by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

This is the first Tolkien I've read since high school, so it was fun to go back to his "great, epic tale" style of writing. I am perhaps shamefully unfamiliar with the overall mythos of Middle-Earth, so reading his stories really feels like being transported to another world and time, which is, to me, the most important goal of literature.

However, a few aspects of the narrative of Children made it a little difficult to enjoy as much as The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were. Turin, the main character, is easily angered and almost always chooses the path of violence over caution or defense. Aside from the peripheral characters this leads him to kill, often inadvertently, it sets the stage for so very many encounters with orcs, which actually manages to get tedious after a while. I know this novel takes place in a time when Morgoth is flooding the land with his agents to further impose his will, but the orc raiders Turin encounters are so pathetically outmatched that they lack the threatening presence they had in the later novels, when they attacked more stoic adventurers like Gandalf and Aragorn who didn't actually want to fight. In a more general sense, this made Turin a difficult protagonist to relate to.

Another source of disappointment was due to my own unrealistic expectation, stemming from my unfamiliarity with the source canon. Knowing nothing of the history of the First Age of Middle Earth, I assumed this would be the story of Morgoth's downfall at the hands of a band of adventurers, in the style of the destruction of the One Ring in LotR. Instead, Children reads more in the style of a Shakespearean or ancient Greek tragedy, especially considering one detail from the end which I don't want to mention, but fairly squicked me out for some reason. In the end, it's still the excellent writing anyone expects from Tolkien, but has a bit of a downer vibe throughout.

And I STILL don't know how Morgoth is defeated...