QuoteDespondent Tolkien fans forced to wait until at least 2010 for the release of the film version of The Hobbit will be cheered by the news that the author's previously unpublished retelling of a Norse legend also adapted by Wagner to create the Ring cycle is to be published for the first time this May.

Tolkien put the tales of Sigurd the Völsung and the fall of the Niflungs into narrative verse while he was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford during the 1920s and 1930s - before he wrote his most famous works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which have sold 150m copies worldwide.

Little is currently known about his retelling of the legend, although it has been suggested that Sigurd's slaying of the dragon Fafnir was in Tolkien's mind when he wrote the encounter between Bilbo and Smaug in The Hobbit. He also re-uses the story of Sigurd's dragon-slaying in his story of Turin Turambar, the protagonist of The Children of Hurin, according to the JRR Tolkien Encyclopaedia, while elements of the story - a golden ring, and a broken sword which is remade - can also be seen in The Lord of the Rings.

In the legend which Tolkien relates, according to the Tolkien Encyclopaedia, after Sigurd, the legendary "prince of the heroes of the North", kills Fafnir, he takes his gold, and then rescues the woman Brynhild from a rock surrounded by flames. She pledges herself to him, but he marries another woman, Gudrún, returning to Brynhild's rock later disguised as Gudrún's brother Gunnar, to win her for Gunnar as his bride. Rivalry then develops between Gudrún and Brynhild, culminating in the murder of Sigurd.

HarperCollins, which is publishing the text as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, will be hoping the fact the tale is in narrative verse won't put off Tolkien's legions of fans. Tolkien's unfinished Middle Earth tale The Children of Hurin, which HarperCollins brought out in 2007 after it was completed by his son Christopher, has sold more than 1m copies to date in English. Christopher Tolkien is also editing and introducing the new book.

Ian Collier of the Tolkien Society welcomed the news. "The Society looks forward to seeing this work in print which will help show that JRR Tolkien was a gifted academic as well as a very talented writer of fiction," he said.