Hacker News Reader

Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

"the Noldor, the kindred of the Elves among whom were numbered Húrin and Túrin Turambar"

Um, not quite. Hurin and Turin were men, not Elves, at least according to The Silmarillion.

Speaking of which, has anyone who has read the Silmarillion also read The Children of Hurin or Beren and Luthian? Are they the same stories with more detail? Do they change the basic stories told in the Silmarillion?

View on HN

I have obsessively read the Silmarillion and the Children of Hurin, and they are overarchingly the same, just in different formats. The Silmarillion is written like a history book; the Children of Hurin is written like a novel.

I never got through the poem of Beren and Luthian, I am not a poem guy, but from the bits I have read, it seemed to have the same relationship to the Silmarillion as the Children of Hurin.

Also, I am unclear if this is a "new" version of the Fall of Gondolin or just a new printing of the old one. Anyone found a more detailed source?

It appears to be a combination of "The Coming of Tuor to Gondolin" found in "Unfinished Tales" and "The Fall of Gondolin" found in "The Book of Lost Tales 2" [1]. The first covers Tuor's journey from Dor-Lomin to Gondolin in detail but stops there (Christopher Tolkien called it "one of the saddest facts in the whole history of incompletion"). The second covers the fall of the city itself in great detail. I read the two in that order recently and enjoyed the account immensely; it's on the order of Lord of the Rings in terms of a compelling story, grandeur and beauty.

[1] https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2018/04/the-fall-of-gondolin-...

Pro tip: let someone else read you poetry. Get an audio book version for poem books (see also: the Iliad and the Odessey, which I couldn’t force myself to read past page three)

Read both of them + Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth and few of the books in the History of Middle-Earth series compiled by Christopher.

I have to say I was disappointed in the Children of Hurin as it was once again repeating the same story with slight variations. After that I skipped the Beren and Luthien and will skip the new one as well. But my view may be distorted by the HoME series as they were full of different versions of the same stories.

Yup, The Children of Hurin is an extended telling of the story from The Silmarillion. They're basically the same, but I enjoyed the longer read.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com