Philosophy of 'Children of Hurin'

Hey hope, welcome to A2K. Always great to see another Tolkien reader here.

I haven't read it yet, (it's on the bookshelf, next in line)...but I'll bet there is no real philosopy that is specific to this story. I see Tolkien as more of a highly creative historian and philologist.

Hey Eorl,

Thanks for the welcome. I don't know about Tolkien much and I'm not a fan yet. But, I liked reading this book anyhow. I wish I'd have the opportunity to discuss it with someone who has read it.

Well, I'll be sure to pop back in when I have!

I've not read The Children of Hurin, but i have read everything the J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, and read them several times. Tolkien was certainly not a simple-minded man, and the body of his work hasn't a single, simplistic theme. However, there are two themes which stand out in all of his work. Whether or not this was carried into The Children of Hurin would be for the reader to decide.

The two most common themes which i see in Tolkien are that the world is, in moralistic terms, a balance of good and evil--and that one cannot have one without the other. In The Silmarillion, Eru (Supreme Being, "God," if you will) has created the Ainur, and they are to create a great song, which will reveal his will, and incidentally create the world. Among the Ainur is Melkor, who has greatest power of all the Ainur, and who rebels--he first sings an antiphonal part, and then uses his power to free himself from the song, and create his own song.

When the singing has ended, Eru shows to the Ainur a world which they have created with their song, and twelve of the most powerful of them are sent to this world to complete the creation. They are lead by Manwë, who is the "brother" of Melkor, and the most powerful of the Ainur after Melkor. These members of the Ainur who go to the world to complete the task of creation (and their song has vouchsafed to them a vision of the completed world, and the people--elves, dwarves and men--who will inhabit Middle Earth) become the Valar, and they are able not only to "awaken" the "first born" (the Elves) and the "second born" (men), but also to create to a limited extent. To aid them in their labors, they create the Maiar, who are powerful beings of an order just less than themselves. Melkor cannot create but only corrupt--however, he successfully corrupts several of the Maiar before they are fully formed, who become balrogs, and he corrupts the Maia Sauron, who becomes the servant of Melkor (known now on Middle Earth as Morgoth).

At no point in the narrative sequence (which is incomplete), are the Valar or Maiar able to dispense with evil, or to create anything "of the light" which does not have an equivalent "of the darkness" in its shadow.

The first principle of Tolkien's "cosmogony" is that there will always be evil to balance good, darkness to balance light.

The second theme which runs through all of Tolkien is hubris, and "the wages of sin." One of the Valar, Aulë, created the dwarves before the Elves (the "first born") were awakened, and the doom laid upon his creation was that the dwarves were not allowed to awaken, and the Aulë was not allowed to perfect them--hence, they remained relatively short and misshapen, and were hard-headed and unyielding, because they partook of the character of their creator, Aulë, who had deifed the will of Ilúvatar (who is the same as Eru, "God," just a different name) to create them. He paid the price of his hubris in creating the dwarves in defiance of the divine plan--or rather, the dwarves paid the price.

Among the Noldor (long, compliacated story--they are basically among the first Elves to awaken, according to Ilúvatar's plan), there were also arrogant and proud people--and one, Fëanor, created the silmarils, three gemstones of great power, into which he put some of the light of the two great trees of Valinor (the home of the Valar after they were sent to middle earth by Ilúvatar/Eru), and the trees from which the sun and the moon were created. In all the tales which proceed from the act of the creation of the silmarils, Fëanor's hubris corrupts all those who are associated with them, Elves and Men, and the Eldar (the first born Elves) and the earliest Men suffer terrible woe and constant battle with the enemy because of the silmarils--into which Fëanor had placed some of his own essence, and which are a physical embodiment of hubris, since even the Valar cannot create anything as beautiful or powerful as the silmarils, and Fëanor was incapable to ever creating anything like them again.

The "wages of sin" for the silmarils is literally ages of warfare for Elves and men, and among the Valar themselves, as they battle Melkor/Morgoth and quarrel among themselves about what must be done about him. Melkor had been imprisoned for three ages in the first great battle of the Valar, but had ended his imprisonment and was in Valinor when Fëanor created the silmaril, so the themes of evil entering everywhere where there is good, darkness everywhere where there is light, is woven into the theme of hubris and retribution. The silmarils lead Melkor to introduce great evil in to Valinor itself, and the two trees are destroyed by Ungoliant (a great spider--Shelob, the spider in The Lord of the Rings is a descendant of Ungoliant, and the pass through the mountains where Shelob has her lair is Kirith Ungol). Fëanor will lead some of the Noldor back to middle earth from Valinor, and in the process will commit the crime of kinslaying of the Teleri, to get the ships the Teleri had refused to give them. In fact, reading The Silmarillion could justifiably lead one to believe that the silmarils brought nothing but darkness and evil into the world.

The theme of hubris and retribution is arguably the greatest theme of his work. After all, the War of the Ring becomes inevitable because Isildur does not destroy the one ring after he cuts it from the finger of Sauron, but rather claims it for his weregild, the price for his father's death at the hand of Sauron. Because Isildur does not destroy the ring, Sauron's spirit survives the second age; the ring slips from Isildur's finger, and he is revealed to the orcs as he attempts to swim across Anduin the Great, and the orcs kill him with their arrows. The ring lays on the bottom of the river until Sméagol's brother finds it, and Sméagol murders him to get the ring--he becomes Gollum.

When Sauron creates the one ring at the beginning of the Second Age, he also creates the seven rings for the dwarves (when Aulë created the dwarves, there were seven "fathers"), and nine rings for men--they are both seduced into accepting the rings because they lusted for wealth and power.

The greatest theme which Tolkien carries through all his work is hubris and retribution for that hubris. Whether or not that will be true in The Children of Hurin, i could not say.

As I understand it, we've already read the outline of the "Children of Hurin" in "The Silmarillion" and/or "Unfinished Tales" anyway Set, so nothing shockingly new is to be expected.

So i had understood, given that he is one of the men of the first age. I can't, of course, know what these boys will do with the story until having read it. I suspect they'll keep to Tolkien's main themes, but i don't know it.

It would be interesting to think that they intend to flesh out the details of all the tantalizing stories which Tolkien only sketched in his life time.

Apparently, every word of this is entirely J.R.R's (except for the introduction) and that Christopher has merely(?) edited this version from the many unfinished drafts he left behind.

Googling tells me "It is a greatly expanded version of Chapter XXI of The Silmarillion, "Of Túrin Turambar", the "Children" being Turin and Neinor...and that it is told in an archaic narrative voice (making it easier to read than the Sil)