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A complete and thorough study of C of H |
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A Complete And Thorough Study of C of H Such a modest undertaking! Well, it's not actually my idea, it's Fuin's -from a post she made regarding what we might try and develop in the C of H forum.
Following on the successful analyses and discussions that have been initiated in the Books Forum by NV , on The Hobbit and LOTR, we are going to embark on a similar approach with C of H.
However, before we embark upon that analysis I am going to offer-from the excellent selection or reviews that have come our way through the good offices of Captain Bingo a 'pot pourri' of approaches that others have taken in considering this latest great work of the Master.
This is in no way intended to supplant or replace our own views, more to spark further ideas and debate as we progress through the various chapters of this great and tragic saga.
So, those of you who are readying your own thoughts, please be a little patient. Look at some of the very disparate views that major -and some minor- commentators have made on the book, consider and reflect upon them, and see how they enhance, challenge, and engage your own thinking, prior to us embarking upon this particular voyage of discovery ourselves.
Please feel free to comment on all or any of the reviews I have chosen to highlight, and, if you feel them of relevance, be sure to refer to them once we start our own detailed analysis of the epic masterpiece. I will myself highlight certain points brought out by the selected reviews which I feel might be of value in our own discusssions.
And above all enjoy!
 Postscript: And my heartfelt thanks to Captain Bingo whose own 'Labor of Hercules' allowed so many diverse and fascinating reviews of C of H to be brought to our attention.
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Tolkien's Christianity and the Pagan Tragedy -Reviewed by Spengler http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/ID24Aa01.html
J R R Tolkien was the most Christian of 20th-century writers, not because he produced Christian allegory and apologetics like his friend C S Lewis, but because he uniquely portrayed the tragic nature of what Christianity replaced. Thanks to the diligence of his son Christopher, who reconstructed the present volume from several manuscripts, we have before us a treasure that sheds light on the greater purpose of his The Lord of the Rings. Suggested Discussion Point for our future analysis Morgoth has cursed
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He that would foil me must use such weapons as I do, for I have not fed my readers with straw, neither will I be confuted with stubble.
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Well, no Morgoth did not use magic to curse Turin, but it was by his doing that Turin's life was cursed. Taking his father did many things. It gave him no male role-model until he was already and older child, it made it so his village was dangerous and he had to be sent to Thingol. Living in Doriath alone caused most of the events that took place- he grew strong and skilled, but was looked down upon by some of the elfs which filled him with more hatred and anger than he already had about his mother and father. I do not believe I have to go over the whole story with you, but you catch my drift I hope. So, though it was not Morgoth's magic that caused the curse to live out, it was Morgoth nonetheless who caused the curse.
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The point that particular reviewer is arguing, and I think quite cogently, is that irrespective of the power of Morgoth's curse, which is the use of 'magic', it was what the Greeks called 'harmatia' - Turin's own fatal flaws -that caused the curse to work.Hence his final sentence. In his view it is Turin, not Morgoth, who is ultimately to blame. This is certainly a point that has been well argued before. |
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The Return of the King – C of H – Reviewer Elizabeth Hand http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902308.html If anyone still labors under the delusion that J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer of twee fantasies for children, this novel should set them straight. A bleak, darkly beautiful tale played out against the background of the First Age of Tolkien's Middle Earth, The Children of Húrin possesses the mythic resonance and grim sense of inexorable fate found in Greek tragedy. According to Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, The Children of Húrin had its genesis in a tale penned by his father in 1919. Tolkien obsessively wrote and rewrote stories over the course of his long life, and slightly variant tellings of this tale have previously appeared in several of his other works. But this is its first stand-alone publication, incorporating all the various versions and attendant fragments into a seamless whole. Does it warrant the attention of readers other than Tolkien purists? Absolutely. Even casual readers, as well as fans of Peter Jackson's phenomenally successful film adaptation, will find their experience of Middle Earth considerably enriched by this new volume, which also features superb illustrations (both color and black-and-white) by Alan Lee. The Children of Húrin takes place 6,000 years before the Council of Elrond (a pivotal event in The Lord of the Rings), as Christopher Tolkien points out in his useful introduction. Its setting is not your great-great-grandfather's Middle Earth, but the forests and mountains of Beleriand, a country that was drowned, like Atlantis, eons before various Bagginses and their ilk populated the Shire. There are no hobbits in The Children of Húrin. The primary players are Men, Elves, Orcs, a few Dwarves, Morgoth (the original Dark Lord -- Sauron was his most powerful lieutenant), and Glaurung, "father of dragons," who ranks with the monstrous spider Shelob as one of Tolkien's most terrifying creations. For centuries, Men and Elves have been engaged in a mostly losing battle against Morgoth's forces, whose members -- Orcs but also Men known as Easterlings -- resemble marauding Vikings more than the crude, slightly cartoonish regiments depicted in The Lord of the Rings. More than any other Tolkien work, The Children of Húrin evokes the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon epics that Tolkien loved and studied and taught and emulated. Its central protagonist, Túrin, is one of the most complex characters in all Middle Earth, a tormented, brooding anti-hero who bears hallmarks of a sword-wielding Heathcliff. Shortly after the book opens, Túrin's father, Lord Húrin the Steadfast, has been imprisoned by Morgoth following a doomed campaign mounted by Elves and Men. In the battle's aftermath, the 9-year-old Túrin and his pregnant mother, Morwen, barely manage to escape becoming thralls of the Easterlings. At Morwen's urging, the boy flees to a hidden Elvish kingdom where he finds sanctuary. His sister is born not long after. Túrin grows to manhood among the Elves, whose king treats him as a foster son, giving him a dragon-crested helm that is an heirloom of Túrin's forebears. Such treatment, along with Túrin's sternly aloof, even haughty, demeanor, causes resentment among some of the Elves. One of these detractors goads Túrin, then waylays him, and Túrin inadvertently causes his attacker's death. Out of shame and remorse, but also pride, Túrin leaves the kingdom before learning he has been pardoned. He joins forces with a group of outlaws and in short order becomes their leader, mustering them against the Orcs. The House of Húrin matches that of Atreus in curses coming home to roost upon doomed and sometimes innocent family members. Readers looking for happy endings will find none in this book. Instead, there is grand, epic storytelling and a reminder, if one was needed, of Tolkien's genius in creating an imaginary world that both reflects and deepens a sense of our own mythic past, the now-forgotten battles and legends that gave birth to the Aeneid, the Old Testament, the Oresteia, the Elder Eddas and the Mabinogion, Beowulf and Paradise Lost. Years from now, when our present day is as remote from men and women (or cyborgs) as the events of the First Age were to the Council of Elrond, people may still tell tales out of Middle Earth. If so, The Children of Húrin will be one of them. |
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Homesick for Middle-earth- C of H – Reviewer Crawford Kilian
Over fifty years after the first publication of The Lord of the Rings, and over thirty since the death of J. R. R. Tolkien, his son has rescued another tale from the endless drafts and fragments that Tolkien left. It's a good occasion to consider not only The Children of Húrin but also the impact of Tolkien on our culture.
That impact has been slight in literary academia. Tolkien's reputation never entirely recovered from a scathing 1956 review of TLOTR by Edmund Wilson. The sheer popularity of the trilogy in the 1960s was another black mark against Tolkien: undergraduates were reading him against their professors, not for them, and finding more to enjoy there than in the canon of acceptable modern literature.
The popularity of The Hobbit and TLOTR persisted, culminating in the gigantic Peter Jackson film version that introduced millions to Middle Earth. By then, Tolkien's themes and images had saturated the culture.
Dozens of lesser writers cranked out imitations; fantasy became a literary industry, like romance novels. By the 1990s, teenagers with computers were bashing out their own Tolkienesque epics, just as I had on a typewriter in the summer of 1957.
