If you’ve ever been interested in how Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien got his start writing, you’ll be able to check out one of his earliest works later this year. The first draft of The Story of Kullervo, complete with Tolkien’s personal notes,will be released in October.
According to the story on io9, Tolkien worked on the book when he was in college, and it was one of his first significant attempts at writing fantasy. It was written in 1914 while he was studying poetry, particularly Finnish epics. In fact, it was specifically inspired by the Kalevala, a 19th-century compendium of Finnish folklore and epic poetry. As biographer John Garth found, “[Tolkien] was ‘immensely attracted by something in the air of this verse epic of dueling Northern wizards and lovestruck youths, beer-drinkers and shape-changers,’ then recently published in English in a popular edition.”
The Story of Kullervo was never finished, but Tolkien’s work on it led directly into his creation of Middle-earth and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself described it as his initial attempt to venture into fantasy, saying, “The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion).”
Although the manuscript has been available to readers for a few years, this is the first time it’ll be a standalone book. The Story of Kullervo will be released in the United States on October 27. You can currently preorder the Kindle version through Amazon.
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