Posthumous offering for myth lovers

Heath Ledger's last film has yet to appear. Janet Frame's name has appeared above the titles of a major poetry collection and a new novel in the years since she died.

There's nothing strange about this. But consider: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien published five works of fiction during his lifetime, or six if you count the narrative poems collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Since his death in 1973 the total has expanded to 24. (That number is highly arguable; I'm counting the 12-volume History of Middle-Earth as 12 separate works. Anyone who wants to be pedantic can count it as a single entity. I'd only note that a counter-pedant could make a case for counting each volume more than once. No, don't ask for details. I won't go there).

The man responsible for this post-humous proliferation is Tolkien's youngest son, Christopher, who has devoted his life to poring over his father's papers. Anyone who has ever stared in bemusement at the elder Tolkien's notoriously personality-rich handwriting will understand why Christopher, now 84 years old, is still uncovering new items of interest. This is why the total Tolkien fiction output, whatever you peg it at, continues to edge upwards every so often, even at this late date.

On the face of it, the newest book is very much what you might expect from the man who created Frodo, Aragorn and Gollum. It has heroic adventure. It has a dragon. It even has a ring. But The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is Tolkien's attempt at translating the Old Norse Elder Edda into stylistically appropriate English verse: which is not quite grounds for running screaming from the bookshop, but people hoping for cheery hobbits and benignly sarcastic wizards should revise their expectations.

To give you a taste: "Of old was an age/ when Odin walked/ by wide waters/ in the world's beginning;/ lightfooted Loki/ at his left was running,/ at his right Hoenir/ roamed beside him".

The alliterative verse form is somewhat similar to that of the great Old English poems, such as Beowulf — with which Tolkien, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford for much of his career, was profoundly familiar — but note how short the lines are.

As Tolkien explains in the short essay reproduced at the start of the book by way of introduction, Old Norse poetry had its own distinctive style, the chief element of which was extreme compression. Few words. Telling details only. Story elements leaped over in great bounds, readers panting behind: exhilarated, exasperated, exhausted. If the haiku and the epic poem had a love-child, this is what it might look like.

The subject matter will be familiar to many, because Wagner drew on it for The Ring of the Nibelung: the cursed gold, the doomed hero, the dragon Fafnir, Brynhilde the Valkyrie.

This material is also one of the great wellsprings of Tolkien's own mythology, for which reason Middle-Earth geeks — very much including myself — will enjoy poring over the book.

But its real audience are those who love the Norse myths and the inventive use of language. Emphatically not an easy read, but for those prepared to give it the concentration it demands, Tolkien's latest is a sinewy, crackling, altogether potent piece of storytelling.

The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun
By J.R.R. Tolkien
(HarperCollins $49.99)

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer