Yesterday there were some interesting reviews of a new Tolkein novel, The Children of Hurin, edited by Tolkein’s son Christopher. The NPR program Here and Now interviewed literature professor Michael Drout. The host was struggling to understand the appeal of heroic literature, and Drout made some interesting points about the Northern hero who fights on even when the battle is lost, and about the role played by individual efforts in Tolkein’s fiction.

Drout also had some observations on Túrin, the novel’s hero. As he writes in more detail at his blog:

I found Tolkien’s engagement with the Sigfried legend more obvious in this version of the story than in others, though that may reflect my own reading rather than the text itself. Of course the seed of the Túrin story is the Kullervo cycle from the Finnish Kalevala, but I think that at least one impulse in Túrin is to tell the story of a dragon slayer who isn’t some kind of Nietzchean/Wagnerian “ubermensch” (a bit piece of evidence, I think, is the inclusion of a dwarf named Mîm). Tolkien detested the kind of heroism that Wagner drew out of the Nibelungenlied and the Völsungr Saga: the hero who is superior in some existential way to everyone else and thus somehow deserves to crush everything in his path. By taking the physically most powerful hero, the original dragonslayer, but putting him under the curse of Morgoth and showing how he suffers, Tolkien approaches the Sigfried story in a very different, and more humane, way.

Meanwhile, Andrew O’Hehir’s Salon review discusses the synthesis of Pagan material and Manichean / Christian outlook that adds so much tension and interest to Tolkein:

I came away from “The Children of Húrin” with a renewed appreciation for the fact that Tolkien’s overarching narrative is much more ambiguous in tone than is generally noticed. As has been much discussed, he was a devout Catholic who tried, with imperfect success, to harmonize the swirling pagan cosmology behind his imaginative universe with a belief in Christian salvation. Salvation feels a long way off in “The Children of Húrin.” What sits in the foreground is that persistent Tolkienian sense that good and evil are locked in an unresolved Manichaean struggle with amorphous boundaries, and that the world is a place of sadness and loss, whose human inhabitants are most often the agents of their own destruction.

It’s nice to see a modern work in the epic genre discussed as though heroic literature is important.