Thread: The Silmarillion: I knew I should not have given it away...

Looong time ago, I read the Hobbit.
After that I read the Lord Of the Rings (though I admit skipping the appendices). Thing is, at the time I was sick. Had the flu really, really bad. So I remember reading it, but I had no recollection of it, other than some fragments.

A year or so later I tried reading the silmarillion, but I couldn't get through it. It was as dull as watching grass grow. A big part of it is that I had no recollection of LOTR so not much of it made sense, and also because it is written as a history, rather than a story.

Some time ago, I remember holding it in my hands when culling my book collection, and thinking to myself: face it, you are never, ever going to read it. You might as well give it away. And I think I actually did that, because I can't find it anymore and it is not in my inventory lists.

Only recently I re-read LOTR (after having watched the movies for the umpteenth time) and this time I worked my way through the appendices. And the more I read, the more I wanted to learn about the history of the peoples of middle earth. I finished the last appendix yesterday, and thought it would be a good time to dive into the silmarillion... only to discover that I can't find it anymore and must have given it to the local librarian (along with a couple hundred other English books).



I guess I'll have to buy it... again...
It's a good opportunity to also buy 'The Hobbit' and 'The children of Hurin'.

I have all of the history volumes of middle earth. They are not really designed as a fluent read though. The editing in them is quite poor and often times you will see different versions of the same story. Christopher Tolkien doesn't do a very good job tying them together either IMHO. Still, they are enjoyable if you can handle that they are not well put together.

Yeah that is my main reason for not buying them.
What about the Children of Hurin? Is that one sick in the same bed?

Do not give up. Silmarillion is an excellent read and it gives you a lot of info from the LOTR history. I've read LOTR several times but not after seeing those movies; maybe i should put it to my books to read list. I remember reading Silmarillion as i was younger and it was surely worth it. Another to my endless list.
Another thing that makes all Tolkien books worth reading here is that he took some influences from our mythology, folklore and national epic Kalevala (on the contrary, that is the most difficult book to read).

I read The Hobbit many years ago and followed with LOTR but couldn't get through it. I'd had enough I guess. As for getting rid of stuff .... this is why I live in clutter. How many times have I given or thrown something away only to find I needed to buy it again three or six months later.

The thing with the silmarillion, I think, is that you need to have the knowledge of LOTR for it to make sense.

Btw, I am wondering: Now they will make a movie of the hobbit as well.
If that proves to be a box office succes, will they make movies of earlier middle earth history as well? The story of Beren? The end of the first and second ages?

The Silmarillion has since vanished from my memory, but I remember reading it right after reading the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and I loved it. I can remember the tale of Beren and Luthien...but that's about it.

I think it is almost imperative to read it with LOTR fresh in your head.

Silmarillion has somewhere been compared to Old Testament in its difficulty, so it would be very interesting movie. However i find it hard to believe that it would ever come top selling.
Books like Silmarillion or Unfinished tales are more like chronicles or separate short stories without constant storyline.
Then again: Who knows what Peter Jackson is capable of. He's done some great movies like LOTR, Bad Taste, Lovely Bones etc and was producing District 9. I'm sure that he is the right man for a difficult task.

Silmarillion is my favorite of all the books. As a complilation of unfinished works, you cannot look at this book like the LOTR or the Hobbit. There are some parts that are long winded (such as the beginning which covers the creation of earth), but there are some absolutely magnificent stories, which are very reminiscient to Tolkien's own form of mythology. It does contain much history, and the lineages/names can get a little tricky, but if you focus on the tales, they are gold. Beren/Luthien, Melkor, Valinor, Numeanor, so many good tales...

People chide James Joyce for having written difficult books, yet the world is awash with nerds reading The Silmarillion!

To dig the Silmarillion, you have to make do with the unpolished prose, but you also need to have some classical literary references. Tolkien was a philologist, so not only did he like languages, he also taught literature at Oxford. He is chiefly responsible for bringing Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon poems back into the English lit canon, but he's not ignoring the other classics either.

For example, the story of the creation of the world (Music of the Ainu) is calqued upon Milton's Paradise Lost: Supreme entity (God/Eru Iluvatar) creates world out of his own mind, and his best, smartest student (Lucifer/Melkor) rebels and falls, leading the Host of the Enemy in his Evil Lair (Pandemonium/Angband), etc. (OK, Milton himself did not invent that story, and just wove it from multiple Biblical sources, but you get the point!)

The story of the fall of Gondolin is likewise calqued onto the story of Troy: Super-Protected city (Troy/Gondolin) eventually falls because of a tiny mistake.

When I was younger, I dug into the Silmarillion because it had so many stories, and there was that sense of a grand design, which gave much more scope to the LoTR story, and had an epic splendor that I found eventually dim when growing up. I got two degrees in English, so I eventually read many works that find their ways into the Silmarillion, and lost interest in Tolkien's project. Reading Paradise Lost or The Illiad amounts to so much more in terms of richness, that I prefer reading the LoTR instead: although a less ambitious work, cosmically speaking, it has all the qualities of a good fairy tale, especially the enjoyment of re-reading it again.