Tragedy, Providence, and Sin in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin
No man can enter into the house of a strong man and rob him of his goods, unless he first bind the strong man, and then shall he plunder his house.
(Mark 3:27)
There is little doubt that, among the vast—if posthumously published—corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin stands out as his darkest and most openly tragic work. It is a tale of doom set against the prince and princess of the House of Hador, and worse still, the great tragedies they are entrapped by are borne witness to by their father, albeit without their knowledge.
For those unaware, The Children of Hurin is set, like much of Tolkien’s literary output, within the same sprawling legendarium as The Lord of the Rings. Until 2007, the story was known almost exclusively as but a single section from 1977’s The Silmarillion, itself a masterwork of layered narrative, mythological study, and moral fairy tale. It was the story of Turin Turambar, patrilineally cursed by Morgoth upon his father Hurin, interwoven into the history of the First Age of the world. All of this took place some six or seven thousand years before the events of Frodo and the more famous ring.
We can begin by comparing it with what most readers will be more familiar with. The Lord of the Rings is a sprawling epic rich in specifically placed details about the world in which it is set. That novel gives the distinct impression of a vast land alive with innumerable local customs and ancient tongues. The travels of the fellowship, both before and after its sundering at the end of the first book, take years to complete. They walk nearly the full length of western Middle Earth, explore ancient ruins, meet the Eldar and enjoy the hospitality—or lack thereof—of the kingdoms of men, orc, and ent alike. The Middle Earth of The Lord of the Rings is one wild and ancient but, for the most part, civilized and broad, where Tolkien’s brief glimpse into the world is granted by casual references to the days of yore with abandoned watchtowers or statues of great empires now long dormant.
Hurin’s world, albeit in the broadest sense, is the same world, but for the purposes of its narrative, it’s a much tighter, smaller Middle-Earth. The events of the First Age took place predominately in Beleriand, a segment of the continent sunken by cataclysm by the time the events of the War of the Ring took place. Although comparable in overall size, the geography of Beleriand, as well as the nature of the conflict with Morgoth, overwhelm the story with an ever-present sense of evil and dread that far surpasses the immanent threats of Sauron some three ages hence. The threat of the great Enemy is but a bridge or two away, across a river, only ever on the far side of a mountain; the safety of the realms inhabited by our characters is limited, fleeting—to put it in one sense, like a drafty hall where the warmth of the hearth never seems to reach one’s bones. Worse still is the weight of gloom that hangs about the characters themselves, too often betrayed by their own kin, ruled by their passions, driven into madness, plundered by ambiguous allies, or simply routed by the forces of evil.
Perhaps this presumption is clouded somewhat by the imagery included in volume itself. Alan Lee’s supplements present the vivid imagery of a First Age perpetually clouded, quite literally, by doom. The landscapes are grey or sullen-green, the sun seems to either shine only to blind or to remain obscured by some permanent overcast that threatens storms. There is very little true green, or blue, or white. It is a mythic age that he presents, but it is not some golden antiquity; it is aged with the stress of a great evil that works upon the world: an evil incarnate whose being seeps into the fabric of reality in a way that the latter Sauron would only distantly imitate.
It is in this sort of grime that the tale of Hurin’s two surviving children is set. Turin, a great prince, is sent at an early age to live with the elves of Thingol, in Doriath, after the sack of his homeland in Dor-Lomin. His father Hurin was captured by Morgoth and forced by magic to view the doom that enemy placed upon his bloodline. In Doriath, Turin matures quickly, being a man among elves, and becomes extremely skilled in hunting and fighting. A fateful mistake, goaded on by his own pride, results in his self-exile, fearing the worst judgment from his foster father the king. Afterward, he lives a life as an outlaw, hunting orcs with a band of fellow men, and operating out of an ill-gotten fortress provided by a treacherous dwarf. His adventures are many, and each new adventure is hounded always by the remnants of the last, his steps haunted by the misfortunes of his past that are, at every turn, exacerbated by his own personal failings.
