Witam
The Children of Hurin
stron 320
Stan nowy - jak na zdjęciu Wydawnictwo: Publisher: HarperCollins;
The very first thing you read in most editions of The Lord of the Rings is its Foreword, which begins with an allusion to what is not in the book: "the mythology and legends of the Elder Days". Tolkien had, he said, "little hope that other people would be interested in this work", and the second paragraph begins: "When those whose advice and opinion I sought corrected little hope to no hope ..." So off he went, to his publisher's relief, to finish The Lord of the Rings. Yet now, as part of the Nachlass of an unimaginably large corpus of notes and drafts, comes a story from those Elder Days. The first print run, I gather, is half a million.
The continuing popularity of The Lord of the Rings and its spin-offs is a matter that makes many serious literary critics, if they can bring themselves to face the matter at all, throw their arms up in despair. But it's interesting that a book so reactionary, so deeply at odds with the modern world, so profoundly conservative, should have such a grip on people who might not necessarily describe themselves as reactionary or conservative.
Yet it does. The Children of Húrin takes place in the First Age, or some 6,000 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. This, for many of that book's readers, was a time of great fascination and mystery: the hints supplied in Rings gave us to understand that in the First Age everything was bigger: the baddies were worse, the elves taller and more magical, the men more heroic. Even the landscape was more spectacular, and the earthly paradise of Valinor could still be reached, in theory if not always in practice, by ordinary boat.
You may question the concept of a society that produces nothing except a slow decline over 6,000 years; but that's the way Tolkien called it. There is a great, medieval bar over his imagination, beyond which nothing (except tobacco) is permitted. It is a world whose creator disapproves of every invention since, oh, let's say, the harpsichord. (Actually, sometimes it even seems as if he's not entirely happy with the invention of the wheel.)
That this happens in a work whose every word was apparently written in support of Tolkien's Catholic faith is, in a way, theologically questionable. Also interesting is the almost complete lack of religious observance in any of his works, despite the occasional appearance of superhuman entities we may as well call gods.
So there's something very pagan about Tolkien's world, and it gets more pagan as we go further back. The Children of Húrin is practically Wagnerian. It has a lone, brooding hero, a supremely malicious dragon, a near-magical helmet, a long-standing curse, a dwarf of ambiguous moral character called Mîm and - the clincher, this - incest. Which is here a disaster and not, as in Wagner, a two-fingers-to-fate passion. Readers will already have come across the story in its essence in The Silmarillion and, substantially, in Unfinished Tales, which came out in 1980. One suspects that those who bought the latter book will not feel too cheated when they buy and read The Children of Húrin
As those familiar with The Silmarillion will guess, the prose style is far from that breezy, homely donnishness that characterises The Hobbit and the first book of The Lord of the Rings. A very ordinary sentence such as "Frodo had a very trying time that afternoon", which occurs in chapter one of Lord of the Rings, is more or less unimaginable in the later stages of the book, and not at all in The Children of Húrin, which begins almost impenetrably: "Haldor Goldenhead was a lord of the Edain and well-beloved by the Eldar. He dwelt while his days lasted under the lordship of Fingolfin, who gave to him wide lands in that region of Hithlum which was called Dor-lómin." To which the unfamiliar reader may well ask: who? The who? The who? Who? And where?
I guess that most of the readership will be able to take this on the nod. After all, there must now be more people in this country who can name the three unions of men and elves in Tolkien's work than can name five of the demons in Paradise Lost, or recall that Balin is a name Tolkien borrowed from Malory - to whom, incidentally, Tolkien owes quite a lot; although there is more humour in Malory. (Or rather: there is humour in Malory.)
Christopher Tolkien has brought together his father's text as well, I think, as he can. In an afterword, he attests to the difficulty his father had in imposing "a firm narrative structure" on the story, and indeed it does give the impression of simply being one damned thing after another, with the hero, Túrin, stomping around the forests in a continuous sulk at his fate, much of which, it seems, he has brought upon himself.
As to whether the story brings out the feeling of "deep time" which Tolkien considered one of the duties of his brand of imaginative literature, I cannot really tell, for I do not take this kind of thing as seriously as I did when I was a boy and feel that perhaps the onus for the creation of such a sense of wonder is being placed too much on the reader. Actually, the First Age here seems a pretty miserable place to be; Orcs everywhere, people being hunted into outlawhood or beggary, and with no relief, light or otherwise, from a grumpy, pipe-smoking wizard. But it does have a strange atmosphere all of its own. Maybe it does work.
Polecam NACIŚNIJ Zobacz inne moje aukcje, kupując kilka książek zaoszczędzasz na kosztach przesyłki Każdą następną książkę kupioną na mojej aukcji należy doliczyć tylko + 1,00 zł do przesyłki. DZIĘKUJE
