There’s good news for people who have burned through The Hobbit, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, and The Silmarillion, and still found the thousands of pages fleshing out J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth insufficient: According to The Daily Dot, Tolkien’s The Story Of Kullervo will be available in print in the U.K. and on Amazon Kindle everywhere August 27. Kullervo is an unfinished, early foray into Middle Earth, set in the First Age (for reference, the events depicted in The Lord Of The Rings represent the close of the Third Age). The synopsis for Kullervo on Amazon’s pre-order page is as follows:
Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother, and who tries three times to kill him when still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the love of his twin sister, Wanona, and guarded by the magical powers of the black dog, Musti. When Kullervo is sold into slavery he swears revenge on the magician, but he will learn that even at the point of vengeance there is no escape from the cruelest of fates.
Kullervo is an ancestor of Túrin Turambar, who is featured in The Silmarillion. Tolkien describes the work as “the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own.” It appears that the work will be published in its unfinished state, without the guiding hand of Tolkien’s son Christopher. Kullervo will be accompanied by annotations and notes by Verlyn Flieger, who, despite what her name suggests, is a University of Maryland professor and not a Rivendell archer.
While Peter Jackson may already be imagining how he can weave Kullervo into a 14-movie epic, given the attitude of the Tolkien estate, that’s probably not going to happen.