Christopher Tolkien is going to complete and publish his father's unfinished tale, the Children of Hurin.

I'm interested to hear what everyone else thinks of this. I'm not a huge Tolkien fan, but I do have respect for the man. Is his son carrying on (and to some degree, completing) the legacy a good thing or a bad thing? And have the bits of the story JRR Tolkien *did* finish already been printed in Unfinished Tales or something?

the Unfinished Tales has the Narn i Hin Hurin (Lay of the Children of Hurin), and I think there may be some odds and ends in the Books of Lost Tales as well - but I think that's Tuor more than Turin anyway.

Christopher Tolkien did an admirable job in the editing, publishing and annotating of his father's unfinished manuscripts (the two books above and the Silmarillion), I don't see anything wrong with publishing this one, he;s made a living of that with all the other books for decades now, and I'd rather it was him than anybody else. I won't buy it though, because I always found the Narn a bit tedious.

I just hope he doesn't take it to the same extent that Frank Herbert's son did, and just use his fathers name and creation to get known.

There's a reason Tolkien didn't publish that stuff. Most of it was not ready for prime time. I had to read all of it that was available in the early 1980s when I was writing some FRP modules for Iron Crown Enterprises. It got tiresome rather quickly.

C. Tolkien did what he could, but those really were just unfinished odds 'n' ends.

- Cho

yeah, the Lost Tales are mostly interesting as a way to understand how the mythology evolved in Tolkien's mind, not as literary pieces in and of themselves. The Unfinished Tales I actually enjoyed more.