Kids who didn't read still played Dungeons and Dragons. A human fossil, adult but very small, was found on Flores Island in Indonesia, and promptly named a "hobbit." Google "Tolkien" and you'll get over 21 million hits.
Homesick for Middle Earth
By now it would probably take a dozen dragons to guard all the treasure that Tolkien's imagination heaped up. His son, Christopher, editing his father's unpublished work, brought out The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, as well as a history of Middle Earth. These seemed to me disappointing: fragmentary, confusing, and lacking direction.
So when The Children of Húrin was announced, I wasn't sure I wanted to read it. It had been a long time since I'd read Tolkien carefully, and careless reading tends to bring up the flaws that Wilson jeered at long ago: "An overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity."
Still, I recalled what an influence he had been on me when I was a boy, and how I'd dreamed of writing novels on his epic scale. Generations had grown up feeling homesick for Middle Earth, and I guess I was homesick too.
Well, you can indeed go home again, but you'd better expect the old place to look a lot different through adult eyes. It's not that Tolkien's world looks tacky or shabby -- quite the contrary. What once looked picturesque now seems harsh and unwelcoming, and we realize that Tolkien's view of his imagined world was a very bleak one.
The Children of Húrin is not even set in the green and pleasant lands of the Shire and Rivendell, but in Beleriand -- an enormous subcontinent doomed to sink beneath the sea in a struggle far greater than the war Frodo Baggins won. We are in the First Age, long before the Third Age of The Hobbits.
The Elves rule, with Men as their allies; both are locked in an endless war against Morgoth, a kind of corrupted god and the creator of the Orcs. (The social system and technology of the First Age survive almost unchanged into the Third Age. Middle Earth does not know, or welcome, progress.)
We don't see the climactic War of Wrath that will destroy Beleriand; we see only the struggle of one noble family against Morgoth's curse. It's a minor affair, but a familiar story: a young prince loses his rightful place, grows up in exile, and goes forth at last to wreak revenge against his usurping enemies.
Tolkien's epic roots
The curse of Tolkien's imitators is that Tolkien is all they've read; Tolkien himself read widely and deeply in ancient literature, and shaped its themes and language to his own ends. But he was no sheltered scholar; he began to create Middle Earth in the aftermath of World War I, where he had fought in the trenches and unaccountably survived.
It's no surprise, then, that Túrin, the hero of this novel, is a mighty warrior, a Beowulf capable of slaying dragons. But pride drives him from one disastrous decision to another, and his victories are hollow. Elves and Men love him and follow him, but regret it.
In a sense, Tolkien is satirizing medieval heroic romances just as Cervantes did in Don Quixote. But Tolkien finds little to laugh at in his own hero, and much to pity. It is tempting to read The Children of Húrin as one of the first novels of World War I, transposed into a different era but presaging the destruction of a great civilization.
Tolkien's style, however, is far from modern; Wilson called it "a story-book language," and it certainly is. Take a paragraph here and there, and it's easy to laugh at:
To Brethil three men only found their way back at last through Taur-nu-Fuin, an evil road; and when Glóredhel Haldor's daughter learned of the fall of Haldir she grieved and died.
The inverted word order, the strange names, even the cadence of the sentences, all seem pompous and overblown. We have been conditioned by a century of plainer prose, ever since Hemingway and the hard-boiled writers of the 1930s. But they had achieved their tough-guy tone by borrowing from the unemotional prose of the Icelandic sagas, and Tolkien knew those sagas better than most. His style is a direct descendant of the Icelanders'; Hemingway just married into the family.
So Tolkien says simply, "she grieved and died," without giving us the details of her grief or the manner of her death. He generally stays outside his characters' heads; again like the Icelanders, he shows us what they say and do, and lets us infer what their thoughts and feelings must be.
Edmund Wilson derided Tolkien's "travel-book" prose, but he missed the music of the names and the movement they give his sentences. This was always an attraction of TLOTR, especially for young readers who'd never encountered the cadences of the King James Bible. It's especially striking in The Children of Húrin. Reading it is like listening to a somber late 19th-century symphony from northern Europe: something by Grieg, or more likely Mahler.
Speaking with silence
In theory, we should be able to judge a book on its own terms even if we know nothing about its background or author. In practice, Tolkien's writing has troubled critics because it seems so unrelated to his combat experience and to his devout Catholicism.
Middle Earth in all its ages has no religion, no priesthood. The Valar, the gods who created the world and its peoples, have retreated to the forbidden West. Morgoth is a Lucifer, attempting to impose his will on stubbornly secular Men and Elves (and Dwarves). The Valar will intervene only to destroy him by destroying Beleriand. Six thousand years later, Morgoth's flunky Sauron will try the same thing and fail -- but this time thanks to the simple decency of The Hobbits and the courage of the other peoples of Middle Earth.
If Tolkien saw religion as his personal salvation, why did he not offer it to his characters and their world?
A good writer, like a good composer, can say as much with silence as with words and sounds. Tolkien's silence says that Middle Earth is a splendid but unhappy world because it has no real god.
That is certainly implicit in TLOTR, especially in the postwar sadness of Frodo. Not until he leaves Middle Earth for the home of the gods in the West does he find some hope of happiness. His companion Sam sees him off, and then returns to the Shire and the simple consolations of domestic life.
Tolkien's silence in this novel is even louder. Húrin's children, for all their high birth and prowess, destroy themselves in a brutal war. The best they can offer us, like the House of Atreus and like the ignorant armies of World War I, is a warning against self-deceiving pride.
Suggested Discussion Point for our future analysis
In a sense, Tolkien is satirizing medieval heroic romances just as Cervantes did in Don Quixote
A good writer, like a good composer, can say as much with silence as with words and sounds
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John Garth reviews The Children of Húrin BY J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. by Christopher Tolkien
After The Hobbit's success in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien's publisher told him that the public was now hungry to hear more about Bilbo Baggins and his kind. The result was The Lord of the Rings, not a children's book but still starring a Baggins. In fact, what Tolkien most wanted to publish was The Silmarillion, the mythology he had begun in the First World War, inconveniently entirely hobbit-free.
Edited from multiple versions and published posthumously by Tolkien's son Christopher in 1977, this austerely synoptic legendarium proved indigestible to many readers. Since then, further posthumous volumes of Middle-earth writings have appeared: fragmentary works, interspersed with editorial commentaries and footnotes, fascinating for the aficionado but not for the average fan.
Only now, for the first time since 1977, has any cohesive and complete narrative appeared to join the other three major books in the Middle Earth canon. The reader will find no hobbits, but a brooding saga of heroism and sorrow, written soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings by a master at his peak.
The story of The Children of Húrin had its prototype in 1914, when as a student at Oxford Tolkien tried retelling the Finnish folk-tale of ill-fated Kullervo, who unwittingly seduces his own sister. By 1919, that project had been superseded and Tolkien had fused elements of Kullervo with the Teutonic dragon-slayer Sigurd - the German Siegfried. Tolkien was not drawing on Wagner, but looking beyond to a common source in Norse saga.
The daunting opening paragraph of The Children of Húrin outlines a genealogy: this is the saga of a family, whose destiny drastically affects others both immediate and more remote. It is also an outlaw saga, dealing with an individual separated from society and in direct conflict with more elemental forces.
Also true to saga, the prose is full of stark old words and alliteration. People take oaths that bind, suffer curses that bind more strongly still, and trade hard-earned wisdoms: 'A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it."
But The Children of Húrin is no academic exercise, partly because it also breathes the dank air of the 20th century, with its muddied motives, its oppression and slaughter. Cruelty and brutality are explicit. Bitterness ousts charity and hope.
