"There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before The Lord of the
Rings, and the story told in this book is set in the great country that
lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West: lands where Treebeard once
walked, but that were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the
First Age of the World.
"In that remote time Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in the vast
fortress of Angband, the Hells of Iron, in the North; and the tragedy of
Túrin and his sister Niënor unfolded within the shadow of the fear of
Angband and the war waged by Morgoth against the lands and secret cities
of the Elves.
"Their brief and passionate lives were dominated by the elemental hatred
that Morgoth bore them as the children of Húrin, the man who had dared
to defy and to scorn him to his face. Against them he sent his most
formidable servant, Glaurung, a powerful spirit in the form of a huge
wingless dragon of fire. Into this story of brutal conquest and flight,
of forest hiding-places and pursuit, of resistance with lessening hope,
the Dark Lord and the Dragon enter in direly articulate form. Sardonic
and mocking, Glaurung manipulated the fates of Túrin and Niënor by lies
of diabolic cunning and guile, and the curse of Morgoth was fulfilled.
"The earliest versions of this story by J.R.R. Tolkien go back to the
end of the First World War and the years that followed; but long
afterward, when The Lord of the Rings was finished, he wrote it anew and
greatly enlarged it in complexities of motive and character: it became
the dominant story in his later work on Middle-earth. But he could not
bring it to a final and finished form. In this book I have endeavored to
construct, after long study of the manuscripts, a coherent narrative
without any editorial invention." -- Christopher Tolkien
