The Children Of Hurin By J. R. R. Tolkien (Hardback, 2007)

This de luxe collector's edition features the first edition text and eight full-colour plates with an exclusive colour frontispiece illustration The book is quarterbound with a special gold motif stamped on the front board and is presented in a matching slipcase There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before The Lord of the Rings and the story told in this book is set in the great country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West lands where Treebeard once walked but which were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the First Age of the World In that remote time Morgoth the first Dark Lord dwelt in the vast fortress of Angband the Hells of Iron in the North; and the tragedy of Turin and his sister Nienor unfolded within the shadow of the fear of Angband and the war waged by
Morgoth against the lands and secret cities of the Elves Their brief and passionate lives were dominated by the elemental hatred that Morgoth bore them as the children of Hurin the man who had dared to defy and to scorn him to his face Against them he sent his most formidable servant Glaurung a powerful spirit in the form of a huge wingless dragon of fire Into this story of brutal conquest and flight of forest hiding-places and pursuit of resistance with lessening hope the Dark Lord and the Dragon enter in direly articulate form Sardonic and mocking Glaurung manipulated the fates of Turin and Nienor by lies of diabolic cunning and guile and the curse of Morgoth was fulfilled The earliest versions of this story by JRR Tolkien go back to the end of the First World War and the years that
followed; but long afterwards when The Lord of the Rings was finished he wrote it anew and greatly enlarged it in complexities of motive and character it became the dominant story in his later work on Middle-earth But he could not bring it to a final and finished form In this book Christopher Tolkien has constructed after long study of the manuscripts a coherent narrative without any editorial invention