Gratuitous Tolkien Geekery Posting

Philip Hensher reviews The Children of Húrin by J R R Tolkien and I don't think he likes it:

There are almost too many reasons to detest this new Tolkien confection. His prose hasn't improved beyond the grave. It is still that joke Edwardian-Biblical with made-up irregular past tenses ("it would cleave all earth-dolven iron") and absurd plurals - we are spared "waives", but only just. There are passages that you just can't understand - "under the shadows of Ered Wethrin he defiled the Eithel Ivrin". There is the ongoing belief that "for" is how the English say parce que . There is the total lack of any talent for dialogue: "Ha! Here we find them! Follow me all! Out now, and slay!"

And there is the suspicion that none of this actually matters at all: that, in the end, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales and the made-up languages and the Eldar and the Sindar and Uncle Tom Bombadil and all, just maybe, are the insanely consistent ramblings of an eccentric. How, exactly, does the invented mythology of a Tolkien differ from the mythology of, say, a Henry Darger, with thousands of pages kept under his bed?

The Tolkien estate must have been inspired to repackage some of Tolkien's writings by the success of the Lord of the Rings films. (The romantic illustrations, by Alan Lee, give the game away; his Mordor and elf-kingdoms and underground palaces have exactly the look of the three films.) I say "repackage" because, to the real obsessive, none of this will be new; it has been extracted from collections of posthumous writings, such as The Silmarillion and even less penetrable recensions. Supposedly from a period thousands of years before the action of The Lord of the Rings, it's about Túrin, the cursed son of Húrin, a heroic Man.

"Uncle Tom" Bombadil?

I think Hensher doesn't much like this book because he doesn't much like Tolkien to begin with. Me, I truthfully don't have much interest in buying it because I've got enough of the story already from The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. I hate to say it, but I'm not sure Hensher isn't on to something about the reasons behind repackaging the story here.

Yips! from Gary (the Tolkien Geek):
I ain't going near this one.

Yips! back from Robbo: Dude! I tossed you a lateral and was expecting you to take off with it!

Boomerang Yips! back from Gary:
Sorry, man. The farther out Tolkien gets from the Third Age the more it makes my hair hurt.