Second Breakfast

This small volume is essentially another piece of “The History of Middle Earth”, which is the collection of annotated material that has been released since Tolkien’s death by his son Christopher, beginning with the publishing of “The Silmarillion”.

Tolkien conceived of much of the mythological and historical background to “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” decades before he began those two works, and in some respects he probably viewed those more narrative works as distractions from his true aim, which was to create a body of invented myth and legend “native” to Britian, and rooted in the invented languages which were his true love.

“The Tale of the Children of Hurin” (or Narn i Chîn Húrin in the Elvish) is the third of the Great Tales that were the centerpiece of Tolkien’s writing on what he came to call the Elder Days, or First Age of Middle Earth, and was considered by Tolkien to contain some of his most important ideas on myth and storytelling. In assembling this volume, Christopher Tolkien’s aim was to redress deficiencies and inconsistencies in the versions that were told in The Silmarillion and in The Book of Lost Tales. The volume is gorgeously illustrated by Alan Lee, whose concept drawings were uses as the basis for the visuals in the Peter Jackson films.

The story is quite dark and tragic, and like most of Tolkien’s heroes, those here are deeply-flawed.

Despite the fact that this material has been presented in part elsewhere, I don’t see this as a purely commercial effort. If one carefully reads the introduction and appendices one gets a good sense of what the editors are trying to do here. I enjoyed this revisiting of stories that I treasured in my youth.