Leading article: Oh, Frodo, no, no, no!

Even if you skip the interminable Elvish songs, reading The Lord of the Rings is not necessarily the kind of thing you would want to do in public. A muted welcome, therefore, for the tidings that a new Tolkien fiction is to be published next month. Christopher Tolkien has spent 30 years stitching his father's notes for The Children of Húrin into a "continuous narrative".

Another prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Hobbit and the posthumously published The Silmarillion also take place before the main action), it tells the story of the warrior Húrin, his son Túrin, and their battle against the Dark Lord Morgoth. The contents of the book are a closely guarded secret, but we have reason to believe that one of Morgoth's final curses was, if we have got our translation from the language of Barad-dûr right, that the whole story would be made into a film one day.

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It may be pointless to try to resist such powerful magic, but we would urge New Line Cinema to have a care for the parents of the pre-teen target market. Please, leave the fans to the guilty pleasures of the printed page, consumed in private. It is often said that great books are best visualised in the imagination and are bound to lose their richness when translated to the screen, however much the wizardry of computer-generated imagery is deployed. In this case, we are inclined to agree.