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Early on in America’s recent dalliance with a “backlash” against the TSA, I read a news item about TSA honcho Pistole “Pete’s” early attempt to frame some sort of response to criticism. It was a combination of the industry standard bluff-and-bluster, with a sort of general rambling almost Randy Moss-ian in its fumbling aimlessness. “Yeah, just as I thought; the TSA is run by a bunch of complete tools” was my unavoidable conclusion.

And yet, maybe not quite. Certainly the people running the TSA are inept bumblers when it comes to planning and implementing genuinely useful security procedures. But in terms of public relations management, someone at least may actually be pretty crafty. Because, by the end of “National Opt-out Day,” the TSA appeared to be winning the PR war in something like a 96-0 shutout.

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and all the god damn brain dead zombies that are going to elect him. And may John “Boner” boehner die of terminal skin cancer soon.
That is all.

If anyone was curious about the minor promotional blitz accompanying this book some years back, but has not yet read it: for what it’s worth, I highly recommend doing so. At any rate, if you like The Lord of the Rings or, by chance, you’ve read and enjoyed some of the Norse sagas, you should go ahead and give this a read.

I got an impression at the time of its release that a few people were suspicious that The Children of Húrin was somehow not “legitimate,” but instead scraped together from notes as an attempt to milk a few more dollars out of the films. It is true that the basic story was published a quarter-century before, as a part of The Silmarillion. The last film adaptation was released in 2003, though, and the extended DVD was out within a year of that. For that matter, it was already obvious that the films were going to be a mega-blockbuster by the end of 2001. Thus, while I must imagine that the interest generated by the films played some role in convincing Tolkein’s Frenchified son to have one more go at a complete proper novel version that Túrin Turambar story which Dad never quite got into final form… if the book were simply a rushed-together cash-grab, I think they would have had it in stores before the excitement had been cooling off for three years.

In any event, having read it twice now, I believe the result is very much finished-quality work. It covers a longer sweep of years than The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, in both of which the main action takes place in the course of just a bit more than one year. But the narrative of The Children of Húrin definitely takes the form of a novel, with real dialogue, rather than the encyclopedia-entry style of The Silmarillion.

Being part of the “elder days” legends of The Silmarillion, however, The Children of Húrin is certainly different in tone than Tolkein’s two best-known works. Neither of which is entirely a “happily-ever-after” fairy tale, either, but The Children of Húrin is grim. There’s not a single hobbit in this one and, as implied above, much of the story could fit quite well with the dark, stoic sagas of doom-shrouded Norse mythology.

If it somehow existed separatedly from Tolkein, The Children of Húrin would still be a good work but probably not especially significant, I admit. But as-is, I’m glad that the story was at last put together in this form, and it fairly earns a place on my shelf next to its sister novels.