New Tolkien Book Arriving May 2009

Like the Children of Hurin I have high hopes for Tolkien’s new book, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. But my expectations are quite different since The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is not the latest installment of Tolkien’s ‘forgotten stories’ of Middle Earth. Rather it is Tolkien’s retelling of the Norse sagas, that over 70 years ago, inspired Tolkien to sub-create his own mythology for England.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a previously unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, written while Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford during the 1920s and ‘30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It makes available for the first time Tolkien’s extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigurd the Völsung and The Fall of the Niflungs. It includes an introduction by J.R.R. Tolkien, drawn from one of his own lectures on Norse literature, with commentary and notes on the poems by Christopher Tolkien. (From the Publishers)

Read the Forward by Christopher Tolkien at The Tolkien Library.

To better understand and appreciate Tolkien’s literary genius check out Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle Earth: How Tolkien created a New Mythology.