This is far from the black-and-white moral landscape that critics too often decry in Tolkien's works. The enchanted world is being killed by a thousand cuts; the rivers are poisoned and their divine spirit sent are poisoned and their divine spirit sent into retreat.
As befits a story by a Somme veteran, over-confidence leads to the disastrous Battle of Unnumbered Tears. For survivors, the consequences of heroism are worse. The chieftain Húrin is captured by the forces of the satanic Morgoth, who forces him to watch with superhuman vision as a curse inexorably pursues his distant family, and particularly his heir, Túrin.
As a boy Túrin poses immense questions of fate and death, but no one in this benighted world knows the answers. If The Lord of the Rings is an expression of faith in a God who turns events to good, The Children of Húrin expresses a visceral sense of evil undermining everything of worth. Evil, here, delights in irony.
Repeatedly, the adult Túrin strives to make a stand against the forces that drive him from pillar to post, but he is thwarted by his own unhappy choices. The dragon Glaurung sets a snare of circumstance for him and his unrecognised long-lost sister, then laughs with 'the laughter of Morgoth' at their agonies. As the cruel and complicated drama is played out, we are left reflecting that if Túrin had not adopted a pseudonym, Master of Doom, in a bid to evade the malediction on his family, their doom might not have mastered them.
Despite his compound errors, what is heroic about Túrin is his determination to fight on, his refusal to bow to irony. In what is now effectively Tolkien's last Middle Earth work, I think we hear the authentic voice of the war veteran, entirely open-eyed about the horrors of the human condition but a staunch dissident against the view that endeavour is futile.
The volume, with luminous pencil drawings and muted watercolours by Alan Lee, is supplemented by Christopher Tolkien's introduction, setting the scene for those unfamiliar with The Silmarillion: by family trees, a helpful reference list of names, and a fold-out map.
What the perfectionist Tolkien actually left of this story was a matrix of competing drafts, and sometimes nothing more than notes to bridge a gap; die-hard fans already know the fragmentary version published as part of Unfinished Tales in 1980. Re-edited now so that the fragments are fitted snuggly together, and without the distraction of footnotes, The Children of Húrin gains significantly in power: despite the tantalising roughness and brevity of some central passages, the story of Túrin the dragon-slayer has regained its serpentine backbone.
Suggested Discussion Point for our future analysis
In what is now effectively Tolkien's last Middle Earth work, I think we hear the authentic voice of the war veteran, entirely open-eyed about the horrors of the human condition but a staunch dissident against the view that endeavour is futile.
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Eadwyn- in another thread in this forum has raised a question that is well worthy of our detailed consideration- how far was Turin's 'curse' the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
A question I would like to put forward and ponder over. In primitive/mediævil times a curse placed by such a powerful being would have been self fulfilling due to nature of the people of the time. Such curses would be implicitly believed and only those of great mental strength (or god gifted etc etc) would be able to overcome such. The question I ask here - Is it possible for this superstition or fatalism (if you prefer) to be prevalent in this time and if so that would have some relevance to everything that the family did?
Turin believed in the power of the curse - it is why he changed his name. So, if that being the case, wouldn't all the decisions made be subconsciously skewed towards fulfilling the curse? |
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The Children of Hurin – Mnsgnr. Barr
{A Catholic perspective on Tolkien’s work}
TOLKIEN'S NEW WORK:
A Parable on Humanity's Inability to Conquer Evil Without a Redeemer
Already the reviews are pouring in, and most are favorable for J. R. R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin. Rather than focus on the usual stuff of criticism, I want to look directly at Tolkien the Catholic author and what he does with this material. The man who talked about the necessity for a happy ending and the triumph of good over evil has produced a tale of woe, betrayal, and tragedy that turns the most optimistic of us to tears. Therein lies the genius of this work. Born out of the despair of World War I, treasured in his heart for his entire life but never really given final form, a window into the complex heart of this Catholic author, The Children of Hurin is a brilliant portrayal of the power of evil even in the midst of God's providence and ultimate conquest of this dark force. Almost a century old in its genesis, the tale is parable for our times and a cautionary warning about the pride of humanity.
In our world, we like to think of ourselves as the masters of creation, flawed but not really sinful. Ask a friend if he or she sins and they will tell you they make mistakes but "sin?"--not so much. The Western world values "niceness" above all other virtues and raises tolerance to an almost oppressive level. We must accept anything and everything because each of us is the ultimate decider of what is right and wrong. Ambiguity rules our hearts and assuages our consciences. What is good for you may be wrong for me and vice versa. Too much reflection and we may think badly of ourselves. The problem is: not enough reflection and when our sins come home to roost and we must face them, then we may just give in to despair.
Critics will say our world is nothing like the one Tolkien created in his mythology, but they would be wrong. It is exactly like it--peopled with characters who are much like us, convinced that they can look evil in the eye and conquer it; convinced that if we just all tolerate everyone's take on the truth, we can do anything we want; convinced that salvation rests in our own virtue and courage. Just like the heroes in Tolkien's story, we do not reflect on our weakness for fear that such reflection will drag us down and tear us apart. The irony is that a little reflection on personal sin, balanced with humility usually leads to a chastened and wiser person who goes forward better for the examination of conscience. If we keep running away from the evil within us, then it becomes most dangerous when we are forced to face it. That fact destroyed Turin and Hurin, his father, and may very well destroy us.
Turin is a kid who grows up with an absent father, who happens to be a hero, and deals with the fear of terror every day. His father, Hurin, captured by the Satanic figure of the story--Morgoth--is held in thrall in Middle-Earth's version of hell. As Turin's world breaks apart (Morgoth stretches out his hand to conquer his family), he flees to the Elves where he is fostered by the Elven King. Yet, as he grows into adulthood, he remains a man apart, a loner, given to flashes of anger and compassion, in the grip of emotions he doesn't understand. In his hatred of Morgoth, he dances with the Dark.
His loathing is very close to a perverted form of love, for his very self finds its only meaning in relationship to this terrible evil force. Elves and men who try to befriend him, women who try to love him are pushed away in favor of his lust for revenge.
Fleeing the consequences of his anger, he takes up with a group of outlaws and lives like them, finding his humanity leeching out of himself. Here is where Tolkien, in the midst of this bleak tale, reminds us that in our essence, human beings are inherently good. This is the very Catholic, optimistic view of humanity. We sin, but we cannot blame our actions on our sin. In the end, our inherent goodness makes us responsible for our actions. By our evil decisions, we diminish our humanity, no matter what the horrendous circumstances may be in which we make those choices.
Turin is a prideful man, and when his one friend comes to take him back to the elven king who promises friendship, Turin turns him down and goes back to his lonesome life. Tragedy never happens from happenstance; there is always an element of choice. Much is admirable in Turin; but his pride is his undoing.
When he confronts the dragon Glaurung, servant of Morgoth, he thinks he is a match for that evil, but the serpent beguiles him, getting Turin to focus solely on what a failure he is. In trying to save himself from his failings, he continues to make disastrous decisions. Unknowingly, he marries his sister, but neither she nor he will seek forgiveness for this unwitting horror. Once again, evil in the shape of the dying dragon throws the twisted truth in their faces and rather than conquer the evil, they submit to its terrible despair. The most haunting words in the whole novel come when Turin realizes that his sister is dead. All his actions, even his good ones, have led to darkness and doom and he cries out, "Now comes the night!" and thrusts himself toward a suicidal end. The epilogue to this pain-wracked story comes at the grave of Turin some time later when his father, Hurin, released by Morgoth, chances across his long lost wife, Morwen, and they hold each other in sadness and their grief cannot be consoled.
