The Laboratorium : The Children of Húrin

The tale of Túrin Turambar, told more briefly in The Silmarillion, is a tragic epic in the old-fashioned Germanic tradition. Think of the Siegfried components of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, but with the gods well offstage. As with much of the Silmarillion, it doesn’t read well if you expect a narrative with modern pacing, economy of plot, or dialogue. It succeeds quite well as Tolkien probably intended it: a convincing imitation of a fragment from an enormous and partially lost corpus of myth and history. Someone ought to turn it into an opera.