THE STORY OF KULLERVO, an Unfinished Tolkien Story, to be Published

42 years after J.R.R. Tolkien's death, his previously unfinished work, The Story of Jullervo, will be published. The story tells of a doomed young man who is sold into slavery and who swears revenge on the magician who killed his father.

The story will also tie into Tolkien's other works through connections with The Silmarillion.

The completed printing of The Story of Kullervo will include additional notes, drafts, and further source material.

The description of the story according to Amazon is: Kullervo son of Kalervo is perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all J.R.R. Tolkien's characters. 'Hapless Kullervo', as Tolkien called him, is a luckless orphan boy with supernatural powers and a tragic destiny.

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 cruellest of fates.

Tolkien himself said that The Story of Kullervo was 'the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own', and was 'a major matter in the legends of the First Age'. Tolkien's Kullervo is the clear ancestor of Túrin Turambar, tragic incestuous hero of The Silmarillion. In addition to it being a powerful story in its own right, The Story of Kullervo - published here for the first time with the author's drafts, notes and lecture-essays on its source-work, The Kalevala - is a foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien's invented world.