J. R. R. Tolkien

I will never, ever finish The Silmarillion. I know because over the years I have tried no less than five times to read the thing cover to cover and I just cannot do it. There are so many characters to track and so many people running in one direction or another and it isn’t as if the whole thing is really a cohesive story. It’s more like a collection of short stories except that they are all intertwined with each other and you, the reader, are supposed to be able to track it and make sense of it all so as to really, really understand the whole world Tolkien created and really, really, appreciate the depth behind The Lord of the Rings. And I suppose part of the problem must be that I just didn’t feel as if I didn’t understand the world and appreciate the depth in the first place. So, I send this book into the West to its deserved rest.… (more)

Naturally people read The Silmarillion first, but I must say that I prefer this book. It includes a selection of very different writings and while they have the disadvantage that most of them are not finished, to me they are fascinating and they show the scope both of J.R.R. Tolkien's and Christopher Tolkien's work.

The texts cover all the three ages and are often rooted in stories from The Silmarillion, but while that book includes stories that are mostly more like retellings or summaries, in this one they are broadened and told more in the style of a novel or novella, by which I mean a slower pace and more direct speech among other aspects.
The stories from the First Age are about the hidden elvish city of Gondolin and about the children of Húrin, humans who became entangled in the fight against Morgoth, a super evil being (Sauron once was his lieutenant), while those of the Second Age are mostly concerned with the island of Númenor (which is kind of the Tolkien version of Atlantis). The stories from the Third Age provide a lot of background information about the characters and events of The Lord of the Rings, such as the original alliance between Gondor and Rohan, an account of how and why Gandalf planned the events of The Hobbit and persuaded Thorin to take a hobbit with him, and more information of what happened to Gollum after Sauron let him go, and how he ended up in Moria where he came across the fellowship. To me, reading the book would be worth it because of those texts alone.

Each text features an introduction by Christopher Tolkien and extensive notes, and these enable the reader to learn a lot about how both father and son worked, and how gigantic this work - and the project of creating Middle-earth - actually was. I am endlessly fascinated by the energy, knowledge, and painstaking labour that went into it, and still does by those who inherited the work from Christopher after his death in 2020.… (more)