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Summary: The History of the World of Tolkien
Review: Finishing "The Silmarillion," one feels as though one has read the history of the world; so rich and lengthy was the world within the mind of JRR Tolkien.Reader be forewarned, this book - the word "book" is hardly fitting - is NOT at all like the Lord of the Rings or its counterpart, The Hobbit. Those works were wrought from a more individual point of view, one being's perspective. The Silmarillion, however, is a book whose scale accounts for the happenings of more than eight thousand years. This script contains the complete history of the world of Ea, the creation of Tolkien. The scale is immense, something of an "Elvish bible." A mere taste of this history was accounted in the Lord of the Rings, which was of great importance in Tolkien's history but nonetheless takes about a page total near the end of Silmarillion. This book begins with the creation of the World by Iluvatar, something of the God equivalent in this myth. It goes on to describe the events of thousands of years in Arda, the World. Starting on Valinor, essentially Heaven, it fades into legend as events move to Beleriand, the ancient land of the Elves. This is where the reader compares to the events of the Lord of the Rings, and realises that despite all of the splendour of it there was a much greater land in the past. The Elves seem a relatively small part in Lord of the Rings, but in the First Age, thousands of years before LOTR, the Elves were the great ones, and all that was in Middle Earth in the Third Age of LOTR was a mere remnant. One also discovers the origin of many unrevealed things in LOTR. We discover the Dark Lord Sauron's origin as a mere servant of Morgoth, whom at the time was even more powerful and evil. The happenings of Beleriand in the main body of the Silmarillion are mainly about the Elves and Men's wars against Morgoth, and also of the Silmarils. The Silmarillion simply overwhelms the reader with the scale that it is on. One must read it to discover it, and once begun you will be immersed in his vast world. Truly a work difficult to comprehend by our own minds that Tolkien has tapped.
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Summary: I liked history at school
Review: This is not an easy book. After several failures at trying to read it I restarted, keeping notes as to who was who, related to who, on the same/differing side and so on. By referring to my own notes I eventually finished the book. Apart from the clarity of the writing and the depth of passion Tolkien indulges in the best thing is finally understanding what Lord of the Rings is all about.
It is not about Peter Jacksons' effort unfortunately.
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Summary: A fantasy classic, but not for everyone
Review: "The Silmarillion" is perhaps the most unique and difficult-to-explain book I have read. It is among the books I love the most, but this might not be the case if I had not read it in a bizarre way that I can hardly recommend to anyone else, and yet may be the best way to read it. For ten or twelve years I skimmed through "The Silmarillion," "The Hobbit," "The Lord of the Rings," and many of Tolkien's posthumous books (many of which present the stories of "The Silmarillion" in different forms which Tolkien wrote at various times in his life) without reading the books verbatim. Only in the last twelve months have I read these books all the way through. This was a wise way of approaching Tolkien's most famous works because of the odd nature of "The Silmarillion," which must be understood by anyone desiring to enjoy it. "The Silmarillion" is not a "novel," as are "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" (Tolkien preferred the word "romance" to "novel" for LotR). "The Silmarillion" is well described by the subtitle on the front of the jacket of the Ted Nasmith-illustrated edition: "The Myths and Legends of Middle-earth". "The Silmarillion" is the equivalent, for the imaginary world in which "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" take place, of a work like Hamilton's or Bulfinch's "Mythology". It does not tell one single story; rather it tells many stories in a briefer form, almost as though the stories are being synopsized rather than told. In a real sense "The Silmarillion" is a greater work than even "The Lord of the Rings" could ever be, since it contains not one but several stories with as much power and grandeur as that of LotR. However, much of the book is written in the style of a tome of history, setting out the vast historical framework within which these unforgettable stories unfold, and thus seems dry and soporific to many readers. Moreover, large numbers of characters, often with similar names (seven important Elven characters have names starting with F, and six of them start with the letters "Fin"), are presented without space for them to be strongly characterized, so that the reader may be unable to become as engaged with them as with Frodo, Sam or Gandalf. This is where my bizarre manner of reading the book came in handy: I became familiar with all the characters over my years of skimming, and knew precisely who they were and how they were connected to each other when I finally read the whole book. Moreover, since I had often skimmed "The Silmarillion" before reading "The Lord of the Rings," I could appreciate the many references back to the former work in the latter. Although "The Silmarillion" was not published until many years after LotR, Tolkien had written all the stories that make up "The Silmarillion" before writing LotR. Many of LotR's references to past events, which contribute greatly to the impression it gives of taking place in a real world, are references to events told in "The Silmarillion". (No Hobbits appear or are mentioned in "The Silmarillion" until the last three pages of the book, when the events of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" are briefly described at the end of a section that explains how the events of "The Silmarillion" ultimately led to the events of those books.) In my opinion, the creation myth with which "The Silmarillion" opens is one of the most intellectually and emotionally satisfying creation stories I have ever read; the chapter "Of Turin Turambar" presents a heroic tragedy comparable in grandeur to a Wagner opera and in depth and power of sorrow to a tragic opera such as "Il Trovatore" or "Tosca"; and the chapter "Of Beren and Luthien" presents Tolkien's very best story of all, perhaps the most unforgettable tale of love and adventure written in the twentieth century. But for readers to appreciate these treasures, they must be aware in advance of the unusual nature of "The Silmarillion," and not expect a fantasy adventure novel, a mere "prequel" to "The Lord of the Rings". These are the stories that are told in Frodo's world; they are to Frodo, Sam and Strider what "The Lord of the Rings" is to us: a saga of a vanished world of heartbreaking beauty, glimmers of which we can still see if we look hard enough. (Some of Ted Nasmith's illustrations are better than others. The image of Luthien dancing in the wood is one of the best Tolkien-inspired paintings I've ever seen, especially since it leaves the ineffable beauty of Luthien's face to our imaginations. On the other hand, Galadriel's brother Finrod is not depicted as nearly good-looking enough in the painting of him singing by the campfire of the first Men to come into Beleriand.)
