That was his first work of imaginative literature, and a substantial one, for though it was left unfinished there are fourteen completed tales. When my father was a young man, during the years of the First World War and long before there was any inkling of the tales that were to form the narrative of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, he began the writing of a collection of stories that he called The Book of Lost Tales. This book is thus primarily addressed to such readers as may perhaps recall that the hide of Shelob was so horrendously hard that it ‘could not be pierced by any strength of men, not though Elf or Dwarf should forge the steel or the the children of húrin hand of Beren or of Túrin wield it’, or that Elrond named Túrin to Frodo at Rivendell as one of ‘the mighty Elf-friends of old’ but know no more of him. I have thought that if the story of the fate of Túrin and Niënor, the children of Húrin and Morwen, could be presented in this way, a window might be opened onto a scene and a story set in an unknown Middle-earth that are vivid and immediate, yet conceived as handed down from remote ages: the drowned lands in the west beyond the Blue Mountains where Treebeard walked in his youth, and the life of Túrin Turambar, in Dor-lómin, Doriath, Nargothrond, and the Forest of Brethil. For this reason it has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father’s long version of the legend of the Children of Húrin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it. It is undeniable that there are a very great many readers of The Lord of the Rings for whom the legends of the Elder Days (as previously published in varying forms in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth) are altogether unknown, unless by their repute as strange and inaccessible in mode and manner.

Hurin lord of the rings