Tragedy and the Demonic
If the tale of Turin had to be reduced to only two narrative elements, it is easy to decide which two take priority. The first would be his tragic and incestuous marriage with his sister Nienor, which follows an ancient mythic formula that combines amnesia with a great passage of time having sundered any familiarity between the two. On this, we will not dwell at any length, though it works in conjunction with what is perhaps the second most memorable element of the tale: the character Glaurung.
First made and loosed for the Battle of Unnumbered Tears—a complete defeat that hangs over this story, and in fact, all events of the First Age thereafter—the dragon Glaurung was known as the father of the fire-drakes. He comes to Nargothrond, one of the three strongholds against the Enemy, and briefly the domain of Turin’s rule, ravaging it in his absence. To do so, he crosses over the very bridge that Turin had built in the interests of expanding the stronghold’s power. Although easily understood as a consequence of Turin’s arrogance, the expansion of Nargothrond’s influence seemed a necessity that was self-evident to all. This incident, and its dramatic, tragic inversion at the hands of Glaurung, illustrate well the doom that hangs over Turin throughout the tale.
In a pivotal scene, Turin returns to Nargothrond to rescue the elven princess Finduilas, who had fallen in love with him during his stay. The great serpent emerges from the ruins of the stronghold to confront him on the bridge. Here, Glaurung is revealed not merely as some instrument of war or rampaging beast. For Tolkien, the dragons were no mere animals. They were intelligent, vocal, and deeply insidious. We can recall Smaug from The Hobbit, a slothful beguiler who used reason in an attempt to discern Bilbo in his thievery. Smaug was not just some guard dog of a treasure hoard; he was the hoard’s master by conquest, and uniquely greedy even by by the standards of the Dwarves from whom he stole.
The dragons of Tolkien are encapsulations of great vice. They are sin given form, devils clothed in the scales and slime of monsters. And here, Glaurung, the father of all dragons, is an evil writ far larger than the petty appetites of Smaug. Second only to Morgoth in this tale is Glaurang’s flagrant display of evil as he preys upon Turin, further dementing him:
Glaurung spoke again, taunting Turin. ‘Evil have been all your ways, son of Hurin,’ said he. ‘Thankless fosterling, outlaw, slayer of your friend, thief of love, usurper of Nargothrond, captain foolhardy, and deserter of your kin. As thralls your mother and sister lie in Dor-lomin, in misery and want. You are arrayed as a prince, but they go in rags. For you they yearn, but you care not for that. Glad may your father be to learn that he has such a son: as learn he shall.’ And Turin being under the spell of Glaurung hearkened to his words, and he saw himself as in a mirror misshapen by malice, and he loathed what he saw.’1
Turin has thrown back at him all of his failures—each an error that doubtlessly weighs heavily on his conscience. He had accomplished great things, won just acclaims for himself and saved many lives by then, but as with any great man guilty of great successes, great failures are found there, too. For Turin, his failures were greater than most, and there should be little doubt that he had remembered all of his sore life. It is these unspoken memories of them that contributes an explanation to his rashness and doom in his decision making.
Glaurung gives a narrative voice to Turin’s guilty conscience, but more than this, the voice is that of an outsider using the guilt to contort his victim. It is a demonic practice too commonly witnessed in the mystical life. There is more than mere mythic fairy tale at work here in the confrontation with and slaying of dragons in The Children of Hurin. The dragons of Tolkien are effective villains because of their speech first and foremost. They speak to the characters, and then also to you, but they speak insidiously, corrosively; they seek to corrupt the mind and disorient the great man. “Turin hearkened to his words,” Tolkien explains to us, “and he saw himself as a in a mirror misshapen by malice.” Is this not exactly the description of the devil’s lies?
It is by this dragon that Turin is distracted from his goal. Finduilas is taken by the enemy’s host while Turin, utterly distracted, allows the demon’s whispers to send him after his hidden kin. The elvish princess is sent to her death practically before Turin’s eyes, and yet, due to the spell weaved about him by the dragon’s words, he does not even see it happen. But notice the nature of the spell: Turin had to give assent to its formation. He had to hearken to Glaurung’s words.
