Unfinished Early Tolkien Work To Be Published This August

This is neat.

From The Telegraph:

An early work by JRR Tolkien that would spark the creation of his Middle Earth epics will be published as a novel for the first time at the end of August 2015. 

Tolkien begun work on The Story of Kullervo, a dark revenge narrative, in 1914, while he was still at Oxford University. 

[…]

 …the plot description tells of a “a doomed young man who is sold into slavery and who swears revenge on the magician who killed his father. Kullervo son of Kalervo is perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all JRR Tolkien’s characters. ‘Hapless Kullervo’, as Tolkien called him, is a luckless orphan boy with supernatural powers and a tragic destiny.

“Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother, and who tries three times to kill him when still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the love of his twin sister, Wanona, and guarded by the magical powers of the black dog, Musti.

“When Kullervo is sold into slavery he swears revenge on the magician, but he will learn that even at the point of vengeance there is no escape from the cruellest of fates.”

The Story of Kullervo will be released in the US on 27 October.

Read the whole thing here.

Love me some Tolkien. This is one I’ll get in the dead tree version, rather than e-book.

Photo Credit: Julian Nitzsche [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia

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