Вот рецензия на СоН от Джона Гарта, опубликованная в Дэйли Телеграф:
(Я постараюсь приложить подстрочник)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...26/botol22.xmlA last, sombre visit to Middle Earth
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 26/04/2007
John Garth reviews The Children of Húrin BY J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. by Christopher Tolkien
After The Hobbit's success in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien's publisher told him that the public was now hungry to hear more about Bilbo Baggins and his kind. The result was The Lord of the Rings, not a children's book but still starring a Baggins. In fact, what Tolkien most wanted to publish was The Silmarillion, the mythology he had begun in the First World War, inconveniently entirely hobbit-free.
Edited from multiple versions and published posthumously by Tolkien's son Christopher in 1977, this austerely synoptic legendarium proved indigestible to many readers. Since then, further posthumous volumes of Middle-earth writings have appeared: fragmentary works, interspersed with editorial commentaries and footnotes, fascinating for the aficionado but not for the average fan.
Only now, for the first time since 1977, has any cohesive and complete narrative appeared to join the other three major books in the Middle Earth canon. The reader will find no hobbits, but a brooding saga of heroism and sorrow, written soon after the publication of The Lord of the Rings by a master at his peak.
The story of The Children of Húrin had its prototype in 1914, when as a student at Oxford Tolkien tried retelling the Finnish folk-tale of ill-fated Kullervo, who unwittingly seduces his own sister. By 1919, that project had been superseded and Tolkien had fused elements of Kullervo with the Teutonic dragon-slayer Sigurd - the German Siegfried. Tolkien was not drawing on Wagner, but looking beyond to a common source in Norse saga.
The daunting opening paragraph of The Children of Húrin outlines a genealogy: this is the saga of a family, whose destiny drastically affects others both immediate and more remote. It is also an outlaw saga, dealing with an individual separated from society and in direct conflict with more elemental forces.
Also true to saga, the prose is full of stark old words and alliteration. People take oaths that bind, suffer curses that bind more strongly still, and trade hard-earned wisdoms: 'A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it."
But The Children of Húrin is no academic exercise, partly because it also breathes the dank air of the 20th century, with its muddied motives, its oppression and slaughter. Cruelty and brutality are explicit. Bitterness ousts charity and hope.
This is far from the black-and-white moral landscape that critics too often decry in Tolkien's works. The enchanted world is being killed by a thousand cuts; the rivers are poisoned and their divine spirit sent into retreat.
As befits a story by a Somme veteran, over-confidence leads to the disastrous Battle of Unnumbered Tears. For survivors, the consequences of heroism are worse. The chieftain Húrin is captured by the forces of the satanic Morgoth, who forces him to watch with superhuman vision as a curse inexorably pursues his distant family, and particularly his heir, Túrin.
As a boy Túrin poses immense questions of fate and death, but no one in this benighted world knows the answers. If The Lord of the Rings is an expression of faith in a God who turns events to good, The Children of Húrin expresses a visceral sense of evil undermining everything of worth. Evil, here, delights in irony.
Repeatedly, the adult Túrin strives to make a stand against the forces that drive him from pillar to post, but he is thwarted by his own unhappy choices. The dragon Glaurung sets a snare of circumstance for him and his unrecognised long-lost sister, then laughs with 'the laughter of Morgoth' at their agonies. As the cruel and complicated drama is played out, we are left reflecting that if Túrin had not adopted a pseudonym, Master of Doom, in a bid to evade the malediction on his family, their doom might not have mastered them.
Despite his compound errors, what is heroic about Túrin is his determination to fight on, his refusal to bow to irony. In what is now effectively Tolkien's last Middle Earth work, I think we hear the authentic voice of the war veteran, entirely open-eyed about the horrors of the human condition but a staunch dissident against the view that endeavour is futile.
The volume, with luminous pencil drawings and muted watercolours by Alan Lee, is supplemented by Christopher Tolkien's introduction, setting the scene for those unfamiliar with The Silmarillion: by family trees, a helpful reference list of names, and a fold-out map.
What the perfectionist Tolkien actually left of this story was a matrix of competing drafts, and sometimes nothing more than notes to bridge a gap; die-hard fans already know the fragmentary version published as part of Unfinished Tales in 1980. Re-edited now so that the fragments are fitted snuggly together, and without the distraction of footnotes, The Children of Húrin gains significantly in power: despite the tantalising roughness and brevity of some central passages, the story of Túrin the dragon-slayer has regained its serpentine backbone.