The presentation of Glaurung’s cunning in Hurin, both here and later when he drives Nienor into madness and amnesia, is not at all dissimilar from the preternatural’s attack upon the mortal in every day life. The guilt of conscience opens a space for the devil to enter into a dialogue, especially for those unaccustomed to hearing or distinguishing the enemy’s cunning from his own thoughts. It’s the sort of voice that at once throws back at you your own evils while confiding, with some vile gentleness, a familiarity of personal knowledge or closeness. See the dragon here again as he speaks to Turin in that scene on the bridge: he speaks as one with knowledge of Turin, not simply in abstract, but as one whose knowledge is such that he is in a position to lecture the man on his evil deeds. And worse, Turin acknowledges this position; he listens to the drake and in so doing, invites this evil to act upon his conscience.
Like the demonic, Glaurung knows far more than it seems like he should given his position. And like the demonic, he speaks with lies and half-truths for the sole purpose of causing greater ruin. What we see in Turin’s encounter is a tragic lesson of what not to do. Turin halted first, perhaps out of surprise, to greet his foe and let him speak, despite knowing immediately of what he encountered. To his credit, he struck the dragon after their greeting, but having already been psychologically attacked, it was utterly ineffective and laughed off with a sneer cloaked in mercy. He should have attacked first, ignored every word that left the dragon’s evil mouth, and remained of single mind in pursuit of the goal that brought back him to Nargothrond. Our own dealings with evil, particularly within the scope of our interior lives, should be characterized by exactly this single-mindedness. Waver but an inch and the demonic can, if so allowed, leverage it into a mile.
Sin and Providence
Fate, or something like it, plays a critical role in the legendarium, particularly in the First Age stories. Oaths and prophecies are used as narrative devices that reflect back at us, the readers, the structured and narrative aspects of real experience. Cast in the vocabulary and drama of myth, however, Tolkien’s stories at once project certain intuitive connections of the interior life upon the grand matte of history and heroism. By reading Tolkien with this in mind, our understanding of providence, which is the junction at which the Divine Will meets our own in history, becomes that much clearer.
In the case of The Children of Hurin, this all depicted through the means of tragedy. Tolkien never makes too obvious the presence or operation of a Divine Will within the legendarium. This is not to suggest that it isn’t there by implication, however, especially as we are to understand Hurin within the larger context of The Silmarillion. Rather, the structure of Arda as laid out in his creation story present a world tied to the very thought of Illuvitar, the One God within the legendarium. As such, all instances of the Valar affecting the world and influencing the wills of elves and men should be understood not as active elements of the world’s providence, but participation within this providence even if it goes against, as is the case of Morgoth, their own designs.
Tragedy, then, manifests in The Children of Hurin as the plight of a great man menaced by evil, and how this realistically unfolds over the course of his life. At its deepest level, it is twofold. The first is the tragedy of Turin Turambar himself: a man cursed by Morgoth whose every action leads him into some deeper and more unsettling doom. Time and again Turin is presented with opportunities and crucial decisions, and time and again the decision he makes is the wrong one. Turin’s tragedy is not the sort to be found in the dramas of Shakespeare or, for the most part, modern literature; it is difficult to consider exactly what Turin should have done otherwise at most points within the plot. Where tragic narrative is formed around a character’s flaws leading to his ultimate destruction, too often in literature do we find these flaws to drown out or overwhelm his strengths. This is not the case with Turin. At any proposed judgment we may offer to Turin, there is the lingering doubt in our own minds: are we a better man than he? And the answer, generally, is no.
But deeper than this is the second aspect of Hurin: that the curse laid upon Turin by Morgoth was a curse directed at his father. The end of the House of Hador came with Hurin himself as the intended witness. It is a cruelty inflicted by Morgoth for no other reason than the delivery of malice upon the race of men.
We might wonder, then, what we are supposed to do with a story such as this. Although in the greater narrative of the story of the First Age, told in abbreviated fashion in The Silmarillion, Morgoth does eventually get his comeuppance. But here, at the end of The Children of Hurin, evil seems to win. Morgoth allows Hurin to leave his prison throne at Angband as a sneer, Hurin having been broken by his witness of his exterminated house. Although the great courage of men did not fail in his son, it was corrupted and twisted, turned inside out and confused; the evil mist of Morgoth’s curse ensnared Turin and affected everyone he came into contact with.
