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The Silmarillion (Paperback)

[book review]

In my review of The Children of Húrin I noted the difficulty of the language and the difficulty of remembering a long list of names. The Silmarillion is a older work that spans the entire history or Tolkien's mythical world, it is more difficult to read and has an even longer list of names to remember. The language seems most abstruse for the first 6 chapters or so but I feel that it does lighten up (similarly with the names). It is not impossible to read by any means and anyone that has read Shakespeare should not be overly challenged here. The style is archaic but less so than Dickens.

The book is an over-arching account of the mythology from which his other works are drawn. It is mostly consistent with his other published works but reveals many new characters and insights. It was an ongoing work whenever Tolkien died but it is also one if his first works; since 1917 he made notes about the languages names and people that inhabited his imaginary world, of the notes that were not published during his lifetime they have found their way into this book. If you can bare to complete this work then you will see the wholeness and the scale at which Tolkien was thinking, and so gain insight into the vast effort he exerted to create a rich and consistent world.

It is no surprise then that many authors have copied Tolkien stylistically and worse still, his content. While that is in itself contentious as Tolkien did not invent elves, he did go a long way in creating his own variants of elves which have been copied and pasted in modern works. Games such as Dungeons and Dragons as well as Warhammer owe a lot to to Tolkien, and seems that he is uncredited. Wood elves, high elves, dark elves, all written by Tolkien. Did he copy those ideas from older works, that isn't so clear to me but I'm inclined to say that his ideas are significantly different to put a claim on them and it is in the Silmarillion that we learn how those mythological people came to be and what their characteristics are.

I don't see this work appealing to casual fans though and is likely only to appeal to more dedicated fans that have the patience to tackle the language. I actually wonder how much of this was intended for publishing, perhaps the content has always been intended for publication but I doubt the style. LOTR and the hobbit are not difficult to read while the posthumous works are quite abstruse. The fault of which could easily be placed upon his son who edited the works for publication.