Tolkien & The Silmarillion

In Tolkien & The Silmarillion, Clyde S. Kilby recounts his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien and his time reading drafts of The Silmarillion, then unpublished. Kilby writes of Tolkien’s writing process, “Something of the extent of Tolkien’s perfectionism may be sensed by noting that he, like C.S. Lewis, thought a story properly composed only after the author had first done the whole thing in poetry and then turned it back into prose. Some of the manuscript of The Silmarillion is in verse form. It is a concept reminiscent of Horace’s dictum that an author rework his writings for nine years before giving them to the public” (pg. 32). In addition to his impressions of Tolkien as a writer, Kilby offers glimpses of Tolkien’s life, show more his appreciation of the English countryside and language, as well as his religious convictions and connection to the Inklings – including Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. The work does not serve as a full biography, however; Humphrey Carpenter’s later book, Tolkien: A Biography, fulfills that role. Kilby also offers a glimpse of things Tolkien did not fully complete. He writes, “He has the intention of completing a full account of the Second Age of Middle-earth under the title The Akallabeth, a word made up of kalab meaning ‘fall down,’ with the doubled ‘l’ giving it intensity, i.e., the ‘great fall’” (pg. 23). When Christopher Tolkien edited The Silmarillion for publication after his father’s death, The Akallabêth consisted of approximately thirty pages, having never expanded to fit a complete volume on its own. Kilby’s Tolkien & The Silmarillion will primarily appeal to those interested in Tolkien’s writing process, especially readers of Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth. show less