Fantasy
Mythologising the self
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The Children of Turin shows how Tolkine burnished and aged his universe in the oak barrels of his mind. SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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WHEN, at the age of 14, I first read The Lord of the Rings, I turned the last page, took a deep breath, and flipped right back to Page One — there and back again, as it were. By honest admission, though, I could never move pa
st the first few pages of The Silmarillion. In the canon, there has always been an unoccupied middle ground between the dense historicity of The Silmarillion and the narrative force of The Lord of the R
ings. The Children of Húrin, pieced together from J.R.R. Tolkien’s earlier writings by his son Christopher, straddles that middle ground superbly, with one of the most nuanced, stirring tales from Tolkien lore.
The Children of Húrin is to The Lord of the Rings what The Iliad was to The Aeneid — a prequel only in the most casual sense of the word. Six and a half thousand years
of Middle Earth history separate these events of the First Age from those of Frodo Baggins’ valiant quest in the Third Age; there are no hobbits, Rings or wizards to be found, and Sauron is yet only a flunkey to the aloof power of Morgoth, who menaces the region of Beleriand.
Tragic figure
At the exquisitely named Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Morgoth captures Húrin, Lord of Dor-lómin, and curses the members of his family to variously tragic destinies. Much of that tragedy is borne by Húrin’s son Túrin, who is sent away to grow up in the safety of a still-strong Elven court, into a redoubtable young warrior.
Túrin is an antihero from the pages of Shakespeare or Sophocles, as brooding and conflicted as Hamlet and as star-crossed as Oedipus. Even as he struggles against the webbing of his fate, he is drawn tighter into it; he turns allies into rivals, loses friends to his own sword, is desperately unlucky in love, and rages, all the while, against the tempestuous currents of his life. Even more than Romeo, Túrin Turambar is truly fortune’s fool.
Mythmaking is normally a product of the relentless march of history, when the passage of hundreds of years rubs and rubs against a tale until it has the warm, glowing veneer of antiquity. Time shapes a tale’s language, giving it the ring of proclamatory truth; time shapes its texture, adding further strands of plot and character; time shapes its appeal, stretching it to include elements that, at the risk of over-simplification, can only be called universally human.
In the annals of literature, the stories of Middle Earth are perhaps unique in how they emerged fully formed as myths, like paperback Athenas from the brow of Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings did it half a century ago, and The Children of Húrin shows again exactly how it was done, how Tolkien burnished and aged his universe, like fine wine, in the oak barrels of his mind before distilling it for our consumption.
Language of fable
The Children of Húrin is told, thus, in the familiar, archaic constructions of Tolkien’s English. The direct, elegant language of fable masterfully reins in a boisterous narrative that itches to run away at every tangent it
can find. Had Tolkien worked at it more, this book may have reached even the delicious length of The Lord of the Rings.
As with all great myths, The Children of Húrin is most remarkable for its fundamental humanity. The Lord of the Rings was only partly about rings of power; it was mostly about great courage, common sense, loy
alty, trust, and a smorgasbord of other old-world values. Here too, Morgoth and Glaurung are only secondary enemies for Túrin and his equally doomed sister Nienor. What they must really conquer are their own selves; what they must battle are impulses every one of us faces every day — anger, self-pity, lust and mistrust. The Children of Húrin may be less spellbinding than The Lord of the Rings, but it is every bit as rich and rewarding.
The Children of Hurin, J.R.R. Tolkien, editied by Christopher Tolkien, HarperCollins, Rs. 495.
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