The Silmarillion
by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
HarperCollins, 2001
(Originally published 1977)
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 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.
