More on new Tolkien book

Interesting piece in today's Boston Globe

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`The Children of Húrin" is another tale of heroes, dark forces, elves, and dragons set in the mythical Middle-earth of Tolkien's previous books. Since his father's death, Christopher Tolkien has completed and ushered into print ``The Silmarillion," ``Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth," and ``The History of Middle-earth." While most Tolkien scholars accept the junior Tolkien's authority to finish the unpublished texts, he has acknowledged that, in sorting through mountains of hand-written manuscript pages, he at times had to make educated guesses at his father's intentions.

``It seems Christopher has taken pieces and stitched them together into one narrative," said Michael Drout, an English professor at Wheaton College who is a Tolkien specialist. ``This is a big deal, because the problem with the other is that, while they're an amazing resource for scholars, they're fairly unreadable."

Christopher Tolkien ``was viciously condemned" by critics when he published ``The Silmarillion" in 1977, Drout said. ``They said, `It's not really Tolkien's words, because you can't tell what is J.R.R. and what is Christopher.' " But, said Drout: ``When it comes to Middle-earth, he rightly feels that he knows more than anyone else. I can't think of anyone but Christopher Tolkien to make that call."
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Neither Younce nor Brawn would disclose the financial terms of Houghton's and Harper's rights to ``The Children of Húrin," but the price could not have been small. Younce said 80 million Tolkien books have been sold in the United States since ``The Hobbit" was published in 1938, and 200 million worldwide. Of that number, 50 million were sold after Peter Jackson's three movies based on ``The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, in 2001-03. As for the movie potential of ``The Children of Húrin," Hollywood is sniffing around, said Brawn. Disney, Warner Brothers, and New Line Cinema have contacted the Tolkien estate, but the estate put them off until after publication. The interest is understandable. The box office gross of Jackson's trilogy was $2.9 billion.
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http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/10/07/is_it_tolkien_or_isnt_it/