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��It is undeniable that there are a great many readers of The Lord of the Rings for whom the Elder Days are altogether unknown, unless by their repute as strange or inaccessible in mode and manner.��
Yup, that would be me.
I really should have heeded everyone's advice and read The Silmarillion first, even though Christopher Tolkien said it was okay not to.
It's not that it would've been necessary to the story itself, just for the background. Because although I read all the Appendices in The Lord of the Rings the First Age was always kept at bay, conspicuously absent and as mysterious as it should be. So when it came to things concerning the Valar, the Noldor, the Eldar and the Edain, I got a bit confused or muddled, even though their story was summarized in (very) brief in the first Appendix of The Lord of the Rings and in the Introdutcion of this book.

So this was my first real taste of the First Age of Middle-Earth and boy did I love it. It also dawned on me, while reading the Appendices of this book as well, that if Tolkien had lived and been able to write all the stuff he'd wanted to, we would've gotten a wholey different (and much larger) book series - we would've gotten The Children of Húrin, the tale of Beren and Lúthien, the fall of Gondolin, and The Book of Lost Tales in their complete forms. We would've gotten a whole bookshelf's worth of novels about just the First Age of Middle-Earth, of which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings would've been sequels only. It never crossed my mind before reading the words of Christopher Tolkien that his father had started from the very beginning, and that there might not have been any Second, Third, or Fourth Age at all. That The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit had been the 'interruption' of his original work, that in fact they were only a very small and almost insignificant part of his legendarium; the ending to his creations rather than the beginning.

So I mourned a bit. I mourned for the loss of all those unwritten books, for the bookshelf I might have had, weighed down by the novels that in chronological order would've had The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at the very end.

I loved The Children of Húrin all the same though, and I commend Christopher Tolkien for his great efforts at trying to make it as near as what his father had intended as possible, while having to work with a ‘labyrinth�� of manuscripts and notes, and conflicts between what was already written in The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales, and all others that concerned even briefly The Children of Húrin. In fact there are things about it that I loved more than The Lord of the Rings. Maybe it has something to do with Christopher Tolkien's input or the fact that it was meant to be a story of the Greek Tragedy variety (although since I'm not very familiar with these I likened it more to a Shakespearean play), but I felt that The Children of Húrin had a bit more depth than The Lord of the Rings. The characters, particularly that of Túrin the protagonist, felt stronger and more off-the-page. This book was filled with emotion. At times it did feel a little too overdramatized, when a character accidently kills or betrays his friends one too many times, for which I dock one star, but everything about a characters' struggles or suspicions or despairs or jealousies were so raw I could see the expressions on their faces. If I thought that Peter Jackson would make a good job in filling in all the 'empty' places in the book (places where there would be longer scenes of fighting, traveling, or dwelling and waiting out the days �� what Christopher Tolkien calls ‘bridging paragraphs��), I would be all for him making a movie adaptation.

Above all, the best thing about this book was Túrin. This is a many-layered hero who can both astound you and anger you, who can earn your admiration and contempt, sometimes all at once. Bearing the brunt of Morgoth’s evil shadow because he is the son of Húrin, he hurts all those around him, wherever he goes, thereby hardening his character more and more through the progressive pages, until the very last straw is put on the camel’s back and he breaks under it. Charismatic, strong and silent, a brilliant fighter, a dominating leader, a merciful capturer, and quick to anger, he is just the sort of hero I love following most in a story �� the archetypical hero, let’s say. Next to him, all the other characters just feel like duplicates of each other, although there are those that stand out on their own as the ‘originals��, such as Beleg Strongbow, ‘Labadal�� Sador, Andróg, Mablung, Saeros, and Thingol. Glaurung the Dragon is also a sinister antagonist and a great driver of hatred and deceit. And though they only played short but pivotal roles in the beginning of the book, my respect is also reserved for Húrin, Huor his brother, and Morwen his wife, who is about so far the most admirable female character I’ve yet seen in Middle-Earth besides Galadriel. The way all these characters and the countless others�� lives intertwine is almost more enrapturing than the characters themselves.

I ought to go read The Silmarillion now: I want to know more about Fëanor, Lúthien, and Beren, and all the other things that happened in that distant First Age. And when I do, I’ll reread this book, hopefully feeling closer to the story than I did before, and welcoming all the familiar faces again.