The Silmarillion
by J. R. R. Tolkien

When The Hobbit was a hit, Tolkien's publisher asked for a sequel and, so the story goes, an early draft of this book is what Tolkien first submitted. The publisher was so perplexed that he sent it back, and so Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings instead. In that staggeringly casual, "oh well, here goes" kind of way was written one of the great stories of our age, a modern-day myth that has shaped so many works of fiction since then, including most of the fantasy genre. But The Silmarillion remained unfinished when Tolkien died. It was left to his son Christopher to patch together J. R. R.'s unpublished writings and fill in the missing pieces of this book, with the help of other fantasy mavens such as Guy Gavriel Kay. And so The Silmarillion became the cornerstone of a vast amount of posthumously-published material collated by Tolkien heirs and scholars up to the present day, much of it having to do with the same fantasy world of Middle Earth where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took place.

This bit of background information may serve to explain why this book is so marvelously insane, or insanely marvelous. In it, essentially, Tolkien creates the entire mythology of the world in which his fantasy masterpieces find their setting. It's a marvelous insanity like that of Peter Jackson, who in filming The Lord of the Rings strove for such a depth of authentic detail that many touches, such as the miles of handmade chain mail worn by the extras in many a crowded battle scene, were hardly seen on screen at all. Likewise, Tolkien fleshes out the background behind the great doings of The Lord of the Rings with not only a sketchy story outline, or a few surplus details, but with a whole vast canvas of history going back to the creation of the world and spanning ages on a scale so huge that the entire Rings saga appears alongside as a brief, parenthetical afterthought. He peoples those eons with a hierarchy of immortal beings who make the elves of Frodo's time seem puny and contemptible by comparison. He imagines languages, peoples, eons of time, and the natural history of whole worldfuls of geography (one world after another, as wars and catastrophes continually reshape the land), titanic conflicts, and the individual melodramas of an immense cast of characters whose comings and goings, sayings and doings, seem fit to stand alongside any epic cycle, saga, myth, or legend in world culture. He creates a reality that seems to be the work of several lifetimes, and all of it to furnish one fully-realized work of art (LOTR) with a fittingly scaled and textured wall to hang on. It's insane. And it's wonderful.

Tolkien writes in brutal disregard of all conventional notions of what makes a book readable, but he does so with incredible lyricism. He writes of spans of time and space that are incomprehensible, while the reader's brain hums like a machine in high gear. He dismisses impossibly long stretches of time with a fraction of a sentence, then tells tales of glory and tragedy and love and fate and conflict between good and evil, in wealth of incident and depth of detail. He zooms in on the weaknesses of his most admirable characters, the fears of the most courageous, the doom of the most powerful, the bitter ironies and mournful mysteries of so many good things that have been turned to evil or destroyed or lost forever. And he persists in coloring his world in shades of nostalgia, in a view of the world as one that has continually, or incrementally, become weakened or diminished or broken, even while light lingered through its darkest times.

The Silmarillion is a novel in five parts of unequal proportions. The greater part of it unfolds the legends of the wars between the powers of the world that existed before mankind came into being. It is interesting to see man depicted as a late-coming race within the world, a race whose very mortality is the gift that ensured that man's dominion would grow as the immortal elves waned. One of the master touches of fantasy is the ability to see all of mankind from an outside point of view, and there are few books that accomplish this so well as The Silmarillion. But even when the elves have the world pretty much to themselves, there is plenty of folly and misunderstanding and conflict and horror. Their history is a long-unspooling thread of curses, vows, revenges, bitter fates, wars against a tirelessly plotting foe, and needless injuries between those who should have been friends and allies. The entire history of elvendom is a continuous movement out of Middle Earth and towards the undying lands of the west, delayed and set back by the ill chances of a world over which, for many ages, only the stars shone, and in which evil got an early foothold.

You can come to this book to find out where folks like Elrond and Sauron, or creatures like Shelob came from; to learn what sets the dwarves apart from the elves; to see the shining beginnings of places that are already in ruin by the time The Lord of the Rings takes place; to learn the stories that lie behind the ancient beings encountered, the names dropped, and songs quoted like clues to a reality beyond what the characters in that book directly experience. That reality is not merely suggested, but actually exists in this monument of one man's mythopoeic imagination. I was right to be afraid to read it for so many years. But now that I have read it, I realize that I was afraid for the wrong reasons. It isn't an occult book of secret Dungeons-&-Dragons lore to subvert the imagination of a pious youth. Nor is it an unreadably tedious tome of made-up lingo and pompous platitudes. It is a huge, noble, powerful, eventful story, or collection of stories, that will move your heart, spark your imagination, and perhaps exert a good influence over the way you think about courage, and pride, and responsibility, and honor. It is a book of phony history that could plant in your mind useful thoughts about the true nature of history. It is a book that could help you understand something about the world's sickness—and not only to grieve over it, but to hope for its healing.

Robbie Fischer
Saint Louis USA

Recommended Age: 13+

If you would like to contact Robbie, you may do so here.

Tweet

comments powered by Disqus