収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

When I was in Philadelphia over the summer I bought too many used books, one of which was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin, part of the big run of HMH paperbacks that happened after they started becoming the main Tolkien publisher instead of Del Rey for reasons that I’ve never bothered to learn about. Anyway. It’s a very pretty book and it tells the story of Túrin Turambar, which was also told in The Silmarillion, much like the other books in this particular series. Unlike Beren and Lúthien, the other book in this run of publications that I read this year, this book is pretty much all one big prose story, almost like a regular novel. (Beren and Lúthien had like four different versions in different formats, showcasing how the story had changed over time.)

It turns out, the regular novel version of the story of Túrin Turambar is incredibly tragic, and it really hits harder when it’s being told in a way that’s got stuff like “dialogue” and “scenes.” It’s a deeply earnest and serious work, almost entirely devoid of the humor that pops up in the books about the hobbits. Nobody in the titular Húrin’s family can catch a single break–not Húrin, not his wife Morwen, not either of his daughters, and least of all his only son, Túrin. Morgoth, the big bad of the First Age, has laid some type of curse on all of Húrin’s family, and boy does it work. The general temperament of the house of Húrin also helps, as they are all proud, brave, kind of reckless, unwilling to take counsel that they deem as cowardly, and frequently misinformed, sometimes by the hypnosis of the dragon Glaurung but sometimes through the regular difficulties of getting accurate news around Arda in ancient times.

Túrin is a grim hero, naturally inclined to be quiet, a trait which is only reinforced after he manages to get himself in trouble nearly every time he does open his mouth. After his father is captured by Morgoth and his baby sister dies, young Túrin goes to foster with the elves and learn how to become a valiant warrior so he can fight Orcs and other servants of Morgoth. From there he has various adventures where he fights lots of different types of people, including a stint with a band of outlaws. He makes some friends, although more often than not those friendships go awry after somebody ends up in unrequited love. Túrin does eventually get married, in a subplot that hurtles the whole story toward its gothically tragic end.

While many of the plot points are stuff we’ve seen before in various adventure novels, including some fairly trashy ones–let’s go live in the woods and be outlaws! Oh no, this guy married his sister!–none of it ever comes off as even the tiniest bit silly or trashy or derivative, and that has a lot to do with how seriously Tolkien takes every single sentence of his own work. Every piece of this book is treated with the poetic gravitas due to an ancient and legendary history nearly lost in the mists of time. It’s what every other fantasy author for the last seventy years is trying to do when they write pretentious quests about elves with too many names. But Tolkien is the OG and he actually does it. The writing style is hardly naturalistic, but it is incredibly effective.