The Silmarillion

"En el principio Eru, que en la lengua élfica es llamado Ilúvatar, hizo a los Ainur de su pensamiento; y ellos hicieron una Gran Música delante de él. En esta música empezó el mundo

Continuándo con la aventura de leer completo el Legendarium de Tolkien llega "El Simarillion", la clase de libro sobre el que no tengo idea de como hablar ¿Cómo juzgas la obra de una vida? ¿Cómo hablas de la manera que tiene Tolkien de explotar y dar tantos matices a su tema recurrente (a.k.a. la obsesión)? ¿De que manera hablas de los personajes cuando son tantos y tan bien definidos? Supongo que no hay manera correcta de hacerlo aunque trataré de dar algo de sentido a mis palabras.

Esta obra es literalmente el inicio de Arda, el mundo donde show more seubica la Tierra Mieda, de como Ilúvatar la concibió y los Valar la construyeron. La primera historia, Ainulindalë, es absolutamente hermosa. Concentrar tanta genialidad en tas pocas paginas es asombroso, sólo con esa yo ya quería continuar y ver como se desenvolvía.

Lo que ya entra de lleno a la Quenta Simarillion se me hizó pesado de leer, no porque aburra sino porque son tantos sucesos, tantos personajes, tantos nombres que mi cabeza pedía tiempo para procesarlo todo, y la verdad es que, aunque los Valar son importantes en toda la historia, el verdadera protagonista innamovible fue Melkor, creador del mal en Arda y "el Valar caído", cuya existencia influye en todo lo que suederá en la Tierra Media.

No creo que exista en el género obra similar ni un mundo tan bien pensado y es poco probable que lo que Tolkien ha creado alguien logre igualarlo. show less

This was my second time through (my third attempt in total) and it took me over a year (I started May 2014). I was intentionally slow this time around. It's true, this is a very hard book. It's fiction, but this is not straightforward bubblegum. This is the fiber to The Lord of the Rings's meat and potatoes. You might read of Gondolin in the comparative bubblegum of The Hobbit, but the reality of this book is that it is religious text, prophecy, cosmology, and history all in one. But yes, fiction, and all from the mind of one man.

Tolkien devoted much of his life to writing the history, and it remained unfinished at his death. How? You try writing a self-contained fictional history of over ten thousand years. Though unfinished, its show more creation and development bookends the releases of his two most popular books. Even in the bird's-eye view of the mythos, you can see Tolkien's philosophy, religion, and worldview. Interestingly, when the stories zoom in to examine these characters in depth is when the moral ambiguity dissolves into place. There are complaints that Tolkien's characters are weird black or white, good or bad, but these people have never read anything beyond his two popular books. What to think of the characters that are presented as among the greatest mortals to ever grace Middle-Earth, but commit fratricide? Or the tragic warrior held in high esteem that unwittingly plays into the hands of a demon, killing his closest friends and entering an incestuous relationship? This is Tolkien at his most Shakespearian if you can take it.

If you've tried, and failed, at this book, but maintain a love of Tolkien, I cannot recommend enough following along to lectures on what you've just read. The Tolkien Professor is great and knowledgeable not only of this work but all the other supporting ones.

I guess I'm off to read The History of Middle-earth now.

---

First read: Oct 17, 2013-Dec 3, 2013
Second read: May 21, 2014-Oct 12, 2015 show less

I tried to read, this, I really did, back when I first finished The Lord Of The Rings and wanted more more MORE. The opening chapters defeated me, however, which really is a pity. I wasn't sure how to deal with a brand new creation myth, for one thing. As a Catholic teen, it seemed to close to blasphemy. As a Catholic teen who wasn't all that enamoured of being a Catholic, it was too much like religion. Then again the archaic language was also off-putting, and though the chapters were short, the reading was long, so it seemed to take forever to get to the point. So I gave up. Still, I must have dipped in and out of it, flicked through, read passages here and there, because this time I did read it, and quite a bit of it was oddly show more familiar.

