HMH Acquires Previously Unpublished Tolkien Book
-- Publishers Weekly, 2/18/2009 7:39:00 AM
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has acquired a previously unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, written while Tolkien was a professor at Oxford during the 1920s and ’30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The house will publish The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in the U.S. and worldwide on May 5. The publication will mark the first extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigúrd the Völsung and the Fall of the Niflungs. The book will include an introduction by Tolkien, drawn from one of his lectures on Norse literature, with commentary, and notes on the poems by Christopher Tolkien. Ken Carpenter acquired U.S. hard and soft rights for HMH from HarperCollins UK.
