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Jun 01, 2018Andrew Kyle Bacon rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
J.R.R. Tolkien's novel, The Lord of the Rings, stands as one of the greatest works of the English language alongside books like East of Eden, The King James Bible, and the plays of William Shakespeare. It is a novel of depth, brilliance, heart, and soul. Yet The Children of Hurin is my favorite of his works, and in my opinion is vastly underrated. Perhaps even more so than The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin seems like a real myth, lifted from the pages of history, from a culture lost to our world. Yes the novel is based on a real-world myth, but it is so effortlessly woven into the Legendarium as to feel alive and fresh in the hands of Tolkien. The cheery-eyed attitude of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings is nowhere to be found here, and anyone who says Tolkien could not write tragedy have never familiarized themselves with this work. It is unfortunate that the opening two chapters are in the shape they are in (too long and focused on peripheral background), because the actual narrative of Turin Turambar, son of Hurin, is the finest narrative Tolkien ever crafted. Tragic, morbid, and sad. The Children of Hurin is not light reading, nor is it extremely "fun." Yet it stands in a class of literature all its own. This book represents world-building at its finest. Mythopeia. The pure joy of sub-creation is found in this work. That of course is true of all Tolkien's writings, and yet here it comes alive and leaps from the page with depth and breadth and width that sets it apart from anything else you will ever read. Just like The Lord of the Rings, to call The Children of Hurin mere "fantasy" seems a disservice. Tolkien was not a genre writer. He was one of the finest literary craftsmen to ever set pen to paper. This is meant in no disrespect to other authors of fantasy literature, the very genre Tolkien helped created, but it is meant as an acknowledgement that Tolkien simply wrote. He meant it for no one in particular, and this gives the writings a universal appeal. Somehow within the story of Turin Turambar is your own story, and somewhere within is the story of the whole human race. Somehow we are simply doomed.