The Story of Kullervo

FOREWORD

Kullervo son of Kalervo is, perhaps, the least ingratiating of Tolkien’s heroes: uncouth, moody, bad-tempered and vengeful, as well as physically unattractive. Yet those traits add realism to his character, making him perversely appealing in spite of, or perhaps because of, them. I welcome the chance to introduce this complex character to a wider readership than heretofore. I am also grateful for the opportunity to refine my first transcription of the manuscript, restore inadvertent omissions, emend conjectural readings, and correct typos that found their way into print. The present text is, I hope, an improved representation of what Tolkien intended.

Since the story’s initial appearance, further work has been done on its role in the development of Tolkien’s early proto-language, Qenya. John Garth and Andrew Higgins have explored the names of both people and places in the surviving drafts and related them to his language invention, John in his article ‘The road from adaptation to invention’ (Tolkien Studies Vol. XI, pp. 1–44), and Andrew in Chapter Two of his ground-breaking PhD dissertation on Tolkien’s early languages, ‘The Genesis of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mythology’ (Cardiff Metropolitan University, 2015). Their work adds to our knowledge of Tolkien’s early efforts, and enriches our understanding of his legendarium as a whole.

The materials here published, J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished early work The Story of Kullervo and the two drafts of his Oxford University talk on its source ‘On “The Kalevala”’, first appeared in Tolkien Studies Volume VII in 2010, and I am grateful for the permission of the Tolkien Estate to reprint them here. My Notes and Comments are reprinted with the permission of West Virginia University Press. My essay, ‘Tolkien, Kalevala, and “The Story of Kullervo”’, is reprinted with the permission of Kent State University Press.

Thanks for the present volume go to several people, without whom it would never have come to be. First of all to Cathleen Blackburn, to whom I first proposed that The Story of Kullervo needed to reach a larger audience than that of a scholarly journal. I am grateful to Cathleen for ushering the project through the permissions process of the Tolkien Estate and its publisher, HarperCollins. I am grateful to both the Estate and HarperCollins for agreeing with me that re-publication as a stand-alone was what Tolkien’s Kullervo merited. Thanks also to Chris Smith, Editorial Director at HarperCollins in charge of matters Tolkienian, for his help, advice, and encouragement in bringing Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo to the wider audience it deserves.