You've probably all read about this already, but since I forgot to blog it yesterday, Houghton Mifflin announced this week that they'll be the American publisher for a new JRR Tolkien epic, The Children of Húrin, to be released in April of 2007. The work, which Tolkien never completed, was written on and off from 1918 through the author's death in 1973.
Tolkien's son Christopher has "reconstructed and edited" the manuscripts into a coherent product, saying "It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of the Children of Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it."
The Children of Húrin "has been referred to and extracted in other Tolkien work," and reportedly has characters and themes similar to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
More from GalleyCat, NYT
