{"id":100611,"date":"2016-04-05T06:27:08","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T11:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/?p=100611"},"modified":"2016-04-05T06:27:08","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T11:27:08","slug":"the-story-of-kullervo-published-in-america-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/2016\/04\/05\/100611-the-story-of-kullervo-published-in-america-today\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story of Kullervo published in America TODAY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"kullervo1\"<\/a>Fans in Europe were able to buy The Story of Kullervo<\/em> last year<\/a>; the good news is, today the wait is over at last for fans in the US!<\/p>\n

Tolkien himself said of this\u00a0previously unknown work of fantasy that it\u00a0was \u201cthe germ of my attempt to write legends of my own,\u201d and was \u201ca major matter in the legends of the First Age.\u201d Publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt<\/a> tell us:<\/p>\n

‘Kullervo, son of Kalervo, is perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s\u00a0characters. \u201cHapless Kullervo,\u201d as Tolkien called him, is a luckless orphan boy with supernatural\u00a0powers and a tragic destiny.<\/em><\/p>\n

Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his\u00a0mother, and tried three times to kill him when he was still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the\u00a0love of his twin sister, Wanona, and the magical powers of the black dog Musti, who guards him.\u00a0When Kullervo is sold into slavery he swears revenge on the magician, but he will learn that\u00a0even at the point of vengeance there is no escape from the cruelest of fates.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tolkien’s Kullervo was the ancestor of\u00a0T\u00farin Turambar, tragic hero of The Silmarillion. Published here for the first time with the\u00a0author\u2019s drafts, notes, and lecture essays on its source work, the Kalevala, The Story of\u00a0Kullervo is a foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien\u2019s invented world.’<\/em><\/p>\n

Not only is this book finally available to American fans – HMH are also giving away five copies!<\/strong> If you live in the US, simply click here to enter to win!<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

To whet your appetite for this exciting new publication, here’s a conversation shared with us by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, with Kullervo’s<\/em> editor, Verlyn Flieger:<\/p>\n

\"StoryofKullervo_images_0316_2_Final\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Where has The Story of Kullervo been hiding? How did the manuscript come to light?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The manuscript has not been hiding, but neither has it been easily accessible. It is housed with\u00a0other manuscripts, books, and artwork in the Bodleian Library\u2019s Tolkien archive in Oxford, UK.Access to it is restricted and contingent on permission from the Tolkien Estate. I got the Estate\u2019s\u00a0permission to read the manuscript in 2008, when I was working on an article about Tolkien and\u00a0Kalevala. My first look made it clear that this was an important sample of Tolkien\u2019s early work,\u00a0his first real try at creating a fictive world, and also a foundation piece in the creation of his\u00a0Silmarillion mythology.<\/p>\n

How did Tolkien change the source material from Kalevala to make his own story?<\/strong><\/p>\n

He kept the framework\u2014the killing of Kullervo\u2019s father by his uncle Untamo and Kullervo\u2019s\u00a0captivity. But he tightened the story, giving Kullervo one family with two sets of siblings instead\u00a0of Kalevala\u2019s clumsy patchwork of two separate stories about two different families. This\u00a0enabled him to have Kullervo meet an unrecognized twin sister rather than a completely\u00a0unknown sibling for the crucial incest that drives the ending, thus deepening the tragedy, making\u00a0it more personal. He turned what, in Kalevala, was a rape and a one-night stand into a rough\u00a0wooing and a love idyll\u2014again making the incest more poignant. He gave Kullervo one\u00a0memento of his dead father, the knife Sikki, the destruction of which sends Kullervo on a\u00a0rampage of revenge.<\/p>\n

