The Children of Húrin

The Children of Húrin tells one of the greatest tragedies of Tolkien's First Age. The story follows Túrin, the son of Húrin, who grows up while the Dark Lord Morgoth dominates much of Middle-earth. Despite Túrin's courage and skill as a warrior, his family is bound by a terrible curse laid upon his father by Morgoth. As Túrin struggles against fate, his choices and the curse combine to create a powerful and heartbreaking tale.

Unlike The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, this novel is darker, more tragic, and written in a style closer to an ancient epic. It features many familiar elements of Tolkien's world, including:

• Elves
• Men
• Dwarves
• Orcs
• Dragons (especially the mighty dragon Glaurung)
• Eagles
• The Dark Lord Morgoth, Sauron's master

Although Tolkien never completed the novel during his lifetime, his son Christopher Tolkien reconstructed it from his father's manuscripts into a continuous narrative, first published in 2007.

If you enjoyed The Lord of the Rings but are interested in a more mythic, tragic story with deeper First Age lore, The Children of Húrin is one of Tolkien's finest works.

 

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien: writer, artist, scholar, linguist. Known to millions around the world as the author of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien spent most of his life teaching at the University of Oxford where he was a distinguished academic in the fields of Old and Middle English and Old Norse. His creativity, confined to his spare time, found its outlet in fantasy works, stories for children, poetry, illustration and invented languages and alphabets.

Tolkien’s most popular works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set in Middle-earth, an imagined world with strangely familiar settings inhabited by ancient and extraordinary peoples. Through this secondary world Tolkien writes perceptively of universal human concerns – love and loss, courage and betrayal, humility and pride – giving his books a wide and enduring appeal.

Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist who painted for pleasure and relaxation. He excelled at landscapes and often drew inspiration from his own stories. He illustrated many scenes from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, sometimes drawing or painting as he was writing in order to visualize the imagined scene more clearly.

Tolkien was a professor at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford for almost forty years, teaching Old and Middle English, as well as Old Norse and Gothic. His illuminating lectures on works such as the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, illustrate his deep knowledge of ancient languages and at the same time provide new insights into peoples and legends from a remote past.

Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892 to English parents. He came to England aged three and was brought up in and around Birmingham. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1915 and saw active service in France during the First World War before being invalided home. After the war he pursued an academic career teaching Old and Middle English. Alongside his professional work, he invented his own languages and began to create what he called a mythology for England; it was this ‘legendarium’ that he would work on throughout his life. But his literary work did not start and end with Middle-earth, he also wrote poetry, children’s stories and fairy tales for adults. He died in 1973 and is buried in Oxford where he spent most of his adult life.