I think the creation myth is interesting, because it isn't 'let there be light' or anything like it. Everything here starts with song, then comes the world. Getting light to the world is a long and fraught process, and, indeed, that's where a lot of the trouble comes from. First you have the lamps, which mean old Melkor knocks down, then you have the trees, which Ungoliant eats, then at last you have the sun and the moon, put up in the sky as a last resort where mean old Melkor can't get them.

Once you get past the creation myth and the descriptions of the Valar and the lands of the West, the story really kicks off, and keeps kicking all the way. We already know from the appendices that The Lord Of The Rings is only the tail end of a story that begins when Iluvatar starts the singing, a tale packed with the epic and the extraordinary, any one page of which could be spun into a trilogy of its own. The silmarils are created, Melkor steals them, Feanor, the first great elvish asshole, swears his vow, murders his kin, heads back to Middle Earth and the fun starts. So we have sieges and chases and betrayals and cruel fates and massive destruction and triumph in adversity and the whole damn thing. It gets especially Wagnerian around poor old Turin, a veritable Siegfried, and the whole shebang ends, appropriately, with a literal deus ex machina.

Marvelous stuff. Mythic grandeur, evocative with magic, drenched with evil, tragic with nobility and rife with unbearable sadness. I would have loved it.

There's also a bit about that fecker Sauron and the fall of Numenor, more detailed than the account from the appendices, and another chapter about the lead-up to the War of the Ring, more detailed in some ways and less in others, so they both make good additions if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am.

2021 - listened to this on audio, the recording by Martin Shaw is justifiably legendary in its own right. show less

"… 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. show more 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. show less

Though a longtime fantasy and Tolkien fan I held off on reading The Silmarillion for many years. It seemed too dry, too complicated. But after I’d tackled the more recently published The Fall of Númenor I wanted more of the dusty pedantic history I’d been so fearful of, and it turns out, I needn’t have worried about it being boring. I loved The Silmarillion. In fact, when I finished it, I wanted more. That’s the mark of a good book.

Of course, The Silmarillion as it exists in published form was never released by Tolkien. It’s a book of compilations from his legendarium, the worldbuilding background of notes, legends, songs and poems, even bestiaries, he created over the years for Middle-earth. His grown son Christopher edited show more and compiled these into the current work, which was published in 1977 five years after his father’s death. As I’ve written before on this site, it was a Big Event in the fantasy world... comparable to someone today discovering a whole new trilogy Tolkien had kept sealed away in a bank vault for decades.

The book is split into several parts. The first part, the Ainulindalë, is about how Eru Ilúvatar, the One God, created the other gods, the Valar, and sang the world of Arda into existence. The next part, the Valaquenta, introduces these lesser gods and how one of them, Melkor, was a rotten tomato who corrupted what Eru and the other Valar made. Then comes the main attraction, the Quenta Silmarillion, which is about the Valar’s battles with Melkor and how Dwarves, Men, and Elves were created...and how one of those elves, Fëanor, forged the three Silmaril jewels that later led to so much strife and bloodshed.

Indeed, as I read the book as a newbie Tolkien scholar, it strikes me how much the author lays the evils of his world at the foot of greed and desire for what is beautiful, a beauty so powerful it’s mesmerizing. Also how highly he values the art of creation itself, whether through songs and poetry or “lovely and clever” things created through smithing or other craftwork – though the reader is never told exactly WHAT the lovely things are or how they’re made – and the reader is always made to know that artistry itself is a power, one that marks a superior being. By which he means his Elves, who are the major players in this section.

If I have a criticism of the work, it’s that the elves, or Elves, are a little too smug and superior, and the Men, who enter the story later, too primitive and weak. The dynamic comes across as Elves = classically educated White Europeans and Men = the Aboriginals they encounter. There is some friendship between them, but it’s clear on whose side Tolkien’s sympathies are on. And I think he even realizes this, as one part of the book explains how Manwë, the chief of the Valar, justifies the Gift of Men (also known as the Doom of Men, that is, their short and weak, but busy, lives) in persuasive tones. The sum of it is that Men are less of the substance of Arda, and so not tied down to it, they are capable of using and changing it (and, unsaid by him, not respecting it, as elves and dwarves do) and have freedom of choice regarding their moralities; and that after death, rather than returning to Valinor, their spirits go somewhere else. Tolkien being the good Catholic he was, that’s presumably Heaven.

