[davem]

Aiwendil

Good review here

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/04/26/MiddleEarth/

In a sense, Tolkien is satirizing medieval heroic romances just as Cervantes did in Don Quixote. But Tolkien finds little to laugh at in his own hero, and much to pity. It is tempting to read The Children of Húrin as one of the first novels of World War I, transposed into a different era but presaging the destruction of a great civilization.....

Tolkien's silence in this novel is even louder. Húrin's children, for all their high birth and prowess, destroy themselves in a brutal war. The best they can offer us, like the House of Atreus and like the ignorant armies of World War I, is a warning against self-deceiving pride.