How better to illustrate the doom of man innate since the Fall than in such a complex and darkened presentation of providence? For Tolkien’s legendarium, the problem of evil is given a distinct, powerful figure, capable of inflicting curses and bending as much as he can toward his nefarious ends. Unlike The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin features Morgoth as a central presence in this very abstract, Catholic way. He is the devil, whose influence pervades all who lack vigilance against him, who betray themselves and their consciences, and who deal directly with evil. Their lack of self regulation, held in the clutches of their passions—even when directed toward seemingly good ends—are seized by evil and corrupted into the service of the great Enemy. The Silmarillion features all of this, too, but having cast Morgoth as a central character, it becomes easier to think of him by more contemporary standards as some demon king rather than a sort of black hole that attracts and corrupts all flesh toward a vile design.
This pattern is writ large upon all of Tolkien’s legendarium, from the annals of the First Age through to, in its most obvious aspects, the War of the Ring and the influence of the One Ring upon the likes of Gollum, Frodo, and Boromir. As explained in his creation story of Arda, the Vala are formed persons of the very domains, or aspects, of reality that they are ‘rulers’ over. Morgoth’s stain on the world is such that he directly influences evil. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron, once his chief lieutenant, mimics this power by virtue of sharing in the this corruptive element.
But here, in The Children of Hurin, Turin wrestles directly with this menacing doom and he does so all on his own. The story of Turin is one where the will of one man is affected by a curse of Morgoth, blinding him when he succumbs to it, imperiling him when he fights in, and grinding him into apathy when he embraces it. It is fitting then, with all this in mind, that the intended end of Middle Earth—given as according to the Prophecy of Mandos, the Vala responsible for the dead—that Turin should make such a central presence. At the end of time, Morgoth would return for one last great battle before ultimate termination. In this struggle, Turin would deal the fatal blow.
Conclusion
The term ‘doom’ describes more than something that elicits foreboding. It indicates having set into motion a series of events where there are no apparent and favorable decisions left to one’s agency. All choices lead toward destruction. Turin’s life, from the moment his father is captured, illustrates this definition well.
This does not mean that Turin escapes the penalties or punishments of his actions, however. A man is not absolved of his responsibility when he has been shouldered with a path of doom. If this were the case, it would not be a tragedy, but simply a story about bad things happening to people who don’t matter. On the contrary, the tragedy lies precisely in the fact that, when one looks past the evil in Turin’s life and the raw deal, so to speak, he was cut at his birth, there is very obviously a great prince whose life should not have been this way. There is an element of doom he brought upon himself, because of the decisions he made, but the actual doom upon Turin was that the decisions in his life offered to him were already bad ones.
This is exactly how evil should be understood in our own lives. The stain of the Fall, though washed from us with baptism, remains imprinted upon reality until the end of this earth. We should not then attempt to define ourselves according to this stain, but rather in spite of it. The tragedy of man writ large, if we are to phrase it this way, is that man was not created to live in or with sin. Evil corrodes the world in spite of these designs, not because of them.
Providence should be understood the same way. Providence is not interrupted by the will of men, nor does evil undo what is providentially willed; rather, providence completes the will of men, and evil’s corrosion weighs it down. Ultimately, however, the part of evil in this struggle is fruitless: it is an unnecessary slog that neither stalls nor prevents the conclusions preordained by the Divine Will. Those who cooperate with evil and carry out the will of its proponents seek ultimately only their own destruction.
The Children of Hurin, taken in context with the broader legendarium of the First Age, brings exactly such attention to these issues. The kingdoms of elves and men are divided due to curses and oaths, prophecies tell of events that dooms end up bringing forth, and tragedy is at every turn. Sin, wrongdoing, and doom are all presented across a narrative of consequences, providence, and masculine valor. And though evil has its hour at the end of Hurin, it does not ultimately have its day.
1179.
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