But still, after reading the whole thing, we’re left with the idea that in Middle-earth it’s great to be an elf, and sucks to be a human. The humans themselves realize this in the Akallabêth, the next section, which is a history of the men of Númenor, Tolkien’s Atlantis analog. Envy of the Elves’ long lifespans and a fear of death lead the humans to invade Valinor, the Land of the Gods, which causes a catastrophe by which the entire world changes. The ancestral land of the elves, Beleriand, is sunk beneath the waves as well as the island of Númenor, and the world is made no longer flat but round like a globe. Only Elves now can sail the sea into the outer-dimension pocket where Valinor now lies, where can live forever. As for men, they die and go to ... wherever. (Personally I think they’re reincarnated.)

After the Akallabêth there’s a summary of the events of The Second and Third Ages – remember the Third includes the events of The Hobbit and LOTR trilogy -- after which begins the Fourth Age, or the “Age of Men” in which all the Elves leave and all the magic is gone.

This odd history seems to me, as a writer, a way for Tolkien to organize his own creative history of Middle-earth and bring into a coherent narrative. In his first writings Middle-earth was this earth, but the myths were real and actually happened. Then came up with an imaginary world with different continents the gods and their creations inhabited together. By the time he wrote the The Hobbit he realized this world didn’t mesh with down-to-earth realism of rural English life (as interpreted by decidedly unreal Hobbits, anyway) and he started to think of Middle-earth as a globe, a planet like Earth, and stuck in the idea of an ancient civilization’s hubris to blame for the changes that made it so. Thus the progression of his ideas was recorded in the world's history. There’s a hint of the original concept in that Middle-earth’s constellations are those of this one – Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Big and Little Dipper – albeit with different names. No writing effort was wasted.

And I’m happy with that, as clunky as it was. Also clunky were the tales of Elf migration and settlement and re-settlement that to me, as a writer, sounded like Tolkien, or his heirs, were nipping and tucking his notes. Or he might have been seeking a way to order all his tales and account for why some elves were higher in status than others or became as isolated as the Mirkwood ones in The Hobbit, Legolas' kin, turned out to be. Tolkien worked on his world all his life, up to the date of his death, even after the publication of his novels. His history was constantly in revision.

As to whether or not Tolkien really meant for Middle-earth to be a prehistory for this one, well, that’s up for grabs. Certainly he intended the Fourth Age to be the Age of Men, with the Eldar beings, the Elves, fading in influence and sailing away to Valinor. But if these Men later remake the world into this one, with its echoes of ancient Celtic and Germanic myths, we don’t know.

What is certain is that over the years Tolkien framed his history as a story-in-story. The tales of both Bilbo and LOTR have a meta-narrative, that of being recorded in The Red Book of Westmarch, a chronicle purportedly kept for centuries in The Shire after the War of the Ring ended. Even as a longtime reader it’s easy to forget that. In addition, Tolkien made up other imaginary books and authors who contributed to his imaginary history. In that, he was just being true to his profession.

The Silmarillion concludes with a slew of genealogies maps, and a glossary that had me constantly flipping back and forth. Though it was an awkward way to read, all did the job they were supposed to. But it drove the point home that the book is not for the impatient or those unwilling to invest in it.

The preface to the book is written by Tolkien himself, and it’s a good one. It wasn’t intended to be, as the book was published posthumously; but it states what it’s about in Tolkien’s own words. It’s actually 1951 letter written to Milton Waldman, an editor at Collins publishing house, urging him to publish The Silmarillion and LOTR together. It wasn’t to be of course, and in the publisher was correct. The world needed time for the fictional works to sink in and enjoy them. Premature publication of The Silmarillion would have been a fanfic by the author of his own world, aimed at the imaginary audience who had already enjoyed the trilogy’s imaginary publication. There was nothing in it to engage a novice reader. Which is why The Silmarillion could only have been released after decades of the trilogy and The Hobbit being in print (and being illustrated, which is just as important) because the reader has something to reference.

