Children of Húrin

　　"There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before TheLord of the Rings, and the story told in this book is set in thegreat country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West: landswhere Treebeard once walked, but that were drowned in the greatcataclysm that ended the First Age of the World. "In that remotetime Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in the vast fortress ofAngband, the Hells of Iron, in the North; and the tragedy of Turinand his sister Nienor unfolded within the shadow of the fear ofAngband and the war waged by Morgoth against the lands and secretcities of the Elves. "Their brief and passionate lives weredominated by the elemental hatred that Morgoth bore them as thechildren of Hurin, the man who had dared to defy and to scorn himto his face. Against them he sent his most formidable servant,Glaurung, a powerful spirit in the form of a huge wingless dragonof fire. Into this story of brutal conquest and flight, of foresthiding-places and pursuit, of resistance with lessening hope, theDark Lord and the Dragon enter in direly articulate form. Sardonicand mocking, Glaurung manipulated the fates of Turin and Nienor bylies of diabolic cunning and guile, and the curse of Morgoth wasfulfilled. "The earliest versions of this story by J.R.R. Tolkiengo back to the end of the First World War and the years thatfollowed; but long afterward, when The Lord of the Rings wasfinished, he wrote it anew and greatly enlarged it in complexitiesof motive and character: it became the dominant story in his laterwork on Middle-earth. But he could not bring it to a final andfinished form. In this book I have endeavored to construct, afterlong study of the manuscripts, a coherent narrative without anyeditorial invention." -- Christopher Tolkien