By The Sea is 51,000 words down and I estimate about a third written. Jennifer Rohn at LabLit has kindly agreed to serialize it and from last Sunday the first episode was posted there, with another to follow this week. After that there are another six in the can, and I’ve written three more …. goodness, I can’t afford to stop now.
It is strange to see one’s writing published while it’s still being written, having it solidify behind you, as it were, inaccessible to change or revision. A friend of mine who has published novels as serials notes the obvious and stark parallel with Real Life.
The business of writing as fast as possible to keep up with oneself for fear of having Real Life catch up with you before you finish leads me to the subject of this entry. For, while busy with By The Sea I took a few moments out to read The Children of Hurin the latest novel by J. R. R. Tolkien. That such a book exists is remarkable given that the author has been dead for 34 years.
The Children Of Hurin is a bleak heroic saga that takes place in the same Middle-earth wherein the events of The Lord of the Rings are set, but in a different part of it and 6,000 years earlier, and, what’s more, written in an entirely different way. Reviewers’ elisions of The Children of Hurin as a ‘prequel’ to The Lord of the Rings are therefore so lazily inaccurate as to be misleading, rather like saying that Waterloo was a ‘prequel’ to Stalingrad. But I’ll let that pass.
The tale concerns the exploits of the hapless Turin, labouring under a curse directed at his entire family by Morgoth, a figure analogous to Satan. The tale owes much to that of Sigurd the Volsung and the dragon Fafnir (Turin kills a dragon here, too), and even more to that of the doomed hero Kullervo in the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala (or so I understand it, not having read The Kalevala). In The Children of Hurin there is blood, death, war, cruelty, mutilation, incest and talking animals, but no humour whatsoever.
As a story, therefore, it works provided that one expects an ancient heroic saga taken from a much larger tradition, and not a self-contained modern novel. It is more like the Odyssey or, perhaps more pertinently, Beowulf, full of high-flown heroism and deeds of doom; magical artefacts and Anglo-Saxon ‘kennings’; references to other tales and places in the expectation that the reader will immediately know what is meant; and – what modern critics find so frightening – a concept of an external fate or wyrd which one cannot change, and will in fact make worse if one tries.
The language, though, carries it – tight, thrawn, economical and muscular. Even though it’s shorter than it looks (it’s really a novella blown up with big type, generous white space and illustrations), this is a heavyweight read.
But for all that, it’s a disappointment. I hope you won’t mind my taking a little time to explain why I think that is.
Tolkien first began to lay out an immense cycle of legends for his imaginary world while recovering from trench fever during the Great War. This task he substantially completed in the 1920s, but the book, entitled The Book Of Lost Tales, remained unpublished.
The reason was that before Tolkien had quite finished, he attempted to rewrite it, and in various styles: annalistic and in extenso, in verse and in prose, and even in different languages (believe it or not he wrote some of it in Old English, as well as bits and pieces in various forms of his invented Elvish). He concentrated, if concentrated is the right word, on the three longest, most complex and most affecting tales, of which the Turin tale was one – this he recast as an immense epic in Modern English (but Old-English-Style) alliterative verse.
Twice.
Neither attempt was ever quite finished, which is a pity, as Tolkien was a natural at this extinct form of versifying.
As a way of summarizing the context of the verse epic, Tolkien sat down in 1930 and wrote a summary of the entire myth-cycle. This summary took on a life of its own, developing into a strand of writing in which Tolkien told the stories of the legendarium in compressed form, in the same way that Charles and Mary Lamb did for the Bard in their Tales from Shakespeare. This summary was revised and expanded in 1937, and Tolkien got halfway through the Tale of Turin (which occurs late in the legend cycle), stopped in mid-sentence … and didn’t return to it for at least fifteen years.
The reason was that he wrote and published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both of which Tolkien considered digressions from his private legendarium, even though both stories draw heavily on the invented world and even hint at the contents of the unpublished legendarium.
Tolkien returned to the legendarium in the 1950s with enthusiasm and finished off most of the Turin tale. But he was, by then, turning sixty, and the effect of The Lord of the Rings in its freezing parts of his mythology in publication space, meant that he didn’t get as far as he intended.
