The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Book Reviews of The Silmarillion
Book Review: Why the elves are so sad
Summary: 5 Stars
This six-star review assumes that you have read The Lord of the Rings. If you haven't, go do that first, and then come back here.Tolkien thought of the Silmarillion as his life's great work. He was right. Even though we have it only in a partial, posthumous form, he was right. Reading it is a very different kind of adventure from reading The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. What is the difference? In Tolkien's own terms, both of those books are taken from the Red Book of Westmarch, which was written by hobbits. Like hobbits, their books were chatty, immediate, easy to get to know, "hasty." The works in the Silmarillion, in contrast, are taken from the epic literature of the High Elves. Like genuine epic literature the world over before the novel was invented, the Silmarillion is telegraphic, panoramic, and (though only on a first reading, and only to a modern ear) loftily impersonal. And never hasty. To get the proper good of it, it should be read slowly, no faster than the pace of a singing bard.
Most modern readers find Malory's Morte D'Arthur almost impossible to read. That's not because it isn't a great, immortal story. It's because the habit of reading novels has coddled us, so that we want to be shown everything, rather than use our own imaginations to fill in the details in the huge canvas of story that Malory (or in the present case Tolkien) has constructed for us. The epics must be read actively to extract their gold. The Silmarillion, in this regard, is actually much more readable than Tolkien's premodern models, and I don't want to overstate its difficulty. It would be impossible to overstate its rewards.
What's difficult about the Silmarillion isn't that it's boring; it's that so very much happens in it. It relates primarily the history of the First Age of Middle Earth (the Silmarillion proper). But it begins with an account of the creation of the world (the most dense and difficult part; just take it slow and easy and keep plowing forward, the going gets smoother), and it also tells about the second age (when Aragorn's line was founded), and the third. The entire three volumes of the Lord of the Rings get summarized in only five pages of this book. It is chock full of other stories that are just as worthy of expansion to their own thousand pages: all you have to add is imagination.
It's true that Tolkien was not a very great, perhaps not even a very good, writer. But his world has taken up deep residence in the minds and hearts of millions of people, because he was the twentieth century's greatest co-creator. The Lord of the Rings has thousands of imitators, but no equals. What did it have that they don't have? Samwise could have told us: "It's elves, sir." JRRT's epic novel showed the requisite triumph of good over massive evil, but from the beginning what held the reader was not the clash of battle or the exhilaration of victory, but the elegaic sense of a magical world doomed to pass away.
That elegaic magical sense belongs to the elves. What the Silmarillion does is to unfold in its full depth the source of the elven melancholy: the sorrow brought on by immortality, which is after all a kind of irreversibility. It's not too much of a spoiler to observe that the Silmarillion begins with a disastrous oath, and that it is the deathlessness of the elves which ensures the oath's curse will be deathless. If you were moved by the partings at the Grey Havens in Lord of the Rings, then the story of the ages-long unfolding of Feanor's oath will tear at your heart, and its intertwining with the jewel-perfect romance of Beren and Tinuviel will break it.
The same immortality theme is deepened and freighted with irony in the Akallabeth, the tragedy of the Second Age, in which Morgoth persuades the men of Numenor that human mortality is an injustice, rather than the gift the elves know it to be. Tolkien has single-handedly fashioned a vast tragic cycle as full of meaning and potential as the ones he knew from Greek and Nordic mythology. The elves' world is every bit as doom-haunted as the Norse, but as a devout Roman Catholic Tolkien deliberately left an uninhabited open space, nestled within the mystery of human mortality, inside which a thread of unspoken hope barely glistens. Its glow secretly alters the coloring of Middle Earth's twilight, and makes the Silmarillion unique among all the world's epic literature.
Go ahead, read it.
Book Review: Better than any Mythology
Summary: 5 Stars
In The Silmarillion, Tolkien, himself a devout Christian and student/professor of mythology, has created something far more interesting and readable than that which he himself studied.He creates a cosmology that is a combination of that which he believed to be real (Christianity), and that which he believed to be mythology. At the very top sits Iluvatar, also known as Eru, or The One - obviously, God. Below him are the Valar, what I refer to as Tolkien's version of the head deities of various cultural mythos, be they Greco/Roman, Norse, Sumerian, or what have you. Below them are the equivalent of archangels or demi-gods (the Maiar) - we see them clearly in the Lord of the Rings in Saruman, Gandalf, Sauron and - believe it or not - the Balrog of Moria.
Some call the stories contained within The Silmarillion dry and boring. I can't see how. If the book is taken as a work of mythology, as it was intended to be read (from which both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were somewhat accidentally withdrawn), it reads much easier than the Bible and practically every mythological work I've ever read.
Within The Silmarillion, mainly, we are told of the Creation of Middle-Earth and all of the races that eventually populate that world. We are shown in narrative form the disgrace and downfall of Melkor, later called Morgoth (the Satan/Lucifer character) and that is so much more intriguing and fulfilling than merely being told of it happening. There is a compendium of the Valar, describing their various powers and stations, a history of the race of the men of Numenor (from which Aragorn is a descendant), and the crux of the book - the History of the Silmarils (Quenta Silmarillion).
