Christopher Tolkien to finish lost Middle Earth novel

[davem]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

Most likely it'll be exactly the same text as is found in Unfinished Tales, except with a few passages added in from the '77 Silmarillion. So, nothing new if you've read UT/HoMe.

Still, I think anything that makes this wonderful story more widely accessible is worth something.

Of course, but many readers of Tolkien will not have read UT (The Narn) & HoM-e 11. CT has scattered the fragments across 3 books. This was not Tolkien's intention, & the narrative is coherent enough to work as a single story. Neither can we assume that there is no unpublished material left - CT did not include all the M-e writings in HoM-e & it is still appearing in Vinyar Tengwar. If a major text such as Osanwe Kenta could be excluded from HoM-e I wouldn't be surprised if other bits & pieces are around. Even if this isn't the case, the Narn should be made available to the general reader (as opposed to the Tolkien scholar).

I see a very beautiful edition forthcoming, the culmination (as the press release has it, of CT's work on his father's work. It is a fitting culmination too. We will have Tolkien's final great novel.

I'm sure that many of the critics who have dismissed Tolkien's work as 'trivial' will be shocked by the themes he deals with & amazed by the way he handles them.