I’ve been a Tolkien fan for at least 30 years. I read my omnibus volume of Lord of the Rings until it quite literally fell to pieces. Like many Gen-X geeks I played Dungeons and Dragons and related RPGs. I read The Hobbit to my own children when they were little. I loved what Peter Jackson did with the movies, even though he changed some bits. I delighted in showing the extended versions of the movies to my partner Helen as her introduction to Tolkien.
So… the Tolkien legacy has produced another book, and I rushed out and bought it. I’ve owned The Children of Hurin for a couple of months now, and, well, I’ve tried three different times to get into it, and I find it boring. This is some kind of heresy I know, and I’ll probably burn for it, but I can’t understand how tedious it is. Maybe I’ve changed, and I suffer now from nerd ADD where there is a minimum necessary attention grab. I don’t know, perhaps {{shudder}} I have outgrown one of the greatest novelists of the last hundred years. So I re-read some of Tolkien’s other books, and even the obscure work like the Silmarillion was better than The Children of Hurin.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, The Children of Hurin was not published as a separate work because J.R.R. just didn’t think that it was good enough.
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