Sunday 12 April 2009

Tolkien's Sigurd and Gudrun - Coming in May!!

Well last year the guardians of the Tolkien corpus favored us with the publishing of The Children of Hurin - and now coming up this May we have what I hope will be a a continuing series of Tolkiens unpublished works - this one The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun - is based on work Tolkien did in the 1920's and 1930's on the Saga of the Nibelungs and Fanfinrsbane Sigurd. The book will also include a lecture on Norse mythology that Tolkien gave.

Currently online is a great promotion video about the work including a very short excerpt from the book read by Brian Cox who will do the audio book:




Included in this video or some actual pixs of the manuscript in Tolkien's handwriting I have tried to capture these for view:














Intriguing to see mention of "gold tormented" "serpents seize him" and "the eye of Atli"- we shall have to wait to May for the rest!


So Christmas comes every May for Tolkienists we hope - what could be next? Well there is a prose back story to the Beowulf legend that Tolkien wrote called Sellic Spell and then of course back in Middle Earth we can see similar Children of Hurin treatment given to the Legends of Beren and Luthien and the magnificent Fall of Gondolin we find in the Lost Tales (written shortly after World War I - one of the bet descriptions of war I've read) - and then of course there is that grammar of Taliska (the first age language of men based on Gothic) which the Tolkien linguists have been working on for some time - one can only wait and hope.....

Please note the screen shot above is from the video about J.R.R. Tolkien's upcoming book Sigurd and Gudrun by the Publisher. The material is copyrighted by The Tolkien Estate and if there are any concerns about it being displayed here please contact me at asthiggins@yahoo.co.uk

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