Children of Hurin
April 18th, 2007
Christopher Tolkien has come out with a new book based on his father’s work called Children of Hurin. It is an episodic book that covers moments in the tragic life of Hurin’s son Turin, thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings. When I opened the book last night, it took a few minutes to find the map at the end of the book. The locations on the map are not found in the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. So, I went searching for a full map of the world Tolkien created. I searched the term Arda (Tolkien’s word for his planet) and found this map. I just cleaned up the image a bit in Photoshop. It turns out that the locations in the book are far to the North of where the Hobbits live in the movies.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to adapt Children of Hurin into a screenplay. It it takes place over the entire course of Turin’s life, and it does this in only 250 pages. If I used film terminology, the book has a story but it doesn’t focus on a plot. What I mean is, the book covers many possible plots that could be extrapolated into movies, but it covers them briefly. If it had only covered a specific part and spent 250 pages covering that, it would be more easily adaptable. Instead, the new work shifts between a history book and a novel.
