Front Flap
"There are tales of MIddle-earth from times long before The Lord of the Rings, and the story told in this book is set in the great country that lay beyond the Gret Havens in the West: lands where Treebeard oncw walked, but that were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the First Age of the World.
"In that remote time Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in the vast fortress of Angband, the Hells of Iron, in the North; and the tragedy of Túrin and his sister Niënor unfolded within the shadow of the fear of Angband and the war waged by Morgoth against the lands and secret cities of the Elves.
"Their brief and passionate lives were dominated by rthe elemental hatred that Morgoth bore them as the children of Húrin, the man who had dared to defy and scorn him to has face. Against them he sent his most formidable servant, Glaurung, a powerful spirit in the form of a huge wingless dragon of fire. Into this story of brutal conquest and flight, of forest hiding-places and pursuit, of resistance with lessening hope, the Dark Lord and the Dragon enter in direly articulate form. Sardonic and mocking, Glaurung manipulates the fates of Túrin abd Niënor by lies of diabolic cunning and guile, and the curse of Morgoth was fulfilled.
CONTINUED ON BACK FLAP
Back Flap
"The earliest versions of this story by J.R.R. Tolkien go back to the end of the First World War and the years that followed; but long afterward, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, he wrote it anew and greatly enlarged it in complexities of motive and character; it became the dominant story in his later work on Middle-earth. But he could not bring it to a final and finished form. In this book I have endeavored to construct, after long study of the manuscripts, a coherent narrative without any editorial invention."
- CHRISTOPHER TOLKIEN
J.R.R. Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein. After serving in the First World War, Tolkien embarked upon a distinguished academic career and was recognized as one of the finest philologists in thw world. He is, however, best known as the creator of Middle-earth and the author of such classic and extraordinary works of fiction as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. His books have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold many millions of copies worldwide. He died in 1973 at the age of eighty-one.
Christopher Tolkien, born on November 21, 1924, is the thrid son of J.R.R. Tolkien. Appointed by Tolkien to be his literary executor, he has devoted himself since his father's death in 1973 to editing and publication of unpublished writings, notably The Silmarillion, the collections entitled Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth. Since 1975 he has lived in France with his wife, Bailiie.