"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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She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her academic work focuses on imagination in apologetics, with special attention to the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams; she teaches courses on apologetics, medieval culture and philosophy, and modern and post-modern culture.

Dr. Ordway's book Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms(Ignatius Press, 2014) describes her journey from atheism to Christianity, and her subsequent entrance into the Catholic Church.

She recently corresponded with Catholic World Report, discussing her life and beliefs as an atheist, her journey toward Christianity, the mistakes made by many Christians in conversing with atheists, and the main reasons why she became Catholic.

CWR: Early in Not God's Type, you state that as a young atheist, you thought that the "decisive argument against faith was that I could not believe, no matter how much I might want to." What sort of understanding of "faith" did you have at that time? How might you respond now to an atheist who expresses a similar notion?

Dr. Ordway: I had the faulty (but common!) idea that faith meant blind faith: that is, believing something without evidence or even contrary to the evidence. Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding that is propagated by many Christians. As an apologist, I've heard Christians say that they don'twant to know about evidence for the Resurrection or for the existence of God, because that will "diminish their faith." It's no wonder that many atheists conclude that ‘faith' is a synonym for ‘ignorance'.

If having faith really did mean believing something without any grounding for that belief, I would never have been able to do it. I couldn't then, and I can't now: it's simply not possible. It would be wishful thinking or self-deception. Continue reading

Source and Image:

• The Catholic World Report