Never has Tolkien shown so powerfully, the existence of Original Sin. This is an unredeemed world, long before the advent of Judeo-Christianity, and in this graceless time no human, despite his or her inherent goodness, has the power to successfully confront evil. Neither elves nor men can destroy Morgoth; sin has weakened them too much. Indeed, though not told in this tale, it takes the angels of Middle Earth, the Valar, to thrust Morgoth outside the world's bounds. Humility is the lesson of this story. If humanity is to succeed in conquering evil, it must look elsewhere for salvation. It will not come from man, or elf, or anything in this creation. Critics see only tragedy in this story, but there is a shadow of hope, an unseen answer that Tolkien is pointing to. It will not be found in the later Lord of the Rings tales, but will only be found, as Tolkien has written elsewhere, in the Gospel with the Incarnate God who came to earth to save a fallen humanity and cosmos. Tolkien the Catholic is alive and well in this newly published story. A parable for our times, this cautionary tale warns us of thinking ourselves as gods, as masters of the universe.
Suggested discussion point for our future analysis:
In his hatred of Morgoth, he dances with the Dark.
His loathing is very close to a perverted form of love, for his very self finds its only meaning in relationship to this terrible evil force |
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In the Beginning
By James Parker | May 6, 2007
The labors of Christopher Tolkien in his father's archive have been as dynastic and subterranean as the delvings of the dwarves in the Mines of Moria. He was bred for the task, in a sense. It was Christopher, the third son of the author of "The Lord of the Rings," who on cold evenings in Oxford, England, in the early 1930s, would huddle by the family stove and "listen motionless" (according to Humphrey Carpenter's "J.R.R. Tolkien") "as his father told him...about the elvish wars against the black power, and of how Beren and Luthien made their perilous journey to the very heart of Morgoth's stronghold."
It was Christopher, at the age of 20, who first drew up a map of Middle-earth, clarifying the geography of what was at that point an unfinished manuscript known only as "the new Hobbit." And it is Christopher who since his father's death in 1973 has overseen the posthumous publication of "The Silmarillion," the 12-volume "History of Middle-earth," and now "The Children of Hurin." Far from being a "new" Tolkien book, "The Children of Hurin" has been assembled from textual fragments dating to 1917, when Tolkien was recovering from trench fever contracted in wartime France, and tells a story that predates the action in "Lord of the Rings" by a good 6,000 years.
Christopher Tolkien, geographer of his father's myth-world, has now taken us almost to that world's limit. The story of Hurin, and of his children Turin and Nienor, and of the curse laid upon them by the archenemy Morgoth, are part of "The Book of Lost Tales," the work that Tolkien never completed but that formed the bedrock of his legendarium. With "The Children of Hurin" we are right at the imaginative genesis of Middle-earth: The moment at which Tolkien's unique mind, with the trenches and shattered woods of the Somme still hanging before it, went spiraling backwards into the misty millennia of an imagined antiquity.
This was not escapism: Tolkien's mythologizing was no more a flight from reality than William Blake's had been a century earlier, in works like "Europe, a Prophecy" and "The Four Zoas." On the contrary, it engaged reality on the grandest symbolic scale. Middle-earth is a realm of perpetual unease, warred over by forces of dark and light whose rhythmic clashes are the pulse of a fallen world. Beauty and wisdom, always under threat, reside with the Elves. Destruction issues from the throne of Morgoth, a demiurge who has more in common with Blake's Urizen than he does with Milton's Satan. Like Urizen, Morgoth is associated with metal, industry, slavery, the death of the imagination, and the exploitation and violation of nature: he dwells in the fortress of Angband, "the Hells of Iron."
Late in "The Children of Hurin" the warrior Dorlas suffers a failure of courage ("He sits shivering on the shore") that Tolkien's contemporaries would have recognized immediately as shell shock. To his admirer W.H. Auden, Tolkien confided that he was a writer "whose instinct is to cloak such self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under mythical and legendary dress." John Garth, in his 2003 book "Tolkien and the Great War," imagines the convalescent Tolkien in 1917, sitting up in bed with pen and paper, poised at the creation of a work that will either be called "Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin" or "A Subaltern on the Somme." He did not, of course, write a trench memoir: The path he took went inward, and down, and it would require the faithful excavations of another Tolkien generation to see exactly how far he went.
Suggested discussion points for future analysis:
Morgoth, a demiurge ....has more in common with Blake's Urizen than he does with Milton's Satan.
With "The Children of Hurin" we are right at the imaginative genesis of Middle-earth: The moment at which Tolkien's unique mind, with the trenches and shattered woods of the Somme still hanging before it, went spiraling backwards into the misty millennia of an imagined antiquity.
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He that would foil me must use such weapons as I do, for I have not fed my readers with straw, neither will I be confuted with stubble.
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Tom Simon
As Tom Shippey rightly points out, Tolkien has not been well served by his critics. On the one hand you have the literati, the self-appointed Guardians of the Tradition, who have never overcome their collective indignation at the success of The Lord of the Rings, but somehow have never quite died of collective apoplexy either. This contingent is ably represented, this time out, by Marta Salij of the Detroit Free Press and Tom Deveson of the Times. I shall come back to Ms. Salij’s brand of incomprehension later, but here is a fair sample of Mr. Deveson’s hard work in establishing his credentials as one of those who just don’t get it:
Turin is captivated by “the Sindarin tongue”, “older, and . . . richer in beautiful words”. Tolkien endorses this equation of archaism with beauty, but doesn’t show why it is more desirable to write “dwelt” than “lived”, to describe a sword that “would cleave all earth-dolven iron” or to have people say, “Await me here until haply I return.”
After reading that, I spent half an hour combing through The Children of Húrin line by line, looking for the sentence that Mr. Deveson found so needless and offensive. It is dialogue, of course, Morwen’s last words to her daughter Niënor before setting out to find her son. That is a perilous quest, and indeed a hopeless one, as Thingol and Melian, her hosts and protectors, have warned her. But as we so often do, she makes a decision in a moment of high emotion and then sticks to it out of stubborn pride, letting no counsel sway her. Tolkien knew better than any author of his time the uses of archaism, and the tricks and techniques of inserting them successfully into more or less modern English. Haply is a good deal more archaic than most of the vocabulary in Children, though not too antique for the style. Yet Tolkien produced many of his best effects by coupling archaic syntax with deliberately ordinary vocabulary. Why did he reach for a half-forgotten word in this case? The best answer is the one he gave to one of his friendlier critics, Hugh Brogan: [R]eal archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of the things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom. (Letters, no. 171)
I have, as it happens, some experience of précis work, and of editing texts to various lengths; I know how sloppy most modern writers are. Had I the time to dehydrate all the English prose that is published each day, I could liberate enough water to run Niagara Falls out of business. The sentence Mr. Deveson objects to is as dry as ship’s biscuit. If you take it apart, and put it back together in purely modern English, it means: ‘Wait for me here until I come back — if that ever happens.’ That takes twelve words to Tolkien’s seven. Morwen’s almost parenthetical use of haply expresses all the fatality of her decision and the fatalism of her outlook, and does it in a way that no other single English word can match. She is fey, desperate, and almost hopeless, and Tolkien shows us the extremity of her plight without a word of narrative. That, Mr. Deveson, is why haply is desirable. On the other hand we have the gushing reviews of the fans, the completists who would have it that every word to drop from the master’s pen must be equally admired. It takes a very great author indeed to survive the sycophancy of his friends. Tolkien was not quite up to the task; but then, neither was Shakespeare. Tolkien wrote his full share of tosh and drivel; some of the worst can be found in the two volumes of The Book of Lost Tales, especially the verses, which after all he wrote in his early twenties. We must all learn our craft somewhere. Few have mastered it as thoroughly as Tolkien, or with such herculean effort: he did not persevere in vain. But then few of us are so unfortunate as to have our early efforts published and preserved. There are fans, I suppose, who claim that the Lost Tales are great work in themselves, just as there have been those who called Titus Andronicus a classic. When The Silmarillion came out, thousands of readers tried hard to like it, failed, and refused to confess their failure. When the Lost Tales came out, thousands who had enjoyed The Silmarillion repeated the process. Lately the buzz has been that Children is a return to the novelistic style of The Lord of the Rings, more accessible than The Silmarillion. We have been told so by a formidable array of Tolkienists, Tolkienians, Tolkienologists, Tolkienosophers, Tolkienographers, and Tolkienicians, most of whom had never seen the book themselves when they issued these favourable pronunciamentos. Now I am not a Tolkienist, a Tolkienian, a Tolkienologist, a Tolkienosopher, a Tolkienographer, or a Tolkienician, but I have at least read the book; and in my considered opinion, we have been told a whopper. This new volume is as accessible as The Silmarillion itself, and no more, or very little; and for very much the same reasons. The Children of Húrin could have been as accessible as anything Tolkien ever wrote, if he had followed through on the impulse that led him to begin the Narn i Chîn Húrin, apparently in the early 1950s. Some of his very best work dates from that period, after The Lord of the Rings had been finished but before it reached print. As he wrote to Sir Stanley Unwin in 1950: For me the chief thing is that I feel the whole matter is now ‘exorcized’, and rides me no more. I can turn now to other things, such as perhaps the Little Kingdom of the Wormings, or to quite other matters and stories.