Tolkien died in 1973 leaving vast quantities of unfinished material, and his son Christopher, as literary executor, to make sense of it.
It was Christopher who took the 1937 summary, collating and crosschecking it with the later material, and published it as The Silmarillion which, like The Origin of Species, was only meant to serve as a taster, an abstract from a much larger and more variegated body of work. The Turin story takes up just one chapter of The Silmarillion. Then came Unfinished Tales – a compendium of various writings, including a long treatment of the Turin story – and the twelve-volume epic The History of Middle-earth, in which Christopher Tolkien collects virtually every scrap and draft of his father’s writings related to Middle-earth and subjected them to a degree of textual commentary. It is in The History of Middle-earth that you will read at least five versions of the Turin story, written over half a century.
To be sure, Christopher Tolkien notes much of this in a helpful appendix to The Children of Hurin. So why do I say that the new volume is a disappointment?
Because, I think, of its positioning. The Children of Hurin is directed quite deliberately at those readers of The Lord Of The Rings who, while stimulated by Peter Jackson’s films, have tried and failed to get
on with The Silmarillion (a thrilling but much less friendly read) or Unfinished Tales, and who’d faint dead away at the thought of The History of Middle-Earth which, at well over 4,000 pages, with notes, notes upon notes, commentaries, giant scads of epic verse, and great swaths of Old English, Elvish and other languages, is probably no better as a bedtime read than the Babylonian Talmud (I’ve done it though. The History of Middle-earth in bed, that is. Not the Talmud.)
On what basis can The Children of Hurin be considered a new work, when it is unashamedly a reworking of the story in Unfinished Tales with some textual revisions and additions from other versions found in The History of Middle-earth? The aim, says Christopher Tolkien, is to provide the tale, in its own covers, and without any textual commentary, as an accessible ‘novel’ for the palettes of the post-Peter-Jackson Rings fan who doesn’t want to try too hard.
And so it works, to an extent – but only if you recognize that it is a primped and polished creation which draws on an old tradition of storytelling, both in the context of heroic epic and the author’s own literary life. To ‘understand’ The Children of Hurin you have to have read The Silmarillion, not The Lord Of The Rings. But if you have read The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin becomes little more than exploitative Tolkien ‘product’. A cash-in.
That’s not to demean the story in any way – it’s great. But it was great in Unfinished Tales, and in The Silmarillion, and The Annals of Beleriand and in The Book Of Lost Tales (vols I and II of The History of Middle-earth), in much the same (or at least very similar) words. And I’d hazard that many people will find The Children of Hurin as baffling as they found The Silmarillion when Christopher Tolkien first presented that in the 1970s – but at least there was the unassailable justification that none of the material had ever been published in any form.
The only reason that The Children of Hurin could have been published at all was the strange circumstance of Tolkien taking up the tale where he’d stopped fifteen years earlier, thus substantially completing it, rather than doing what he usually did, which was to rewrite from the beginning and give up, creating stories with many beginnings but very few endings. This is why we will never see complete forms of the other great tales in the legendarium – of Luthien Tinuviel, of the Fall of Gondolin, and most of all of the flight of Earendil and the War of Wrath, sketched in the 1930s and untouched ever after. But perhaps, in a way, that is a blessing, for as Tolkien said during his life, his aim was to create a myth cycle which, like real myth cycles, would vary in detail and completeness. Christopher Tolkien reminds us of his father’s views in his notes in The Children of Hurin, seemimgly without irony.
I wonder, though, whether there isn’t a flipside to Tolkien’s view: that despite his efforts to get The Silmarillion published in his lifetime, his body of song and story, epic and verse, was never really meant to be finished such that it could be reduced to convenient, complete and self-contained novelizations for a publisher and public for whom the nature and style of heroic epics mean very little unless they can appear on the bestseller list at £18.99 a time.
Again, as Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings, part of its success lay in the stories left untold, the frequent glimpses, as if through the trees, of tales like lost cities on the horizon, lending enchantment to the view but never explored.