As an example of the validity of this, nowhere in The Silmarillion are elves described as having pointed ears, long hair, tall, slim bodies, or wearing flowing robes. Yet in 99.9 % of the artwork and other media depictions it is so. How could one read The Simarillion and grasp it without even knowing what the main characters look like?

Yet it was so. Elves were described as being fair and beautiful, and that's about it it. Hair color is mentioned every once in a while: one noble Elf house has golden hair, another family has red or auburn. Only a chosen few get more description -- like Luthien's great beauty and long black hair, or the male elf Maeglin, whose name means “sharp glance” implying he has piercing eyes or an incisive look. They might as well be humans for the purposes of the story. Substitute “Norseman” for “elf” and it wouldn’t change a thing.

In contrast, there’s quite a few swords that got more description. But the majority of lush, descriptive writing is devoted to the two light-giving trees of Valinor, Telperion and Laurelin, which are written in a way the reader can see them as precisely as Bilbo’s hobbit-hole in the ground. Which was a pretty masterful piece of writing, as nearly all artists depict it correctly from the text!

The Valar also came across as bland, at least in the beginning. They were not as petty and human as the Greek Gods, like Zeus with his constant lusts or Athena with her pride; neither did they have the cosmic adventures of Hindu deities or the grimness of Norse ones. But they grew on me by the end of the book. It was amusing to me how continuously they were thwarted by bad-boy Melkor, yet always gave him another chance. I got the sense they didn’t know quite how to deal with him, which made them relatable.

In retrospect the vagueness served a purpose: it highlighted the rhythm of the prose with its archaic cadences and exotic names, the same way E. R. Eddison did in The Worm Ourobouros. I could tell Tolkien really got off on the writing of it, even the look of the typeset imaginary words, the downthrust points of the vs , the gentle curves of fs and hs, the ornamentation of umlauts and accents. In fact, I'd go as far to say the languages made the story write itself – why else would there be so much traveling around than to show off obscure place names? It made for a pleasant reading experience, even if nothing much was said, and in spite of that I wound up rooting for Luthien and Beren even as I felt sorrow at Finwë’s heroic death.

That said, some of the material felt unexplored, too edited, or not filled out enough. For example, King Thingol, an elf who actually married a Maiar (the Valar’s angels, so to speak) and ran the hidden kingdom of Doriath for a number of centuries, meets his end when he claims a finely made necklace and refuses to give it back to the dwarves who made it, for which they kill him. It’s a bit of a character assassination for someone we’ve gotten used to behaving in a more noble way. Another is the marriage of Nienor, who has forgotten her memory due to being hypnotized by the dragon Glaurung, to her own brother Turon. The fact that it’s incest is NEVER mentioned, only that, when Nienor finally gets her memory back, she commits suicide by pitching herself off a cliff in true Wagnerian fashion.

In sum, The Silmarillion is perhaps the ideal of which Tolkien’s other works are a reflection of, yet it is also a work in its own right. Reading it, and getting enjoyment out of it, requires a certain mindset. The task becomes for the reader to consolidate the poetic, high-minded, almost abstract Silmarillion with the descriptive, immediate realism of trilogy and the childish tone of The Hobbit. The three are very different, but draw from the same source. show less

I tried and failed 3 or 4 times to read The Silmarillion over the years, and finally decided to give the audiobook a try in hopes of finally making it through. Only near the end of the listen did I realize ... I read "Fellowship of the Ring" for the first time 20 years ago--so reading and finishing Silmarillion this year seemed momentous and apropos.

A member of a LOTR-themed Facebook group commented recently, "Nothing makes artificial mythology (mythopoeia) come alive like artificial oral tradition (audiobooks). I mean, have you truly experienced The Silmarillion if you haven't read it aloud or heard it read aloud?" This absolutely and entirely captured my sentiment about the book. It was made to be read aloud!!

I also loved how the show more material lent depth to Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I've been reading these, as mentioned, for 20 years, and love them to pieces; Silmarillion only enhanced that, giving the two layers and layers of richness. We only see the tip of the mountain in LOTR/Hobbit; Silmarillion gives it roots.

Love, love, love this book. show less

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 show more together 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. show less