In the event, few of the tales he projected in those days were ever taken up, and none were finished; but before the impulse failed, he had written substantial chunks of a ‘novelistic’ retelling of the Silmarillion. That would have been worth having, and arguably it would have been a better use of Tolkien’s time than the academic busywork that fretted him until his retirement in 1959. But it was not to be. Portions of it were cannibalized for Christopher Tolkien’s 1977 edition of The Silmarillion, and much more for Unfinished Tales and the last four volumes in the History of Middle-earth. I understand that some still has not been published. The Children of Húrin represents Christopher Tolkien’s best effort to present one of the ‘late’ long-form tales as a complete and independent story. It is an admirable effort, ennobled by his scrupulous refusal to add more than a few connective phrases to his father’s unfinished and disjointed drafts. But at the same time it is essentially quixotic. The thing cannot be done; there is not enough of the raw material to do it with. And not all the material that exists is really suitable in tone for readers expecting a modern novel. Many people complained because The Silmarillion begins with a creation myth, like the Old Testament. They will not be better pleased to find that Children begins with a genealogy, like the New: Hador Goldenhead was a lord of the Edain and well-beloved by the Eldar. He dwelt while his days lasted under the lordship of Fingolfin, who gave to him wide lands in that region of Hithlum which was called Dor-lómin. His daughter Glóredhel wedded Haldir son of Halmir, lord of the Men of Brethil; and at the same feast his son Galdor the Tall wedded Hareth, the daughter of Halmir.
Children is typeset with short lines and wide line-spacing, and it is somewhat misleading to say that this retailing of family trees goes on for two straight pages. The tighter typography of the old Unwin (and Houghton Mifflin) hardcovers would have fitted it in a page; but even that is too much for modern stomachs. ‘But now the tale returns,’ Tolkien (father or son) says at last, ‘to Húrin and Huor in the days of their youth.’ That would have been a better place to begin. The story of their fight against the Orcs, their rescue by the Eagles and their secret sojourn in the hidden city of Gondolin, makes a gripping little tale; it could with profit have been longer. It is there that the essentials of the background are spelt out: the age-long war of the Elves against Morgoth, the friendship, sometimes tense and wary, between Elves and Men, and the foreknowledge that Gondolin, for all its secrecy, would be merely the last realm to go down before Morgoth to inevitable defeat. A few pages later, the lame craftsman Sador says all that is needful about Hador, ‘the old lord,’ and his successors down to Húrin; and the stuff about the Men of Brethil and their marital entanglements could well have been left until Túrin arrived in Brethil to make the relevance of this information clear. The mediaeval audience of the Beowulf-scop, or even of the Gawain-poet, liked to know in advance who all the dramatis personae were, and how everyone was related to everyone else, and expected these things to be important to the plot. Modern readers, brought up as atoms in a society that hardly knows what a family is, have no patience for it. Regrettable as this may be, it is pointless to burden them at the outset with knowledge that they do not want. The story really takes on detail and interest with the Black Breath and the death of Túrin’s sister Lalaith, and gathers speed and force as Húrin rides to war in the host of King Fingon. The account of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears is grievously docked, according to Tolkien’s own intention, but I suspect much to the confusion of those who have not read the full account in Chapter 20 of The Silmarillion. The exact details of the eastern battle we can get by without; but more probably needs to be said about the Union of Maedhros, and about who Maedhros was and why his Union in fact failed to unite all the Elves of Beleriand. Few of the folk of Nargothrond joined his alliance, and hardly any from Doriath; and as those are the Elf-kingdoms principally dealt with in Children, it might have been helpful to explain why. The whole atmosphere of the tale is one of brooding fatality, of suspicion between friends, distrust and division between ancient allies; but if you were to read Children without having read The Silmarillion, that mood might seem strange and unmotivated. This was an avoidable lacuna, created perhaps by Christopher Tolkien’s unwillingness to splice in bits of extraneous text or to venture explanations of his own. A worse gap, but an unavoidable one, occurs in the very heart of the book, in Chapters XI and XII. Túrin’s fate was foreshadowed from his childhood, but sealed by his rejection of Finduilas and her ill-starred love. This is glossed over in a few short passages, for Tolkien never wrote any long version of the Finduilas story. Christopher has included a fragment dealing with the love-triangle of Túrin, Finduilas and Gwindor, but not enough to build up its significance, or to carry the emotional weight that conditioned Túrin’s later dealings with the unknown maiden who turned out to be his sister. In a purely factual sense, however, enough is told to convey the story in essence. Tom Deveson misses the point, or perverts it wilfully to revive the old charge of racism against Tolkien: When, after a long separation, he meets and falls in love with his sister, she is “tall, and her eyes were blue, her hair fine gold” — now there’s a surprise. Lineage is all and virtue is hereditary.
The people of Hador were of what we should describe as a Scandinavian type; they were nearly all tall, blue-eyed and fair-haired, Túrin himself being an exception because of his foreign mother. (The people of Bëor, from whom Morwen was descended, bear a decided resemblance to Finns, and the people of Haleth to the Brythonic Celts. Tolkien’s taste in languages comes out in unexpected ways.) It hardly counts as racism to say that Niënor resembled most other people of her race. But Túrin’s attraction to her does not depend merely upon the supposed bias of Western society in favour of leggy blondes. He has but lately learned the grisly circumstances of Finduilas’s death, and regretted his failure to requite her love, when he finds this unknown maiden lying unconscious on Finduilas’s burial-mound. If you have paid attention to the (all too brief) descriptions in the Nargothrond chapters, she appears to him almost as Finduilas returned to life: Finduilas the daughter of Orodreth found her heart moved whenever he came near, or was in hall. She was golden-haired after the manner of the house of Finarfin, and Túrin began to take pleasure in the sight of her and in her company; for she reminded him of his kindred and the women of Dor-lómin in his father’s house.
