JRR Tolkien's first fantasy story to be published this month

The Story of Kullervo, written in 1915, was inspired by 19th-century Finnish poem, and influenced his later novel The Silmarillion

The teenage JRR Tolkien’s dark retelling of a Finnish epic poem, which features a young man sold into slavery who unknowingly seduces his sister before killing himself, is to be published later this month for the first time.

The Story of Kullervo was written in 1915, while Tolkien was at Oxford. Thought to be his first work of prose fantasy, it sees the young writer who would go on to pen The Lord of the Rings retell part of the 19th-century Finnish poem the Kalevala. The author himself described it as “the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own”. The unfinished manuscript, which lies in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, has previously only appeared in an academic paper by US Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, with its release on 27 August by HarperCollins its first mainstream publication.

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