The Silmarils were three jewels created by Feanor, one of the most gifted of the race of Elves (not the Elf we see in Legolas, or even Elrond or Galadriel, but an Elf far greater and more powerful). Within these jewels Feanor set the light of the Two Trees of Valinor (the home of the Valar). Morgoth destroyed the Two Trees of Valinor, and then stole The Silmarils, setting them within his crown, and held within Angband, his Barad-dur, so to speak. Quenta Silmarillion is the valorous tale of Feanor's impossible quest to regain that which was his, and the wreckage that followed in the wake of that quest.
There are more stories within, including a history of the rings of power and the third age, and for those interested, an in-depth detail on how Sauron (who was himself the greatest lieutenant of Morgoth, and fought with him in the great War of the Silmarils) infiltrated himself amongst the Elves and learned their craft of ring making, thus setting the scene for The Lord of the Rings. It is a fascinating account, and makes for great reading.
For fans of the Gandalf, it should be of interest that he is here identified as the wisest of the Maiar. In Unfinished Tales, when he is asked to accompany others of his order to go to Middle Earth and help with their struggles against Sauron, he says that he is weary from his travels and that he fears Sauron. Wise indeed, for Sauron in his avarice, unlike Gandalf, desired Middle-Earth to be his own, whereas Gandalf was content merely to enjoy the creations of Iluvatar. Greed is and should be frightening even to those who are strong enough to defend against it.
The Silmarillion is the work that firmly places Tolkien atop all others in his field, for it demonstrates a breathtaking imagination and work ethic. One wonders what The Silmarillion would have looked like if he had not been burdened with teaching to subsist. The Lord of the Rings never made an enormous amount of money during his lifetime (unlike current authors for whom he paved the road today - J.K. Rowling, Robert Jordan, etc.). We'll never know, but what we've been given is a work of astonishing wonder and brilliance.
Book Review: From Light into Darkness
Summary: 5 Stars
For those of you who adore the great narrative of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, or the charm and vigor of THE HOBBIT, you owe it to yourself to at least attempt to read THE SILMARILLION. Tolkien spent most of his life writing and rewriting the tales that comprise the full story of the First Age of Middle-Earth. Although he sadly died before completing the work, enough remained for his son to edit THE SILMARILLION into publishable form. Although it shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was first published in the 1970s, it is certainly the least read of all Tolkien's works. The book - which is nothing less than an entire cosmology and myth cycle covering the creation of the world, the religion of Middle-Earth (oh yes, there is one), and its history during the thousands of years which elapsed before (and led up to) the War of the Rings - was perhaps not meant to be popular. As so many other reviewers have noted, the language of THE SILMARILLION is quite archaic (deliberately so) and hard to grasp. Recall that Tolkien spent decades creating the languages of Middle-Earth long before the LORD OF THE RINGS took shape in his mind, and you will understand what this book is and how it is supposed to be read. Like the Greek world's ILLIAD and ODYSSEY, (or even the Bible) THE SILMARILLION is meant to read like a collection of myths so ancient that centuries elapsed before they were written down, not like a novel in which we travel as narrators. Indeed, THE SILMARILLION sounds much better read aloud or even chanted, than consulted in silence. The subject of the book is the War between the great leaders of the Elves - assisted by some of the first men - against the Great Dark Lord, Morgoth (Sauron's "boss") for possession of the Jewels made by the Elves in their pride and stolen by Morgoth from the land of the gods. Although the haughty language of the book may discourage the casual reader, once you allow yourself to get caught up in the story, you will be riveted. THE SILMARILLION is ultimately concerned with the same theme as RINGS - the corruption that inevitably comes from power and the inability of thinking beings to let go of pride and materialism. From the earliest portion of the book, it is obvious that Morgoth cannot be defeated, and that the Elves allowed their immortality and their long residence in the land of the gods - Valinor - to lead them into temptation. For those of you who wondered why the Elves - who seem so powerful in Tolkien's other works - were so reluctant to involve themselves directly in the War of the Ring, the litany of their mistakes and miscalculations contained in THE SILMARILLION will answer your questions. The book is not a hopeful one - although it contains much beauty among its tales of grief. Time and time again, the lust for power and rigid adherence to ill-chosen oaths destroys one mighty lord (and a few ladies) after another. The individual tales are all tragic, and only grow more so as the reader comes to realize that the bulk of the miserable events that take place could have been avoided. The Elves, who to the human reader seem to have so many advantages (like eternal life and youth), are fatally flawed by their own hubris, which leads them to think that they can defeat the Dark Lord. Although much good comes from their attempt to do so, much of the evil that winds up besetting Middle-Earth in Tolkien's other works can be laid at the door of the Elves. The fact that none of the characters in the book intend to do evil makes the story all the more heartbreaking. If you can handle the language, THE SILMARILLION is a profound tale of struggle and a great series of adventures that will break your heart, for even as you hope that good will triumph, it is not to be.Book Review: Tolkien's Bible...