When Túrin sees Niënor on the grave of Finduilas, the circle of memory is closed: for this is in truth a woman of his father’s house. But because he has never met Niënor before, and has no reason to guess that she has left the safety of Doriath, he fails to recognize her, and that circle becomes a noose that soon draws tight around them both. In the end Glaurung the dragon reveals to Niënor that Turambar, her husband, is also Túrin, her brother. Believing that he is dead, she despairs of him, and knowing that she has committed incest, she despairs of herself for shame; and nothing short of suicide can allay her grief. Then Túrin in his turn finds out the truth and kills himself. This is the crux of the tale, the element Tolkien took from the Kalevala and made his own. It is only the ‘elvishness’ of The Children of Húrin, its place in the high matter of the Elder Days, that raises it above the sordid tale of Kullervo. But to know this you would have to do some reading; you would need to know more about the Silmarillion, and about mythology in general, than a Deveson is allowed to know without surrendering his licence to sneer. In like fashion, Ms. Salij aims an ignorant barb at Tolkien, or what she fondly believes to be a barb: Tolkien's weakness for making his heroes so very, very good and his villains so very, very bad is particularly grating. Middle-Earth is the place to go if you must have the morality of your fiction be black and white, and apparently the simplicity was worse early in its history.
Beyond any doubt Túrin is the protagonist of Children, and the hero of the tale if it has one. He has the interesting trait, common enough among ‘men of honour’ in primitive cultures and still more in their mythological traditions, of having the strictest scruples without any actual morals. He is stubborn, stiff-necked, wilful, impulsive, violently touchy, immune to good advice, and prone to murderous rages against his closest friends; I can barely resist adding, ‘And those are his good points.’ I can account for Ms. Salij’s complaint in only two ways. Either she had already made up her mind to complain about ‘black and white morality’ before ever reading the book, or she really does think that a psychopath like Túrin is ‘so very, very good’. I am not quite sure which explanation disturbs me more. Even the Elven-kings, Thingol and Orodreth, are reckless and pusillanimous by turns, and push Túrin and his sister towards their grisly doom by their foolish miscalculations. On the other side, Morgoth himself is Tolkien’s Satan-figure, and not meant to be a sympathetic character in any respect; for Tolkien knew what traps awaited him if he followed too closely in the footsteps of Milton. But he is not a significant mover in the plot. Everything that happens to Húrin’s son and daughter is, as it were, over-determined; in fact, the whole plot is a formidable inquisition into the nature of fate and free will. We see it first in the description of Túrin’s friend Sador: He had been a woodman, and by ill-luck or the mishandling of his axe he had hewn his right foot. . . .
Which is it, fate or his own lack of skill? Is it Túrin’s obsession with Finduilas that leads him to commit incest with his sister, or the doom laid upon them by Morgoth? Is it Morwen’s pride that leads her to separate herself from her son, and then abandon all safety to go chasing after him when it is too late to save him? Or is some more elemental evil at work? In Chapter V, Túrin himself leaves Doriath because he has chased Saeros to his death over an insult; as so often happens, Saeros’s words struck a sorer spot than he intended. But between the insult and the revenge, Mablung the Hunter touches on the same question of fate versus freedom: ‘But if either be slain it will be an evil deed, more fit for Angband than for Doriath, and more evil will come of it. Indeed I feel that some shadow of the North has reached out to touch us tonight. Take heed, Saeros, lest you do the will of Morgoth in your pride, and remember that you are of the Eldar.’
In the whole tragedy of Húrin and his family, the only character who acts in direct obedience to Morgoth is Glaurung. He pushes the plot along at crucial moments, first by diverting Túrin from Finduilas’s trail, then by wiping out Niënor’s memory, and in the end by restoring it before he dies; but these things, while necessary to accomplish Morgoth’s vengeance, are far from sufficient. More important are the times when the human characters do Morgoth’s will by their own free choice. The whole plot reminds me of the traps and temptations in The Screwtape Letters, with the epic portentousness of an ancient skald in place of Screwtape’s corrosive wit. What is the flaw in the world that makes all our paths turn crooked against our will; or in ourselves, that we choose the crooked path when we would walk straight? The question was old when Shakespeare made it the moral heart of Macbeth, and when it vexed St. Paul a millennium and a half before: For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
Those verses would serve well as an epitaph for Túrin and his family. In The Children of Húrin, for all its flaws and gaps, Tolkien has produced a masterly meditation on the evil that lies sleeping in the human heart, and the evil in the world that calls it into wakefulness. Even in this incomplete form, it stands as a monument to the themes and obsessions that drove Tolkien to write the calamitous history of the Eldar. Who, then, is morally simplistic, or childish, or escapist? Is it the great authors of the last century — Tolkien, Orwell, Vonnegut, Burgess, to name only a few — who dressed up human wickedness in fairy-tale costumes so that we could bear to look upon it and call it by its name? Or the academics and critics, the Modernists and Postmodernists, who refused to look and pretended it did not exist? It takes a peculiar and wilful blindness to accuse Tolkien of moral puerility, or to read him without seeing the deadly seriousness of the issues his fantasies raise. The Children of Húrin is Tolkien at his darkest, Tolkien looking into the abyss; and I find it deeply disturbing that none of his enemies and few of his friends seem capable of grasping the fact. Suggested discussion points for future analysis
Tolkien knew better than any author of his time the uses of archaism, and the tricks and techniques of inserting them successfully into more or less modern English.
He {Turin} has the interesting trait, common enough among ‘men of honour’ in primitive cultures and still more in their mythological traditions, of having the strictest scruples without any actual morals
Morgoth himself is Tolkien’s Satan-figure, and not meant to be a sympathetic character in any respect; for Tolkien knew what traps awaited him if he followed too closely in the footsteps of Milton
the whole plot is a formidable inquisition into the nature of fate and free will. We see it first in the description of Túrin’s friend Sador:
He had been a woodman, and by ill-luck or the mishandling of his axe he had hewn his right foot. . . .
Which is it, fate or his own lack of skill? Is it Túrin’s obsession with Finduilas that leads him to commit incest with his sister, or the doom laid upon them by Morgoth? Is it Morwen’s pride that leads her to separate herself from her son, and then abandon all safety to go chasing after him when it is too late to save him? |
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Apologies halfir for taking so long to arrive, I have finally been reunited with my CoH book.
A few thoughts on some of the discussion points you've brought forward... On Turin being trapped by Morgoths magic or Turins flaws, it really could be both. Morgoth was at one point considered the most powerful of the Valar, and I believe it is stated in one of the Histories that he expended much of his power using it on giving his minions more power. I am not sure as I can't remember where I found the quote but there was also something about men and his extension of power on them. If I am remembering correctly then those that thought themselves subject to Morgoth could be controlled by him. Turin's flaw I would say would be his belief in Morgoth. And if he believed Morgoth had power over him then this would give Morgoth an in for extending what power he had at this time to perhaps give the extra push towards the doomed path. I am not sure on all the beliefs of prechristian society, however I am sure that many took things as signs and omens, which would mean that a belief in curses is not something that could be tossed aside as something that would not happen, belief is power. And the inability to decipher when someone is bluffing at their power (There are a few points where Morgoth appears to worry that Turin would escape his doom which means the curse was not without its weaknesses) could easily be viewed as a fatal flaw. |
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Fuin: Glad to see you joining in. I've a few more reviews to analyze before I start the discussion proper that you requested, so will delay my detailed response to you until then. I hope that's OK with you.
Your point about 'belief is power' resonates with the point madce in an earlier post by Eadwyn:
A question I would like to put forward and ponder over. In primitive/mediævil times a curse placed by such a powerful being would have been self fulfilling due to nature of the people of the time. Such curses would be implicitly believed and only those of great mental strength (or god gifted etc etc) would be able to overcome such. The question I ask here - Is it possible for this superstition or fatalism (if you prefer) to be prevalent in this time and if so that would have some relevance to everything that the family did?
