The Children of Húrin

The Children of Húrin is a single, self-contained volume: a continuous prose narrative of some two hundred pages, framed by an editorial apparatus that Christopher Tolkien deliberately kept out of the story itself. A preface explains why the tale was published separately; an introduction sets out the shape of Beleriand and the enmity with Morgoth for readers who need it; a note on pronunciation, genealogical tables of the houses of Men and Elves, an index of names, and a map of the northern lands follow the text. An appendix on the composition of the text carries the discussion of manuscripts, dates, and editorial decisions, so that the narrative proper runs without notes, brackets, or visible seams. Alan Lee's illustrations accompany the text in the first edition, and the Elvish title Narn i Chîn Húrin stands with the English one, the second word being the mutated plural that the Silmarillion had printed unlenited.

The narrative voice is the one Tolkien had developed for the long version of the tale: third-person, measured, chronicling rather than psychologising, but working at the pace of scene and speech rather than of annal. Where the Silmarillion chapter compresses years into sentences, the book lets encounters unfold in dialogue and lets minor figures speak at length. The greater part of the text is drawn from the long Narn as it survives in Unfinished Tales, with the shorter and later material supplying passages where the long version breaks off or was never brought past draft state; Christopher Tolkien's own connective writing is acknowledged in the appendix rather than marked in the text.

Within the legendarium the book belongs to the Elder Days, to the First Age wars of Beleriand, and to the small group of long tales that Tolkien intended to stand at full length beside the compressed history. It presupposes very little: a reader who knows only The Lord of the Rings is given what is needed and no more. It does not replace the Silmarillion account, which remains the version fixed within the larger history, but stands beside it as the fuller telling of the same matter, and beside Unfinished Tales as its consolidated form.

The matter of the book was among the earliest that Tolkien wrote. A prose tale of Túrin belongs to the group of stories he composed around the end of the First World War, and in the following decade he took the same material up again in an alliterative poem that he left unfinished; from those beginnings the story was carried forward in progressively compressed form through the successive versions of the Silmarillion prose. Christopher Tolkien's preface presents it as one of three tales to which his father returned at every period of his working life without ever bringing any of them to a settled final shape. Writing to a prospective publisher late in 1951, Tolkien himself set the story of Túrin among the central matter of the legendarium and named the older material he had worked from, pointing to Sigurd, to Oedipus, and to the Finnish Kullervo.

The long version from which the book chiefly derives belongs to the years after The Lord of the Rings was finished, when Tolkien turned back to the Elder Days and began writing the great tales out at full scale rather than in annalistic summary. He worked at it by intervals through the 1950s and after, and left it both unfinished and uneven: some stretches stand as fully developed narrative, others as drafts, outlines, or competing openings, while long portions of the later story were never carried past the shorter telling at all. Christopher Tolkien's account of the manuscripts distinguishes these layers and marks the points at which the long text simply breaks off, which is also where the editorial problem of 2007 lay.

Before 2007 the tale had reached print twice. The Silmarillion of 1977 carried it as a single chapter, and named within the narrative the long lay from which that chapter was said to derive, so that the existence of a fuller version was signalled to readers who could not yet see it. Unfinished Tales, published in 1980, printed the long version under its Elvish title, but as an openly editorial text: passages that ran close to the published Silmarillion were dropped to save space, breaks in the manuscript were bridged by summary, and the whole was accompanied by numbered notes. The 2007 volume was assembled to give the same story as continuous reading matter, with the editorial discussion moved out of the way, and it appeared in April of that year from HarperCollins in Britain and Houghton Mifflin in the United States, thirty years after the Silmarillion and nearly three after the death of the tale's first prose form.

A German edition followed in the same year from Klett-Cotta as Die Kinder Húrins. The book has since been reissued in paperback and in illustrated and collected formats, but the narrative has stood as first published; no revised text has been brought out, and the appendix on composition remains the account of record for what was taken from where. Christopher Tolkien afterwards applied the same principle to the two companion tales, publishing Beren and Lúthien in 2017 and The Fall of Gondolin in 2018, though in those volumes he set the successive versions side by side rather than fusing them into one continuous narrative, so that The Children of Húrin remains the only one of the three to appear as a single unbroken story.

