[j. d. worthington]

Pyan: Yes, I do, though it's been some time since I went through them. I'll try to track down that for you sometime this week, though.

As for why... well, for one thing, The Children of Hurin was written during the same time he wrote The Silmarillion... which he was working on long before he ever thought of The Hobbit, let alone LotR... and neither of them were done in a single go, but over years (decades, really). And actually, such books were much more the approach given to fantasy, outside the pulps. Even in LotR (or, for that matter, briefly, in The Hobbit) you see such a "high style"; it is more the tone used in some parts with Rivendell, or Rohan, and certainly with several portions of the sections on Gondor.

You still see fantasy books take this sort of approach at times, though not anywhere near the amount they used to. But many of the best-known names in fantasy used such a style, and they certainly didn't suffer any great lack of readers (as far as people read fantasy at that point, when no type of fantastic tale, be it horror, fantasy, sf, etc. was all that much in favor, it being a period of extreme realism in fiction save for the pulps). Eddings had three books in a much more difficult style published, which remain classics to this day (a fourth was also published, but posthumously and unfinished); Cabell has always had quite a strong reputation, as he was one of the greatest American stylists of the Twentieth Century; Dunsany certainly was extremely popular for some years, and is becoming so again... and influenced the majority of writers until LotR became such a well-known book; Clark Ashton Smith uses a very lapidary prose style, especially for his outright fantasies; not to mention Lovecraft.... So I'm not at all sure that it would have had such difficulty being published for that reason.

But The Silmarillion, at least (and, if I recall correctly, even the first volumes of The History of Middle-Earth), actually were on the best-seller lists for some time... and The Silmarillion went through several printings within the first few years; I don't know as it's been out of print since... so I think this is more a matter of taste than it being something the general readers (or fantasy readers in general) dislike....