Word: rin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sudden fondness for movies about domestic terrierism? Well, it's not that sudden; pooches have been a staple of family entertainment since Rin Tin Tin was a pup. We love dog movies for the same reason we love dogs. "A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes," says Owen Wilson's character in Marley & Me. "A dog doesn't care if you're rich or poor, clever or dull, smart or dumb. Give him your heart, and he'll give you his." There it is: both dogs and dog movies afford us a chance...
...Children of Húrin is set in the First Age of Middle Earth, six and a half millennia pre-Frodo, back when Treebeard was barely shaving (Tolkien scholars will know that The Lord of the Rings takes place in Middle Earth's Third Age). The First Age has a different feel to it: it's younger and wilder somehow. The elves, distant figures in The Lord of the Rings, spend more time outside their secret spa-resorts mixing it up with mere mortals. When, in the midst of a huge battle, a balrog rears up and whips down...
...hero of Children is Túrin (son of Húrin), an aristocratic human who has the good fortune to be raised and trained up by the elves into a bad-ass swordsman. Túrin is good-hearted but flawed: he's irascible, quick to anger and quick to act on his anger - he has a bad habit of killing people before he quite realizes what he's doing (though he's always remorseful afterwards). "Túrin was slow to forget injustice or mockery," Tolkien writes, "and he could be sudden and fierce. Yet he was quick...
...Children is written in Tolkien's full-on high heroic style, which is light on the characterization and sometimes hilariously dorky. (An example, chosen more or less at random: Túrin's helmet "was made of grey steel adorned with gold, and on it were graven runes of victory. A power was in it that guarded any who wore it from wound or death, for the sword that hewed it was broken, and the dart that smote it sprang aside." Et cetera. The book also comes with some pseudo-Blakean illustrations by Alan Lee.) But once you surrender...
...Just heed this warning: The Children of Húrin is a darker, bitterer tale than we're used to seeing from Tolkien. Its hero is proud and imperfect and willful - more Boromir than Frodo - and his story is full of accidents and disasters, poisoned barbs and ruinous betrayals and grievous misunderstandings. Which makes sense: after all, if the good guys had beaten the forces of darkness in the First Age, they wouldn't have been stuck with Sauron in the Third...