Tolkien’s ‘Hurin’ is in demand

The world still has a taste for tales about Middle-earth.

Two weeks after the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Children of Hurin,” an unfinished novel edited by the late author’s son, Christopher, more than 900,000 copies are in print worldwide, nearly double the original total, according to the U.S. publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

The new book, a prequel to Tolkien’s epic “The Lord of the Rings,” was started by J.R.R. Tolkien in 1918 but eventually abandoned. The author died in 1973, and his son spent the next 30 years working on the manuscript.