The Children of Hurin - post IV

Well the curse takes them all to their graves and the dark lord continues to rule with out challenge. Although he does lose his faithful servant the dragon he is not going to lose too much sleep over it and even lets Hurin lose at the end in the knowledge that he can do more harm.

This feels like a start of something and when it does end it is with a sense of slight anti-climax because the story did not quite go according to plan plus with Morgoth still in control there is a real sense that justice has not been done.

At the end there are family trees, maps and appendices about how the book was written. This in a way is more interesting because it shows the love a son has for his father and his commitment to keeping a world that came out of his father’s imagination going. There are notes about when J.R.R wrote the book and how it fitted in with other works he was planning plus an insight into the switch from just being a story told in verse to something that ended up in prose.

A book that is a struggle to get into but then keeps going with a great plot but probably one that the Lord of the Rings fans rushed out to buy quicker than anyone else. Also you can’t help but feel like you a reading a children’s book when people on the train catch you at the moments when the entire right hand page is taken up with one of the illustrations that pepper the book, good though they are.

A review will follow soon…