Paula Mejia writes in the August 12th Newsweek that one of Tolkien’s first fantasy short stories from an unfinished manuscript entitled “The Story of Kullervo,” — which he penned as a youngbuck undergraduate student at Oxford University in the 1910s — will be posthumously published in late August. What’s more, the book’s cover art features a painting by Tolkien from 1914.
Although twisted in details, Tolkien drew on the tale of Kalevala in Finnish mythology, for his story.
Writing in a 1964 letter, Tolkien penned that the story was “the germ of my attempts to write legends of my own to fit my private languages. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age.”
Edited by Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, the book will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and HarperCollins in the U.K.
This follows a trend of Tolkien’s unfinished works being slowly released, including his incomplete “The Children of Húrin”, a story about (you guessed it!) Middle Earth.