Turin believed in the power of the curse - it is why he changed his name. So, if that being the case, wouldn't all the decisions made be subconsciously skewed towards fulfilling the curse? I think that both you and Eadwyn raise a pivotal pont, and one that Tolkien certainly intended to have debated as it goes to the core of the free will v predestination argument. Was it indeed the belief in the curse of Morgoth that - in conjunction with Turin's own particular personality caused the catalogue of woes to happen or was there, as Morgoth told Hurin, an objective Valinorian power which made such a curse effective?
As Shippey says (Road to ME-Chpt.Visions and Revisions):
when he {Morgoth} says Hurin does not understand the power of the Valar (including himself) he may be telling the truth. |
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Indeed it is more than alright that you're detailed response to me is delayed... saves me looking silly now I'd venture.
And yes it was Eadwyn quote/question that got me thinking along those lines with the first review. A want for something more (knowledge and understanding mostly) is as likely to have been a predominant need in men in Beleriand as it was in pre Christianity, as it is today. I would hazard that human nature dictates that we need an explanation for the unexplainable. Or as an answer to something we don't really want to admit we have control over so that we have a reason to do what we do. Honestly I think Morgoth IS indeed telling the truth to Hurin about not understanding the power of the Valar, as that power doesn't have to come from within, it can come from without as well. |
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as that power doesn't have to come from within, it can come from without as well. So perhaps we need to compare the nature of evil as say between Morgoth and Turin and Sauron and the One. Sauron objectifies his power in order to gain greater control and there is a strong argument in LOTR that the nature of evil is both internal and external- Boethian and Manichaen. (I leave aside for the purposes of this argument those who say that Shippey's thesis- for his it is- is flawed and that there is only one nature of evil in LOTR). In C of H there are no artefacts employed by the Dark Power- simply his will objectified by a curse. And Hurin is he responding to that 'objective evil' of the curse or is he in reality simply fighting the 'evil within'- that which resides in his own hubristic personality?
Food for thought perhaps for our later discussion.
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Enter the Door Within - C of H Review
Wayne Thomas Batson
If having a story weigh on your heart long after you close its covers is any indication of quality, then The Children of Hurin (CoH) is a marvelous story. I found myself dwelling on Turin’s decisions and examining my own pride. I thought about how easy it is for loved ones to hurt one another even with simple words. And I was overcome by hatred for sin and the horrors that mankind inflicts upon itself. CoH is well-written, though you could tell in parts where transitions between scenes were abrupt or incomplete. But most marvelous of all, you could tell that this was indeed J.R.R. Tolkien’s language. Once again, I was transported into a vast and ancient land. I was a visitor to something old and magnificent, and felt privileged for the opportunity. I fell in love with the characters—even little Urwen whose stay was sadly so brief. In this tale I found creeping pestilence and dread. I found noble heroes—oh, how I wish Beleg Strongbow had whole books written about his adventures! And, of course, there were very cool swords and weapons—some cursed and some not. All to say, CoH is definitely worth of reading. It is definitely worth having on your “keep forever” shelf. And it is definitely worthy of Tolkien’s legacy. I am glad I lived to read Children of Hurin.
And after reading Children of Hurin, I am convinced there are things far worse than death. Watching every tragedy known to humankind befall your offspring—being chief among them. Morgoth’s curse so utterly devastated Hurin’s kin that it makes me wonder why he didn’t just throw a curse on ALL of his enemies and then, sit back and watch the mayhem unfold. And about Morgoth: there’s nothing better than having a really bad villain get what’s coming to him. But not in CoH. Morgoth escapes virtually unscathed. I guess I knew that going in, as Earendil and the Valar take care of Morgoth much later in the history of Middle Earth. Still, I wanted to smack Morgoth with a big war hammer, but it never happens. CoH struck me much like Mystic River, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and The Departed. These are all extremely well-told stories. Well designed, well-directed, well-cast, well-acted, and well-shot—but dreadfully depressing. The Children of Hurin ended and left me with a vacant sense of dread, but no hope. I am glad to have visited with my old friend, Professor Tolkien. I am reminded of the power of the story. And I am left wanting more. Suggested discussion points for future analysis
Once again, I was transported into a vast and ancient land. I was a visitor to something old and magnificent, and felt privileged for the opportunity. How accurately does this represent your feelings and how does Tolkien achieve this in C of H?
The Children of Hurin ended and left me with a vacant sense of dread, but no hope. How accurate a description is this of C of H's impact on you?
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He that would foil me must use such weapons as I do, for I have not fed my readers with straw, neither will I be confuted with stubble.
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C of H Review –Beth Spera
The Silmarillion, while a detailed background to the events in The Lord of the Rings, has been regarded by most readers as obscure and dense, with too many names and not enough action to interest. However, the recent publication of The Children of Hurin may spark new interest in the vast prehistory of JRR Tolkien’s famous trilogy. The Children of Hurin is a story that was never published in JRR Tolkien’s lifetime, but was gathered and edited by his son, and is the expanded version of a tale from The Silmarillion. While written in an epic style, it is more novel-like than the Silmarillion version of the tale, and is a gripping read. Though the book seems to drop you in the middle of the events of The Silmarillion, a simple knowledge of LOTR will carry you through this almost stand-alone tale, and there is a helpful introduction and index of names.
As the title suggests, the story centers around the two children of Hurin, a human hero who was captured by Morgoth, the villain of the book (and, interestingly, the master of Sauron, who is the villain of LOTR). Because of Hurin's brave defiance, Morgoth curses his offspring, and sets Hurin upon a high place where he can watch what befalls them afterwards. After no news is heard of his father, Turin, the eldest and only son of Hurin, is sent to be fostered by the Elven king in the woods of Doriath. He grows to manhood among them, but an unfortunate act leads him on a long journey upon which he encounters outlaws, elves in hidden realms, dwarves, a dragon, and even his sister whom he does not recognize. Despite the curse upon him, Turin achieves much for good, but The Children of Hurin is a dark and intensely tragic tale in the end, and is not suitable for younger readers. There is one thing that makes this tale brilliant, however, and that is the handling of the idea of the curse. The story at first reminded me of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and in a way The Children of Hurin could be seen as an anti-Macbeth. While Macbeth hears the prophecies about him and attempts to bring them to pass, which makes the reader wonder if they would have come to pass had he done nothing, Turin is entirely unaware of the curse upon him, and yet the reader must wonder if that which seems to fulfill the curse would have happened had there been no curse at all. Many terrible accidents befall Turin throughout the story, but though he is a good man and means well, he is not entirely an innocent victim. Though quick to pity and often to apologize, Turin is also a man of great pride and is impulsive and quick to flare up in anger. When you look closely at the events in The Children of Hurin, nearly every piece of the tragedy that surrounds Turin could easily have been caused by no more than his own dangerous character. But Tolkien is very subtle in his work, and in the end it is not clear how much power was actually in Morgoth’s curse, and how much of the tragedy could be guessed by examining Turin’s character. Let us examine if the curse had no power. If Morgoth, Dark Lord though he was, had no power over the fate of Turin, what was his motive in casting a curse that would have no effect? I think Tolkien makes it clear in the story that Morgoth, like most evil characters, enjoys power, but even more so enjoys when people are afraid of him. As a supernatural being, he could perhaps have more foresight when it came to people, and if he saw the nasty end that Turin was naturally headed toward, he could easily turn it to his purpose by claiming that it was by his power that Turin was surrounded by so many dark events. And it would be clever plan indeed, as shown by the reactions of the other characters in The Children of Hurin. While some of his companions are inclined to think that Turin solely is responsible for his actions, most of the people he encounters are inclined to sense a “doom” about him, one that he cannot escape, and they seem to accept the explanation of the curse when they hear of it. All this, of course, makes Morgoth seem very powerful and undefeatable, an opinion that the Dark Lord would certainly not discount. And then there is Hurin, who finally escapes from Morgoth weary and beaten. If Morgoth wished to stop all defiance against him, he certainly succeeded here, and Hurin, once valiant and sure that good could overcome, is convinced that Morgoth is too powerful to be defeated. Of course, Tolkien never says anything on this subject, and all this is merely my speculation. But if one accepts the idea of a curse being nonexistent, the story becomes more than just a tragedy and takes on such themes as how humans are prone to blame everyone but themselves when bad things happen, and how even the best of intentions can be thwarted by a fault so simple as a quick temper. And that makes it a story both interesting and important. All in all, a definite read for older Tolkien fans, and something that perhaps would be interesting to other readers as well, as long as they are not put off by epic style and a tale with no happy ending. Suggested Discsussion Points for Future Analysis
When you look closely at the events in The Children of Hurin, nearly every piece of the tragedy that surrounds Turin could easily have been caused by no more than his own dangerous character.
