The Silmarillion (1977)

Happy Tolkien Day! ( )

I was always ambiguous toward elves. Not so here. The elves of Tolkien's First Age are, by intent, of a vastly mightier calibre than his own later elves - hence even further incomparably superior to the derived, pallid modern High Fantasy trope. Far from unworldly, distant, or annoyingly "fey", they're fearsome figures: Physically strong, imposing, forceful... & robust. Tougher, indeed earthier, than men or even dwarves. Truly the world's First Children. The First Age - their apogee - is correspondingly vivid, radiant, luminous, & the strongest component in an overall perfect masterpiece.

Perfect, because the later parts are spectacular too. At the author's personal insistence, this posthumous volume beautifully & grippingly ties the very earliest time, of the world's creation, with First Age, Second Age (rise & fall of Númenor & Sauron's forging of the rings), & a concise but evocative summary of The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings - the latter of which famously closes not only the Third Age, but the entire, mythic era when elves walked the physical earth. ( )

"… in which much story and song was preserved from the beginning of the world; and they made letters and scrolls and books, and wrote in them many things of wisdom and wonder in the high tide of their realm, of which all is now forgot." (pp312-3)

For many readers, even devoted fans of The Lord of the Rings, picking up The Silmarillion will be as ill-advised as taking a shortcut through the Mines of Moria. Author J. R. R. Tolkien, lauded as a great world-builder, is sometimes because of this underrated as a storyteller, and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for all their songs and lore and digressions, are often gripping feats of storytelling. The Silmarillion, in contrast, is Tolkien in pure, bone-dry world-builder mode. Particularly in its first half, it is often a chore to read.

Written in the style of a history book, a sort of dusty compendium of the lore of Middle-earth such as Gandalf might find in the archives of Minas Tirith, The Silmarillion will be for the vast majority of readers a feat of endurance. It seems that every fifth word is one that Tolkien has made up, some place name or god or elven king, and while that's what we expect from this richest of imagined worlds, it's not balanced out by any of the storytelling relief that we got in The Lord of the Rings. Despite being a big fan of Middle-earth since my early teens, I began to regret this deep immersion in its lore, which in its bloodless prose became more and more like a waterboarding.

The Silmarillion improves in its second half (the turning point is the story of Beren and Lúthien) but, for those who have made it this far, its reputation will already have set. Nevertheless, it is this second half which redeems the dry weight of the first, and shows just how impressive Tolkien's achievement was. It's not enough to save the book from a middling rating, on the grounds of personal enjoyment, but it's enough to ensure I'll look back on it with begrudging admiration. That in itself is impressive, considering how fatigued I felt in the doldrums of the first half, not knowing my Manwës from my Maiars from my Mandos.

You see, the initial flaw of Tolkien's lore-dump here is its lack of literary depth. It's a dry litany of names and events, all with an impressive internal consistency but, absent storytelling, characterisation or theme, with nothing for the reader to sink their teeth into. Towards the end, I gratefully seized upon a passage where a mortal Man questions why Elves get to go to a land of immortality beyond the sea, whilst Men are required to show "a blind trust, and a hope without assurance, knowing not what lies before us in a little while" (pg. 316). This meditation on death, faith and the prospect of heaven is the sort of deep sounding which the stories of the previous 300 pages were sorely lacking.

However, as this shifting encyclopaedia of invented lore takes its final form, we begin to see the genius of its not-so-blind watchmaker. The gears Tolkien has fashioned are all shown to have fit neatly into place. You see, The Silmarillion gives the backstory of Middle-earth, from its creation by the gods through the long reign of the Elves and the emergence of Morgoth, the Satan-like 'Enemy' (Sauron, the later antagonist of The Lord of the Rings, is merely a lieutenant of his). It ends with a summary of the events of The Lord of the Rings (as are "elsewhere told", Tolkien writes with severe understatement on page 319). These events herald the end of the Elves' time on Middle-earth – as well as the other fantasy creatures like orcs, dragons and trolls – and the emergence of Men. All well and good, you might think, for nerds; but what does it have to do with the price of fish?

