It was written by Tolkien before he wrote anything Middle Earth related but was never published. Chris Tolkien, his faithful son, has put it together and written a foreword for it. The story is Tolkien's retelling of old Norse stories, which he drew on heavily later on to construct various Middle Earth peoples.
And I missed this, but last November, an illustrated collection of Tolkien's various "fairie stories" was published, including Farmer Giles of Ham and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in a single volume for the first time under the name Tales from the Perilous Realm.
Are Chris Tolkien's books any good? I've always steered clear for fear of having my good memories ruined.
Posted by Sean Monahan (Member # 9334) on :
I'm all over this.
Lalo, if you're referring to the History of Middle-earth series, CT's books are not novels. They are a historical account of JRRT's Middle-earth writings. They are more academic than entertaining. They contain many unfinished versions of manuscripts, and previously unpublished passages, and early versions of the story. If this kind of thing interests you, you may like them. If you're looking for another LotR, you'll be disappointed.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
Well, to be fair, they aren't really Chris Tolkien.
The Silmarillion and the Narn (the Children of Hurin), and I think the Unfinished Tales, are almost 100% JRR, all Chris did was move some stuff around and make them readable, rather than writing sections of new material himself.
So whether or not you like Chris Tolkien doesn't matter for those, and for this new one. It's really JRR, he just never had time to polish and edit, or for that matter, no one had time to translate his nearly illegible writing into readable English. Chris has spent a huge chunk of his life turning unreadable or unpublishable works of his father's into something dispensable to the public. To my knowledge, nothing under JRR's name that has been published and edited by Chris has actually had more than tiny bits written in any way by Chris.
The Histories might be a little different. Those are chunks and pieces of Tolkien's background information on Middle Earth, and really are history books rather than stories, though they contain bits of stories in them. There's a lot of commentary, more or less, from Chris Tolkien in there where he explains the different versions that were written and why he put what where and how it all fits together.
If you're looking for another LOTR, the Sil and the Narn might sate your interest, but I doubt the Histories will. I'm not sure what this new book will be exactly, nothing from Middle Earth though.