The narrative is not divided into parts or books: eighteen numbered chapters run in sequence from first page to last, and the only structural signal a reader is given is the chapter title. Those titles are plainly descriptive and mostly name a place, a person, or an event, so that the table of contents works as a rough itinerary. The movement is geographical before it is anything else. The opening chapters stand in Dor-lómin, in the house of Húrin and Morwen; the middle of the book carries Túrin east and south, first to Doriath, then to the outlaw country and the hill of Mîm, then to Nargothrond; the last third settles in the forest of Brethil, where the remaining chapters keep to a single small region. Three chapters are named for a death, so the outcome of each of those movements is announced before it is read, in the manner of a chronicle rather than of a novel of suspense.

Four chapters step away from Túrin, and a reader looking for particular matter should know which. The second and third leave him behind entirely, giving the battle of the Unnumbered Tears at length and then the exchange between Húrin and Morgoth from which everything after it proceeds; this is the fullest continuous account of that battle in the book. Later, one chapter follows Morwen and Nienor out of Doriath on their own journey, and the chapter after it keeps to Nienor in Brethil while Túrin is elsewhere. Elsewhere the point of view stays close to Túrin, and the two chapters given to Mîm and to the outlaw band contain most of what the volume has to say about the petty-dwarves.

The editorial matter behind the narrative is itself divided. The appendix falls into two distinct discussions: one traces how the three great tales of the Elder Days stood in relation to the wider history and to each other, the other sets out what was taken from which manuscript and where the joins lie. The genealogical tables cover the house of Hador together with the people of Haleth, the house of Bëor, and the princes of the Noldor, which is enough to place every kinship the story turns on. The list of names glosses each entry briefly and supplies cross-references and, in places, the meaning of the name; it is the shortest route to identifying a figure met once in passing. The map shows only the lands the tale crosses, so that places named in the narrative can be found without recourse to a fuller map of Beleriand.

The volume's boundaries are worth stating, since they are narrower than its title might suggest. It begins shortly before the battle and closes with the last chapter, and the later course of Húrin's own life after that point is not part of it; for that a reader must go to the Silmarillion, where it is told in compressed form among the events leading to the ruin of Doriath. Nor does the book carry the scholarly furniture of the earlier printing: the numbered notes, the discussion of variant openings, and the editorial summaries that bridge the manuscript's gaps remain in Unfinished Tales, and anyone wanting to see the long text in its unsmoothed state must still consult it there.

What the volume supplies that no other book supplies at length is the human ground beneath a history already known in outline. The condition of Hithlum after the Nirnaeth — the Easterlings settled on the land, Morwen kept in a house she no longer governed, the neighbours and servants who had to live with the conquest — is given here in scenes, where the compressed chapter disposes of it in a few sentences of report. The same holds for Túrin's boyhood in Dor-lómin, for the sister who died in childhood of a sickness carried south on the wind from the north, and for the lame old servant of the household who taught him; none of these figures reach the Silmarillion at all. Mîm and his sons are the fullest treatment the legendarium anywhere gives to the petty-dwarves, and the turn of Nargothrond from secrecy to open war, with the bridge thrown over the Narog at Túrin's urging, is set out here as a policy argued and adopted rather than named in passing as a cause of ruin.

The book asks little of a reader beforehand, but it leaves a good deal outside its frame on either side. It takes as given that Morgoth is a power of another order than any king in Beleriand, and that his curse upon Húrin's family is something more than a threat spoken in anger; the ground of both — the revolt and exile of the Noldor, the oath that brought them back over the sea, the long siege of Angband and its breaking — belongs to the Silmarillion and is only sketched for the reader here. What lies beyond the last chapter is likewise elsewhere: Húrin's own course after Morgoth released him, the treasure of Nargothrond and the undoing of Doriath that followed from it, and the line running from Húrin's brother Huor through Tuor to Eärendil, which is the one strand of the house of Hador not consumed by the ruin this book records.

The whole text belongs to the posthumously edited layer of the legendarium: every word of the narrative is Tolkien's own writing, but none of it was published in his lifetime, and the order in which it stands was settled after his death. One consequence is a change in the tale's own presentation. Within the Silmarillion the story is said to be preserved in a long lay of the same Elvish name, so that the chapter offers itself as an abridgement of something fuller; the 2007 narrative drops that device and runs as plain narrative, with no maker set between the events and the reader. Where its details diverge from the 1977 chapter — in the ordering of episodes, in which encounters are given room, in how much of a conversation survives — the difference is editorial rather than authorial, since both texts were drawn by the same hand from the same body of unfinished drafts, thirty years apart and on opposite principles of compression. The two are therefore best read as two presentations of one body of material rather than as rival authorities.