Well, what becomes clear in this second half of the book is that Middle-earth is not merely inspired by our world and its myths, but is meant to be our world in an earlier iteration. You might look at The Silmarillion's prose and think of the stentorian tones of the Bible (though The Silmarillion is sorely lacking in that other book's lyricism). You might look at Morgoth and think of Satan; at the Valar or the Elves and think of angels; at Avallónë and think of Avalon from the legend of King Arthur; at the drowning of the isle of Númenor and think of Atlantis (Númenor is said to be known as "Atalantë in the Eldarin tongue" (pg. 337)). And you'd be right. Tolkien certainly pulls from many of the Western myths and legends he was fond of, from Christian cosmogony to Nordic sea-myth and Arthurian mist.

But it's more than that. Middle-earth is often characterised as a parlour game that got out of hand; a story created by an Oxford professor to indulge and expand upon his love of creating languages, with hobbits and rings of power created almost as an afterthought so that Tolkien could giddily create some new Elven noun and verbify it in both past and present tense. The dry majority of The Silmarillion seems to confirm this, but the final chapters ultimately give the lie to it. Read the final passages of the 'Akallabêth', the second to last chapter of The Silmarillion, which detail that Atlantean fall of the isle of Númenor. After this fall, which incorporates a Noah-like flood, Men wander the newly-rent world like the sons of Adam after they were barred from Eden, in search of echoes of the old. The world was flat then, in the stories which we have spent the previous 300+ pages labouring through, and Men are longing for it again:

"Thus it was that great mariners among them would still search the empty seas, hoping to come upon the Isle of Meneltarma, and there to see a vision of things that were. But they found it not. And those that sailed far came only to the new lands, and found them like to the old lands, and subject to death. And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle about the Earth and returned weary at last to the place of their beginning; and they said: 'All roads are now bent.' Thus in after days, what by the voyages of ships, what by lore and star-craft, the kings of Men knew that the world was indeed made round, and yet the Eldar were permitted still to depart and to come to the Ancient West and to Avallónë, if they would. Therefore the loremasters of Men said that a Straight Road must still be, for those that were permitted to find it. And they taught that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the West still went on, as it were a mighty bridge invisible…" (pp337-8)

In this, then, as I said, Middle-earth is meant to be our world in an earlier world-cycle, when the world was flat and before it became rounded. Atlantis, Avalon, Satan, and so on, are cast as attempts by us, in a later world-cycle, to comprehend that echo from an earlier iteration, just as those who study world myths can find Christ-like saviours and parallels between religions. Tolkien is knitting together our many disparate Western legends into a single origin. This is more than just a cool interconnectivity; the idea that our world religions and storytelling morals have common roots is an admired theory among a number of philosophers, psychologists and humanists (shown most popularly in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces). The dryness of The Silmarillion becomes somewhat irrelevant when we consider that, absurd as it might sound at first, Tolkien has created arguably the most ambitious fictional contribution to Western mythology since Paradise Lost. Milton's book wasn't exactly an easy read either.

Tolkien's method of inventing languages, peoples and a seemingly pathological commitment to detailing his world, bear their ultimate fruit here. Not only are these final passages of the 'Akallabêth', of which the above forms only a part, arguably the finest that Tolkien ever wrote, but they also present a meticulous depth of philosophy which was not on display in the rest of The Silmarillion and, truth be told, could not really be divined in The Lord of the Rings either. The success of Tolkien's worldbuilding, widely considered to be without peer, is shown to be not in his development of convincing language, as is often supposed, or even his facility for storytelling, but in the fact that, all the time, it has been resting on these solid metaphysical foundations. Foundations which he has only now, in these few passages of the otherwise-maligned Silmarillion, allowed us to glimpse. ( )

If you enjoyed The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, you will love The Silmarillion. This prequel id difficult to read as it is filled with details leading up to The Hobbit. It brings to fulfillment the story which Tolkien has developed in his world. ( )

After a month of reading The Silmarillion - yeah, I was that slow - I'm glad I finally finished it. There is little to say other than the Tolkien books are probably the only ones I'll ever read in this genre because most writers are hacks. JRR Tolkien brought something more to the table when created his creation-myth. The stories in this book carry on to books like Lord of the Rings, in which the heroes look back on the past. A few of the characters even appear in this book, stating their origins and their bloodline.

I say if you want the true Tolkien experience, one must start with this book and read them in their actual "order." ( )