The Story of Kullervo
E-book, Czech
The Story of Kullervo
Tolkien's Tragic Hero, Born from the Kalevala
The Story of Kullervo, the hero of the Finnish epic Kalevala, is one of the works published posthumously from Tolkien's estate. It is accompanied by two studies / lectures on the Kalevala itself, which demonstrate Tolkien's interest in this mythological subject. The Story of Kullervo was written in 1914, and the hero's tragedy foreshadows another of Tolkien's heroes, Túrin Turambar. At the same time, it prefigures Tolkien's lifelong work of creating his own world with its own mythology, history and language. The gripping, tragic story of the ill-fated hero is supported in this volume by an essayistic commentary; a research-focused study illustrates the hero's story.
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but spent his childhood in England, where he also completed his secondary and university education. In 1919, he received a diploma in Old English language and literature from Oxford and became a professor in the same field five years later. Tolkien's first publications in the 1920s were A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) and a critical edition of the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925), but it was the fairy-tale story from the fictional ancient Middle-earth, The Hobbit (1937, first published in Czech in 1979), that brought him readership success. After fourteen years of work, which had begun even before the publication of The Hobbit, he completed a far more extensive sequel, incomparably richer in plot, intellectual complexity and linguistic invention, in the late 1940s with the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955, first published in Czech 1990–1992), which generated a massive wave of interest. The fortunes of Middle-earth and its inhabitants, briefly sketched in The Hobbit and elaborated in The Lord of the Rings, are further developed in the epic The Silmarillion (1977, Czech edition 1992), which was prepared for publication four years after the author's death by his son Christopher. Tolkien's literary legacy is complemented by a number of scholarly studies and fairy-tale stories.
Samples to download:
ARGO, spol. s r.o., Milíčova 13, Praha 3, Česká republika, 222 782 260, [email protected]
