Tolkien Tuesday

As Therese posted yesterday, we have joined with our writer buds in one of our semi-regular Writing Challenges.  It goes like this: we challenge each other to meet a predetermined individual goal, for one week.  We e-mail our day’s results to the group, wherein we give each other boosts of motivation, pats on the back, or commiseration.  We find that a week of intense encouragement and goal-setting helps us move forward with our projects.  Sometimes a good challenge is all that’s needed to find the mojo that can help us finish.  It’s sort of a gentle NaNo.  But only for a week.  And without the pagecounter wiki.  Or the forum.

So we’ll let you know how that goes next Tuesday.  But today, Tolkien fans rejoice.  Behold!

 That’s right.  You’re seeing the jacket art of one of the last fragments from JRR Tolkien’s notes on Middle Earth, now collected in book form by his son Christopher.  The Children of Hurin will release on April 17, 2007, nearly a hundred years after Tolkien began jotting notes about Middle Earth.

And they got Alan Lee to illustrate it.  Hee.

Now, I consider myself a hardcore Tolkien fan, but I had a tough time making it through the Silmarillion back when I was a teen, and I never returned to it.  Tolkien’s elven mythology was dense and populated with so many minor characters that I found it difficult to sustain my interest in the narrative.  Where were the hobbits, Middle Earth’s equivalent of the Everyman?  Who were all those elves?  Why should I care about them?

But now that I’m older, I’m definitely going to revisit Middle Earth this spring with renewed appreciation for the care Tolkien took with his world building.  Without these early legends as the foundation, The Lord of the Rings would not have had the spellbinding power it still exerts today.  These early fragments also offer a fascinating look at Tolkien’s growth as a writer.

I’ve got a place for THE CHILDREN OF HURIN on my permanent bookshelf.

Kathleen Bolton

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.

She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.

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