A French Edition Brings Tolkien's Youthful "Kullervo" Tale to Wider Attention
France Culture devotes a segment of its "Midis de Culture" program to a newly available French edition of L'Histoire de Kullervo, an early text by J.R.R. Tolkien that the broadcaster frames as a key to understanding his later work.
The French public radio program "Les Midis de Culture," broadcast on France Culture, took up L'Histoire de Kullervo on October 5, presenting it as a work written in Tolkien's youth that has only recently reached French readers. According to the program's own framing, the text offers a window into the imaginative groundwork behind the author's later, far more famous books, Le Hobbit and Le Seigneur des anneaux.
For most readers, Tolkien's name calls up hobbits, rings and Middle-earth. The broadcast argues that this earlier, lesser-known piece shows the writer before those creations took shape, suggesting that some of the preoccupations and techniques visible in his mature fiction were already present in this youthful effort.
The source material available here is limited to the radio program's own description, without further detail on the text's content, its translator, or its publisher. Readers curious about the specifics of the story itself, or about when and how this edition came to exist in French, will need to turn to the broadcast or the book itself for more.
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