Have any of you read this book (J. R. R. Tolkien)? I picked it up at Borders the other day and started reading it yesterday. Needless to say I couldn't put it down and just finished it. I kind of want to go kill myself now. The story was a tragedy in every sense of the word.

Here's a little plot summary courtesy of wikipedia.

The Children of Húrin takes the reader back to a time long before The Lord of the Rings, in an area of Middle-earth that was to be drowned before Hobbits appeared, and when the great enemy was still the fallen Vala, Morgoth, and Sauron was only Morgoth's lieutenant. This heroic romance is the tale of the Man, Húrin, who dared to defy Morgoth's force of evil, and his family's tragic destiny, as it follows his son Túrin Turambar's travels through the lost world of Beleriand...

Is this the same as the story of similar name which appears in Unfinished Tales?

I'm not sure, I haven't read the unfinished tales. It's a full novel length though, and from what I gathered this was the first time it's ever been published.

I think his son finished this one. So a shorter version might be in the Unfinished Tales.

Gotta go and buy it one of these days. Though I have Unfinished Tales sitting on my shelf next to other Tolkien books, I don't remember it well enough to immediately recall anything about children of Húrin in it. And that's of course optimal.

Now I only need to decide whether to get it in English or Finnish...

The same story is told both in the Unfinished Tales and in the Silmarillion, but here it's in a greatly expanded form. Christopher Tolkien "completed" it in the sense that he put it together out of various tellings of the story that his father had written, but supposedly all the words are from JRRT himself.

I enjoyed it, but I was kind of disappointed that there wasn't that much new material (as far as I could tell, anyway). Most of the stuff that I didn't remember from before was either at the beginnign (before he flees to Doriath) or during the outlaws' time at Amon Rudh with Mim. Still, it was a fun read, and I probably would've liked it more if it were on a subject I enjoyed more... I've never been that big a fan of the whole Turin storyline.

Here's hoping they do something similar for The Fall of Gondolin or Beren/Luthien.

I bought this book for my dad for Father's day. I might pick it up after he's done.

I clicked on this thread because there is an unorthodox character in its title.