I have said elsewhere that ‘with the completion of the great “intrusion” and departure of The Lord of the Rings, it seems that he returned to the Elder Days with a desire to take up again the far more ample scale with which he had begun long before, in The Book of Lost Tales. The completion of the Quenta Silmarillion remained an aim; but the “great tales”, vastly developed from their original forms, from which its later chapters should be derived, were never achieved.’ These remarks are true of the ‘great tale’ of The Children of Húrin as well; but in this case my father achieved much more, even though he was never able to bring a substantial part of the later and hugely extended version to final and finished form.

At the same time as he turned again to the Lay of Leithian and The Fall of Gondolin he began his new work on The Children of Húrin, not with Túrin’s childhood, but with the latter part of the story, the culmination of his disastrous history after the destruction of Nargothrond. This is the text in this book from The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin (†) to his death. Why my father should have proceeded in this way, so unlike his usual practice of starting again at the beginning, I cannot explain. But in this case he left also among his papers a mass of later but undated writing concerned with the story from Túrin’s birth to the sack of Nargothrond, with great elaboration of the old versions and expansion into narrative previously unknown.

By far the greater part of this work, if not all of it, belongs to the time following the actual publication of The Lord of the Rings. In those years The Children of Húrin became for him the dominant story of the end of the Elder Days, and for a long time he devoted all his thought to it. But he found it hard now to impose a firm narrative structure as the tale grew in complexity of character and event; and indeed in one long passage the story is contained in a patchwork of disconnected drafts and plot-outlines.

Yet The Children of Húrin in its latest form is the chief narrative fiction of Middle-earth after the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings; and the life and death of Túrin is portrayed with a convincing power and an immediacy scarcely to be found elsewhere among the peoples of Middle-earth. For this reason I have attempted in this book, after long study of the manuscripts, to form a text that provides a continuous narrative from start to finish, without the introduction of any elements that are not authentic in conception.

In Unfinished Tales, published more than a quarter of a century ago, I presented a partial text of the long version of this tale, known as the Narn, from the Elvish title Narn i Chîn Húrin, the Tale of the Children of Húrin. But that was one element in a large book of various content, and the text was very incomplete, in keeping with the general purpose and nature of the book: for I omitted a number of substantial passages (and one of them very long) where the Narn text and that in the much briefer version in The Silmarillion are very similar, or where I decided that no distinctive ‘long’ text could be provided.

The form of the Narn in this book therefore differs in a number of ways from that in Unfinished Tales, some of them deriving from the far more thorough study of the formidable complex of manuscripts that I made after that book was published. This led me to different conclusions about the relations and sequence of some of the texts, chiefly in the extremely confusing evolution of the legend in the period of ‘Túrin among the Outlaws’. A description and explanation of the composition of this new text of The Children of Húrin follows here.

An important element in all this is the peculiar status of the published Silmarillion; for as I have mentioned in the first part of this Appendix my father abandoned the Quenta Silmarillion at the point that he had reached (Túrin’s becoming an outlaw after his flight from Doriath) when he began The Lord of the Rings in 1937. In the formation of a narrative for the published work I made much use of The Annals of Beleriand, originally a ‘Tale of Years’, but which in successive versions grew and expanded into annalistic narrative in parallel with the successive ‘Silmarillion’ manuscripts, and which extended to the freeing of Húrin by Morgoth after the deaths of Túrin and Niënor.

Thus the first passage that I omitted from the version of the Narn i Chîn Húrin in Unfinished Tales (p. 58 and note 1) is the account of the sojourn of Húrin and Huor in Gondolin in their youth; and I did so simply because the tale is told in The Silmarillion (pp. 158–9). But my father did in fact write two versions: one of them was expressly intended for the opening of the Narn, but was very closely based on a passage in The Annals of Beleriand, and indeed for most of its length differs little. In The Silmarillion I used both texts, but here I have followed the Narn version.

The second passage that I omitted from the Narn in Unfinished Tales (pp. 65–6 and note 2) is the account of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, an omission made for the same reason; and here again my father wrote two versions, one in the Annals, and a second, much later but with the Annals text in front of him, and for the most part closely followed. This second narrative of the great battle was, again, expressly intended as a constituent element in the Narn (the text is headed Narn II, i.e. the second section of the Narn), and states at the outset († in the text in this book): ‘Here there shall be recounted only those deeds which bear upon the fate of the House of Hador and the children of Húrin the Steadfast.’ In pursuit of this my father retained from the Annals account only the description of the ‘westward battle’ and the destruction of the host of Fingon; and by this simplification and reduction of the narrative he altered the course of the battle as told in the Annals. In The Silmarillion I of course followed the Annals, though with some features taken from the Narn version; but in this book I have kept to the text that my father thought appropriate to the Narn as a whole.

From Túrin in Doriath the new text is a good deal changed in relation to that in Unfinished Tales. There is here a range of writing, much of it very rough, concerned with the same narrative elements at different stages of development, and in such a case it is obviously possible to take different views on how the original material should be treated. I have come to think that when I composed the text in Unfinished Tales I allowed myself more editorial freedom than was necessary. In this book I have reconsidered the original manuscripts and reconstituted the text, in many (usually very minor) places restoring the original words, introducing sentences or brief passages that should not have been omitted, correcting a few errors, and making different choices among the original readings.

As regards the structure of the narrative in this period of Túrin’s life, from his flight out of Doriath to the lair of the outlaws on Amon Rûdh, my father had certain narrative ‘elements’ in mind: the trial of Túrin before Thingol; the gifts of Thingol and Melian to Beleg; the maltreatment of Beleg by the outlaws in Túrin’s absence; the meetings of Túrin and Beleg. He moved these ‘elements’ in relation to each other, and placed passages of dialogue in different contexts; but found it difficult to compose them into a settled ‘plot’ – ‘to find out what really happened’. But it seems now clear to me, after much further study, that my father did achieve a satisfying structure and sequence for this part of the story before he abandoned it; and also that the narrative in much reduced form that I composed for the published Silmarillion conforms to this – but with one difference.