What is the relationship between The Story of Kullervo and the rest of the Tolkien canon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s clearly one of the foundation stones of Tolkien\u2019s Silmarillion mythology. It is his earliest\u00a0attempt at mythmaking, his earliest effort to create what he called a Secondary World, and his\u00a0first serious try at integrating a world and its language. Kullervo is the prototype for T\u00farin\u00a0Turambar, Tolkien\u2019s epic, tragic hero.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Story of Kullervo\u201d is unfinished. How much of it do we have? And why did Tolkien\u00a0abandon it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to estimate, but I\u2019d say we have about two-thirds to three-quarters. We have all of\u00a0Kullervo\u2019s early life, his slavery and escape, his fateful meeting with an unrecognized sister and\u00a0their consequent incest and her suicide. The narrative breaks off at the point where Kullervo,\u00a0seeing her suicide, begins to suspect who she is. Tolkien\u2019s outline notes fill in the subsequent\u00a0events, Kullervo\u2019s return to kill his uncle, Untamo, his subsequent dream visit to the land of the\u00a0dead, where his mother reveals the girl he raped to be his sister, and his final act of suicide by his\u00a0own sword. But these are in synopsis only and lack the poetic drive of the full narration. We\u00a0cannot say that Tolkien \u201cabandoned\u201d the story; we know that he stopped writing, but not why he\u00a0did so. It\u2019s quite possible that he meant to get back to it, but simply got too busy with his own\u00a0Silmarillion mythology.<\/p>\n

How is Kullervo similar to\/different from Tolkien\u2019s other, better-known characters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

He is much darker than the characters we associate with Tolkien, like Bilbo or Frodo or Gandalf\u00a0or even Gollum, who has his lighter moments. Kullervo is brooding, angry, vengeful, ugly,\u00a0resentful, violent. He thinks the world hates him and he hates it back. Tolkien gives him almost\u00a0no redeeming qualities, yet this very quality makes the reader feel sympathy for him.\u00a0In the crucial events of his life, Kullervo is most like Tolkien\u2019s T\u00farin Turambar. Both lose a\u00a0father, are separated from their mother, are fostered in a strange home, and are driven to escape\u00a0into the wild. Both are separated from a sister whom they later meet with disastrous\u00a0consequences that end in the death of both of them. Both are quick-tempered, impulsive, looking\u00a0for trouble and finding it. Yet here too there are differences. T\u00farin is handsome, attractive, easy\u00a0to love in spite of himself, while Kullervo is crooked, ill-favored, with more than a hint of the\u00a0supernatural. He can use magic, he has super-human strength, he can commune with wild\u00a0animals.<\/p>\n

What was it about the story of Kullervo in Kalevala that attracted Tolkien?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"MiddleEarth_news_images_0316\"<\/a>Something in the extreme events and over-the-top emotions, the headlong plunge into tragedy\u00a0with no redemption, spoke to him deeply. Tolkien has a dark side\u2014you can see it in the\u00a0Silmarillion mythology with its endless war, and in The Lord of the Rings, where he puts Frodo\u00a0through such torture and takes away everything he holds dear. When Tolkien wrote The Story of\u00a0Kullervo, he was a very young man, twenty-two or thereabouts\u2014an age when the world is in\u00a0primary colors, no shades or modulations. Like Kullervo he had lost his father, and later his\u00a0mother, he had no home, he was separated from the girl he loved, and he was facing an uncertain\u00a0future. That\u2019s enough for anyone to cope with, and one way of coping with trouble is to turn it\u00a0into art. He called it a \u201cvery great story,\u201d and it\u2019s quite probable that he knew its connection,\u00a0through early medieval Scandinavian versions, with the story that became Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[Click here to enter to WIN The Story of Kullervo<\/em><\/a>] (Sorry, US residents only)<\/p>\n

[Order a copy of The Story of Kullervo<\/em> here<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fans in Europe were able to buy The Story of Kullervo last year; the good news is, today…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":100613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1362,163,85,14,22,153,18,6,1359,152],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-merchandise-books","category-events-contests","category-events","category-headlines","category-tolkien-life","category-merchandise","category-tolkbooks","category-shop","category-tolkien"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/kullervo1.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1tLoH-qaL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100611"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100619,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100611\/revisions\/100619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}