Wednesday, February 18, 2009

New Tolkien Book

Some favorite Norse myths - Sigurd the Gram-wielding, dragon-slaying Volsung and the Fall of the Niflungs - will be retold by J.R.R. Tolkien in the forthcoming The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (May, 2009). Tolkien wrote the previously unpublished manuscript in Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s. His son, Christopher Tolkien, will provide commentary in the edition by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HarperCollinsUK for the British). Christopher has a good edition, by the way, of the Hervararsaga, the Norse saga that Olof Rudbeck drew a map for in Verelius' 1672 edition - the very map that would eventually lead him on his life-long quest for Atlantis.