The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion-J.R.R. Tolkien

How I found this book: I was born, and my father placed it in my hand, and said, “Daughter, you shall loveth thy Tolkien, and it shall be good in thy sight.” This sentence is only funny if you know my father’s a Southern Baptist Minister and a Tolkien freak. I’m surprised he doesn’t speak Elvish.

Setting: In the First and Second Ages of Middle-Earth, in other words, EONS before the happenings of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Plot:

Main Characters:

There are many, but to highlight some of the more important ones….

Illuvatar: The ‘one god’ of this piece, if you wish you can call him/her/it God, Goddess, Allah, whatever, it’s never made clear, but it is supposed to be the originator of Middle-earth.

The Valar: A sort of pantheon of gods, they are more like angelic beings who went about creating the world in Illuvatar’s image, and now guide it. They are the beings whom the Elves seem to worship.

The Maiar: A lesser group of divine beings, also somewhat angelic in nature, who assist the Valar in the running of the world. One of note, Melian, wed an Elvish king, and is the mother of Luthien, one of the heroines of the stories. The wizards, such as Gandalf, are also Maiar.

Melkor: A rogue Valar, he has always wanted to work the world in his own way, and works against Illuvatar and the Valar. He’s the sort of Lucifer of the stories.

Sauron: One of the Maiar who is enlisted into Melkor’s service, he is perhaps the greatest of Melkor’s assistants, and helps bring the fall of Numenor. He is later the great evil of The Lord of the Rings stories.

Elves: They are the ‘first born’ of Illuvatar, and are immune to death by old age or disease, (though they can die by injury). They are brought to the land of the Valar from Middle Earth to be taught by the godlike beings, though not all of the Elves follow. This leads to the many nations of Elves that we find in the later stories. Of note are the Noldor, those who were craftsmen. It is they who create the Silmaril, gems that capture the light of the gold and silver trees that lit the world. When the Silmaril are stolen by Melkor, the Noldor swear an oath of revenge that is the running theme of the Silmarillion, and brings both glory and tragedy to the land of Middle-Earth.

Men: They are the ‘second born’ of Illuvatar, and are not as beautiful or as immortal as the Elves, but die of sickness and old age. They are initially not as advanced as the Elves either, technologically inferior, and banded together in tribal and family units. Some, however, link themselves to the Elvish kingdoms that spring up in Middle-earth and become allies of the Elves in their fight against Melkor. Others, such as Beren, even marry into the Elvish nobility, co-mingling the race of Men and the Race of Elves.

Dwarves: They are the sort of bastard race, created by one of the Valar, Illuvatar lets them live. They don’t seem to have much going on, except some brief contact with the Elves and Men, and their love of creating and of mining.

Plot: The Silmarillion is Tolkien’s REAL story; it is the story of how his world came to be and what shaped it. From the first creation story to the long and epic struggle of the Noldor Elves against Melkor and his minions for the Silmaril, it explains how things ended up the way they were at the beginning of The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings.

Themes: There are many, but a few include…

The Heroes Quest: Several characters within the stories must suffer the pangs of the hero’s quest, highlighted I think by Berin and Luthien’s story. Tolkien was trying to create a new mythos, and part of mythology is that struggle by a man, woman, or group to overcome great adversity to achieve something great. He does this again and again in his stories.

The Pull of Darkness: Many characters, from Elves to Humans, are sucked in by the allure of Melkor and great evil. These stories are always very tragic, with the person or persons finding out only later what the price is for their folly, sometimes with repercussions to be felt for generations to come. I think not only was this a theme borrowed from epic storytelling, but it was also a comment of Tolkien’s on what effect evil acts and deeds have on the generations that follow.

The Folly of War and Revenge: Remembering that Tolkien served in World War I, you see through all his stories, and especially the Silmarillion, that Tolkien has a distinct distaste for war. While it may be a glorious thing at time, and brave acts are committed, war is also the most destructive force on earth. Even the gods themselves had to get a higher power to intercede for them finally. The vicious cycle leaves everyone touched in the wake, and nothing is the same again.


Every book sucks somewhere: I have to say it, and I know there are those who hate hearing it, but there are some sucky parts to this book…I know. It’s tantamount to blasphemy in some quarters. But the book really is heavily bogged down. It lacks the smooth flow of The Hobbit in terms of storytelling, and it doesn’t clean up its massive amount of information, like in The Lord of the Rings. Part of this might be due in part to the fact that it is a bunch of different stories collected together by Christopher Tolkien after his father’s death, and wasn’t edited by JRR Tolkien himself. This leads the reader to get quickly confused and bored by the amount of stuff going on with no clear thread on which to settle on.

Also, Tolkien always does have the tendency of being quite heavy and English in his writings. I fell like I’m reading 19th century historical writings on the life of the Duke of Marlborough at times, (well, if the Duke of Marlborough was a Noldor Elf). Again, this could be due to the fact that the stories were in a constant state of shaping by Tolkien, but they lack the charm and humor of The Hobbit, and the gallantry of The Lord of the Rings.

It could just be that he was trying to mimic the folk-story voice used by many of the same tales he was trying to emulate in his works.

I also had a harder time connecting with any of these lovely characters he made in these stories. Perhaps because they aren’t as well known to me as Bilbo and Frodo, Gandalph, Aragorn and the rest, I felt a distinct disconnect from them. It was like being an American reading about some Central Asian empire in the Middle Ages, it’s a bunch of really neat sounding events, names, and places, but…well what do they all mean, really, and how does this connect back to me again. Self-centered as that thought might be, it made the book a bit less interesting.

What did I like: I love the world that Tolkien created to accompany his languages. This was the man who MADE fantasy what it is today. But unlike everyone else where he tried to create a world to fit a story, he was telling a story about a world he created. That world was every bit as real and vivid to him as ours is to us. There are very few other worlds that have been created like that, and it shows. Those that have, those are the ones that stick with us.

How would I rate this wormy book: I’d rate this book as a FAT worm. It’s a great book to read if you are a Tolkien fan and want to know more about his work and the background behind his more famous stories, (more like the more famous stories are extensions of this, as this was his real story). But a warning, if you aren’t prepared to be peppered with incomprehensible names and plot threads, don’t start with The Silmarillion. Read The Hobbit first and work from there.