much more excited reading The Children of Hurin. But if I hadn't read the Silmarilion, it would have been because I wasn't the Tolkien fan that I am, and I probably wouldn't have bought The Children of Turin anyway.
If you feel a need to have the complete Tolkien collection, by all means buy this and explore the additional information about the lives of Turin and Nienor that this volume provides. But if you are looking for something new to rekindle the excitement you had when you first started reading The Hobbit, or The Lord of the Rings - this is not where you will find that.
