Alors, Et Toi? is a quarterly magazine of the arts, digitally published on the world wide web.
Our Partners
What a Disappointment!
Review of The Children of Hurin
by Peter Budvietas
I’ve been a Tolkien fan since I first discovered The Hobbit in the public library. Shortly after reading it, I was confirmed as a Tolkien fan with The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Then I found some of Tolkien’s short pieces. If you want to read short stories that ring true, try Farmer Giles of Ham and Leaf by Niggle—they are brilliant.
I was not impressed by The Silmarillion and the other offshoots about Middle Earth, but the magic of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and those short stories were enough to build up a sizeable collection, even if I seldom went back to the extras. I read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit at least every second year, but my collection of the short pieces went missing, and I keep meaning to get another set.
So, when The Children of Hurin came out, I was very much looking forward to reading it. Maybe that was the problem—I desperately wanted to read it!
It took a while before I got a copy (there are other books I read, and Children kept getting put off as a buy). Finally I found a copy in the Library, so I borrowed it and settled down for a nice long read. I love to read books from cover to cover in a couple of hours.
Almost from the start, I was disappointed in the writing. It’s heavy, repetitive, and, in a word, boring!
Oh, there’s a powerful story in there, one that would make a great Bard’s Tale in a Middle Earth great hall. I can see a Bard enthralling the audience, with the tantalising of Hurin by Morgoth, the power of Turin, and the other heroes of the age, the magic sword, and the beauty of Hurin’s daughter. Oh, and the unintentional incest...
It’s not that long a book, but it contains so many images and ideas that it should be Tolkien’s crowning work—far more ideas and images than all the pages of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit combined, even with the appendices.
Yet, somehow, it all comes across as dead. For me, at least, the characters never come alive. They’re just two-dimensional figures parading across a landscape that never comes into sharp focus. It’s like listening to a bard that never learned how to tell a tale—ideas presented because they are powerful ideas, characters presented because they could be heroic/tragic characters, evil that could be power incarnate, but...
Sorry, but this time Christopher and the others involved have done a great disservice to one of the most poetic writers of the Twentieth Century.
What a waste of a great set of ideas! (Fantasy writers please note: here’s a great story just waiting to be written).
I’m glad that I postponed buying the book—now I won’t.