Summary: 5 Stars
It's more than slightly staggering to consider the epic fantasy "Lord of the Rings" to be the tail end of Tolkien's invented history. The "Bible" of Middle-Earth, the "Silmarillion" stretches from the beginning of time to the departure of the Elves from Middle-Earth.A complete summary is impossible, because the book spans millennia and has one earth-shattering event after another. But it includes the creation of Tolkien's invented pantheons of angelic beings under Eru Iluvatar, also known as God; how they sang the world into being; the creation of Elves, Men, and Dwarves (hobbits are, I think, not really covered); the legendary love story of Beren and Luthien, a mortal Man and an Elf maiden who gives up her immortality for the man she loves; the demonic Morgoth and Sauron; Elves of just about any kind -- bad, mad, dangerous, good, sweet, brave, and so forth; the Rings of Power; the Two Trees that made the sun and moon; and finally the quest of the Ringbearer, Frodo Baggins.
Many old favorites will pop up over the course of the book, such as Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf, and so on. Fans of Elves will find plenty to feed their hunger; if you are fond of Hobbits or Dwarves, you will not find as much here. For those, you should check some of the other "lost" books of prior writings. It will also answer some questions that "Hobbit" and LOTR may raise, when references to long-ago incidents and people are made.
Be forewarned: The writing style of Silmarillion is more akin to the Eddas, the Bible, or the Mabinogian than to LOTR. It's more formal and archaic in tone, Tolkien did not get as "into" the heads of his characters in Silmarillion as he did in LOTR, and there is no central character. Needless to say, this is necessary as a more in-depth approach would have taken centuries to write, let alone perfect. If readers can bypass the automatic dislike of more formal prose, they will find enchanting stories and a less evocative but very intriguing writing style. This style strongly leans on the Eddas, collections of story and song that were unearthed and translated long ago. Though obviously not as well-known as LOTR, it is clear that these collections helped influence the Silmarillion.
It's evident, while reading this, that Tolkien's passion for his invented history. Someone who had a lack of enthusiasm could not have spent much of his adult life writing, revising, and polishing a history that never was. It's also almost frighteningly imaginative and real: It isn't too hard to imagine that these things could actually have happened. And in an age of shallow, cliched fantasy, Tolkien's coherent, carefully-written backstory is truly unique.
If you can take the formal prose and mythical style, this is a treasure, and a must-read for anyone who loved LOTR or "Hobbit." Only after reading this can readers truly appreciate Tolkien's literary accomplishments, and the full scope of the Middle-Earth that we glimpse in his more famous books.
Book Review: Akallebeth=Atalante=ATLANTIS!
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased the paperback because they were out of hardcovers. The hardcover appears to have pictures. I have not yet read the Hobbit or the LORs. I intend to read them as well. I do own the extended DVD version of the LOR. I was told by many who have read the Hobbit and the LOR to NOT waste my time or rack my brain trying to read the Silmarillion. I tend to agree with them: however, for different reasons. Let me start by saying that this piece of literary work is simply a JRR Tolkien Masterpiece. It is clearly a mind expanding experience to read this book. But why would I not read it if I could go back in time before I made the choice to read it? The reason is that JRR Tolkien starts out painting such beautiful planes of existence of unbridled bliss! Places that the reader can go to! Places created by the Valar, the Maiar and later the Elves. Then at the noon tide, Melkor, a Vala later called Morgoth chooses to destroy it all? The majority of this book is devoted to this downward spiral into unrecoverable darkness. I actually experienced a sense of depression while enduring the absolute hopelessness of it all. With the coming of men celebrating and actually championing ignorance and darkness, it becomes a marathon Shakespearian tragedy. So to sum up it up, while I didn't mind the fact that JRR Tolkien will change the name of a person, place or thing as many as a dozen times and then choose to randomly refer to the one of dozen names during the reading experience since I love to decode, I did not care for the painful downward spiral into the pits of darkness that go deeper than Hell itself.
Given that; I now understand the LOR movies. Watching the movies are a blast but it is hard to follow them. For instance I could never understand how Sauron came into existence. Now I know he was a Maia that specialized in Smithing. In the first age Sauron was lured by Melkor, a Vala, to serve him. When Melkor was rechained by the Valar and sent to the void, Sauron was left as the highest ranking dark lord. Since Sauron was a Maia that was gifted in Smithing, he created and enchanted the Ring to rule them all. For me this is the true gift of information from this book.
Of greater interest is the Second Age, where Middle Earth was ruled by the Numenoreans. Again the same cycle of tragedy. The Valar create the Garden of Eden called Numenor for men located east of Valinor. Then after twenty some Kings, the Numenoreans decide to worship Sauron!!!!? What? The Numenoreons wage war on Valinor and say good bye to paradise. This becomes the JRR Tolkien version of Atlantis.
Like I said at the beginning, this is a book of unbridled contrast of good vs evil or duality with evil being the greater of the polarities. Evil is ignorance. In this book evil becomes the predictable wrong choice of Elves and men.