As a supernatural being, he {Morgoth} could perhaps have more foresight when it came to people, and if he saw the nasty end that Turin was naturally headed toward, he could easily turn it to his purpose by claiming that it was by his power that Turin was surrounded by so many dark events.
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He that would foil me must use such weapons as I do, for I have not fed my readers with straw, neither will I be confuted with stubble.
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I hope we see you posting more here and in the other Lore Forums as well as in the Plaza in general.
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Woot! Discussion proper! *pumps fist*
Anyways Lenwe, welcome! Interesting point about Nienor... However I wonder at this because it was not in fact Morgoth himself but the dragon that caused her to lose her memory. And even long after Morgoth is cast into the Void, dragons had a great amount of power when it came to peoples minds (thus Bilbo avoiding Smaug the way he did.) However one could easily state that Glaraung being the forefather really of dragons, had more of Morgoths powers bestowed on him, and Morgoth could control his legions. Very interesting though about just how potent Morgoth could actually be. |
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Sorry about the delayed mainstream discussion per se, but I think it worthwhile laying a foundation via the many reviews that have taken place- some of most excellent quality, and then crafting a discussion profile around that rather than just having a sort of 'loose canon' approach to discussion. It'll be a couple of weeks yet before I'm ready for that - got my timetabling a bit out of kilter!
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halfir, I'm bursting to discuss some of these reviews, but I'll be patient. By the way, have you come across any articles/reviews which deal about the topic of "wyrd" in CoH, or is that something I should discuss in the "Fate, Doom" threads? I have been reading a lot about it lately in Anglo-Saxon Literature class, so I thought it might be interesting to see how Tolkien employed, changed or added to the concept.
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Fuin, I think Rosebury may have meant that it was Turin's impulsiveness that was guileless. When he was cool and rational he could be moderately guileful, but when that red mist arose, all thought, let alone guile, went out. But perhaps that's just my understanding..
BTW, Rosebury has a very interesting essay in Tolkien Studies 5 on revenge and moral judgement.
Going back a month or 5: Blake's Urizen or Milton's Satan for Morgoth? Well, Milton's Satan has the makings of a Byronic hero about him - mad, bad, dangerous to know, and terribly romantic - as Blake said somewhere, Milton was of the Devil's party without realising it. Urizen, however, as far as I understand (which admittedly isn't very far) is a cold bloodless spiritless bean-counter who only gets a slight stir of emotional satisfaction at seeing the victims of his systems of Newton and Locke suffer. But I'm no Blake expert. If only we had Charles Noad here, who is ....
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"I am no longer young even in the reckoning of Men of the Ancient Houses."
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Hello, and thank you for the opportunity to join in this conversation. As you can see, I'm very new here, and grateful for the opportunity to find people who appreciate and discuss Tolkien's work as I do. Please forgive me if any of my comments reflect previous discussions. While I have read everything in this thread (and the book in question, of course), I don't know all the conversations that have come before. Nor can I claim to have a mastery of every draft Tolkien has made of his tales. I would like to comment on the power of Morgoth and his "curse" on the family of Hurin. The possibilities discussed are whether "magic" was involved, or whether Turin's own tragic flaws led to his own downfall (forgive my oversimplification if I missed other possibilities). I would like to add to this the perspective that Morgoth was in the beginning with Eru, and he could have simply seen the actions of Hurin and his family and how they would play out in the music of the Ainulindale. While I doubt the Ainur during the Music saw with clarity the lives of all living beings as they played out, Hurin's family plays such a pivotal role in 1st Age History that they would likely be seen amongst the melodies. Always wishing to appear more powerful than he was, Morgoth spun lies with truth and told Hurin that he would "curse" his son, when in fact, he simply predicted the hell Turin would endure based on his choices. In addition, to make sure that such actions occurred, Morgoth nudged him along with his agents (e.g., Glaurung) to ensure the result. Another possibility (not incongruous with the first) is that Morgoth indeed shaped Turin's destiny with the Curse, and did so with the power he had as a god of Arda. Indeed, I think often of Morgoth's role in the creation of the Earth (even in the Music), his influence over Ea, and how the earth itself was considered "Morgoth's Ring." More than any of the other of Eru's creations, Morgoth is said to have infused his essence into the substance of creation. If ever there was a being who could shape and determine the events of reality simply by his words, it seems that it would be he. This perhaps goes with Morgoth's comments that Hurin underestimated the power of the Valar. |
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Ecthelion Valaraukar: Firstly welcome to the Plaza and especially to the Lore Forums. Enjoy.
Although there have been a few posts in this thread it has not- I am ashamed to say- really started yet! What I had intended to do was to lay a number of base discussion points- mainly derived from the better reviews of C of H and use them as a critical template from which to proceed. In the event, my work as Lore Adminsitrator- running nine forums- meant this was more honored in the breach than in the observance.
You might like, therefore, to look here -
Turin's Doom -Could he have avoided it?
http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=217337
but also, by all means , continue to post in this thread as I woud ceratinly like to breathe some life into it.
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Thank you for the link to the other forum, Haldir. It appears to be a great resource. I do hope, meanwhile, that this thread takes off as well. Being the most recently published of Tolkien's work, I think CoH deserves some serious discussion, and I enjoyed the reviews you posted. I will add a few more of my thoughts in the days to come, and hopefully be part of that catalyst.
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I'm delighted you have posted here and hope we can get a comprehensive discussion going soon. (and BTW it's halfir!
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Moderately resembles? Yes, moderately, but not altogether closely, in my arrogant opinion. If we follow the Aristotelian model of tragedy (which admittedly not all of the very few tragedies that have come down to us do either), we should have hubris to start with (not much of a problem there - Turin has a touch too much self-regard) and nemesis to end with (well, absolutely no difficulty with that!) - but between the two we should also have "ate" or "hamartia" - the error or fault that turns the whole thing round to the hero's doom; and I find it difficult to single out one particular action of Turin's that precipitates everything, like Agamemnon stepping on purple.
But that's just my AO!
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"I am no longer young even in the reckoning of Men of the Ancient Houses."
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I see, thank you What I was leaning more towards actually was kind of and Oedipal thing, lol. I find it interesting that Tolkien would have Turin wed his sister, I just didn't understand, and the only conclusion that I came to was that he was heavily influenced by Greek tragedies at the time.
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Istari*: If you care to look at some of the earlier posts in this thread which are 'culled' from reviews of the C of H in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals, you will find several do indeed suggest some similarities between Turin's story and Greek Tragedy. And of course Tolkien was very well schooled in the Classics:
i was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer. Letter # 142
But - as ever- Tolkien had his own great 'Cauldron of Story' and, whatever went into it, what came out was decidedly his.
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Supporting Member