Book News: Tolkien, Harry Potter

An unfinished book by J R R Tolkien will be published on April 17 after being completed by the late author's son. Christopher Tolkien has spent 30 years working on The Children Of Hurin, which his father started in 1918 but later abandoned. Extracts from the novel, which is set before the events of the Rings trilogy, have been published before. It has been illustrated by Alan Lee, who won an Oscar for his artwork on The Return Of The King film in 2004. The Children Of Hurin will also be available from Amazon.com on April. 17.

The full story is at the BBC website.

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The audiobooks of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released July 21, the same time as the books. The Grammy-winning Jim Dale will once again be narrating the US version, whilst the British Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows audiobook will be narrated by Stephen Fry. Apparently the unabridged novel will come in at around 21 hours.

J R R Tolkien's birthday

I'm starting a new item on my Blog this year - I shall be commemorating (where I know them) the birthdays (and sadly death days) of various children's writers (and illustrators).

And today it's the birthday of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who was born in South Africa (1892). He was a professor of Philology, the study of the derivation of languages, at the University of Oxford. He was fluent in classical Greek and Latin, Old Norse, Old English, medieval Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, and an ancient form of German called Gothic, amongst other ancient European languages. He was so interested in the structure of language that he decided to invent an entire language of his own. He even invented a new alphabet to write in that language, and when he began writing The Lord of the Rings, he gave that new language to the Elves,
calling it "High Elvish." He later said, "I wrote Lord of the Rings to provide a world for the language. ... I should have preferred to write the entire book in Elvish." (Letters)