"The Story of Kullervo" is Tolkien's retelling of "The Kalevala", a 19th century Finnish epic about an orphan who avenges the massacre of his family and accidentally seduces his own sister before taking his life.

Tolkien, who later wrote "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, began writing this short story while studying at Oxford in 1915, when aged 23.

The unfinished manuscript, thought to be his first work of prose fantasy, was deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The author described it as "the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own".

He did not finish the text, but did pen an outline of the ending, including the main character taking his life.

Tolkien expert and director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Joseph Pearce, is looking forward to the release.

"Tolkien did say that he wanted to do his own thing with (‘The Kalevala'), so I'd be intrigued to see what his Christian imagination does with that pagan story," Mr Pearce said.

He said one theme of the Norse mythology which so attracted Tolkien and C.S.Lewis was "a sense in which man, if he believes himself to be master of his own fate, he's actually mastered by his fate".

"In other words, that we're not gods and when we try to make ourselves gods, we are headed for destruction.

"That's something that unites the paganism of the Norse myth-makers and the Christianity of Tolkien and [C.S.] Lewis."

Mr Pearce also pointed to other Christian writers of the same era who had treated the theme of "darkness": G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" and T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", for example.

Publisher Harper Collins said "The Story of Kullervo" is published with the author's drafts, notes and lecture-essays on its source-work.

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• The Guardian
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