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

Originally published: 2007
Read: January 2021

Narn i Chîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin

 by J. R. R. Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien has taken a number of fragments his father left about an ancient Middle-earth tale and stitched them together into a somewhat coherent narrative; the notes at the end give a pretty good sense of how he did it. This unites material from across Tolkien's life, and also uses some pieces from The Silmarillion to fill in the gaps.

It makes for an odd book. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien adopted a pretty usual novelistic style, keeping us close to events. In The Silmarillion, he took a more distant style (in fact, he saw The Silmarillion as a synopsis of a much more detailed work that he never wrote). Children of Húrin ends up swerving back and forth. We have some bits where we're in scenes and learning about the ways characters think; we have other scenes that do things like "they fought together for three years and became the best of friends" and we just have to accept that these characters are friends now. On average, I would say we're somewhere in between those two points in terms of detail. Closer to Túrin than we ever get to any Silmarillion character, but you'll never come to know Túrin the way you did Bilbo or Frodo or Faramir.

At times the book really comes to life; I liked the glimpses of Túrin's childhood, and I liked his robber baron years. On the other hand, the overall effect of the book is pretty muted. If one is meant to feel the tragedy of Túrin and his family... you just don't, there's not enough here to make you do it. I kept thinking I would like to see someone else take this and expand it so it can have the emotional effect it deserves to. I'd hate to see someone else try to fill in Tolkien's prose, but I also think someone else writing it from scratch wouldn't quite feel right. So perhaps it would work best transposed into another medium; the idea I had was that I feel like it would make for an excellent graphic novel, or series of graphic novels. (Get P. Craig Russell to do it!)

I of course got a lot of enjoyment out of the notes at the back explaining how the story had been put together. That said, I mostly read this because my wife owned it; interesting as it was, I don't think I would take the time to read the subsequent posthumous "novels" Christopher Tolkien assembled out of his father's materials (Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin). Sometimes reading prequels can be interesting, of course, but this is so detached from the era of Lord of the Rings that it feels like a standalone fantasy world that reuses some of the same names.