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Summary: What a joy!
Review: To hear Tolkien's words spoken so gloriously! The Silmarillion is such a masterful piece of work. Whether you read it and then listen, read along, or just listen, these audio CDs are a delight. I would buy them all over again in an instant.
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Summary: The Silmarillion
Review: Jessica Woytko, October 31, 2002 The Silmarilion, J.R.R. Tolkien, 0-618-12698-8 Therefore Morgoth came, climbing slowly from his subterranean throne, and the rumour of his feet was like thunder underground. And he issuded forth cald in black armour; and he stood before the King(Fingolfin) like a tower, iron-crowned, and his vast shield, sable unblazoned, cast a shadow over him like a stormcloud.But Fingolfin gleamed beneath it as a star; for his mail mail was over laid with silver, and his blue shield was set with crystals; and he drew his sword Ringil, that glittered like ice. Then Morgoth hurled aloft Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld, and he swung it down toward Fingolfin like a bolt of thunder. If you like that then you'll the Silmarillion, which is about the history of middle earth from when it was created by Iluvatar to the third age. The Silmarillion has a bunch of fierce and heroic events that ring with healdic fury as much as medieval romances that sweeps you off your feet and into another. Ilutavar created the Valar which was the beginning of the story and after that Ilutavar created elves and made middle earth for them to dwell in until they are ready to reaturn to Valinor, he also made middle earth for mortal men and dwarvs to live in too but they don't get to reaturn to Valinor because they don't live for all eturnity unlike the elves. I really enjoyed this epic faiy tale book because it had events and stories that will stick in your mind. The book just sucked me into it's tale as I kapt on reading eagerly. Sorry to say, but this book isn't for everyone, I would say people with a higher reading level and who like fantasy and knowing the history of J.R.R. Tolkien's world would be able to read this masterpiece of Tolkien's.
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Summary: Why the elves are so sad
Review: 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.
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Summary: Silmarillion Book Critique
Review: "The Silmarillion" by J.R.R. Tolkien is an epic story of noble forces of good battling and overcome the overwhelmingly powerful forces of evil. The odds are definitely not in their favor but by not giving up they are able to prevail in the end. This is the basic theme to "The Silmarillion", which acts as a prequel to his other works "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". "The Silmarillion" is more like a collection of tales and legends than it is a story. It is the story of creation of the world of Middle-earth, and of the events that occurred in the first age. In the realm of Valinor, land of the gods, across vast seas to the west of Middle-earth, the elves lived in prosperity for many years. Creating many works of great beauty and power. The greatest of these were the three Silmarils, great jewels created by the elf lord Feanor. Within these jewels was imprisoned the Light of the Two Trees of Valinor, trees that contained the pure light of the gods. But the dark lord Morgoth was inflamed with jealousy of the work of Feanor, for he had always desired to posses the light of Valinor, but had never been able to do it. In his jealous rage Morgoth destroyed the Two Trees and covered the land of Valinor in darkness. Then he used the cover of darkness to enter Valinor again and steal the Silmarils from the house of Feanor. Morgoth fled from the land of Valinor and stole back to his stronghold in Middle-earth. Feanor is so enraged by this that he rebels and also leaves Valinor with his kindred in pursuit of Morgoth. This is the beginning of the war against Morgoth for the possession of the silmarils. Many adventures and acts of great heroism occur during this battle against evil. In the end it seems that Morgoth may be able to win the war against the peoples of Middle-earth. But finally the Valar to come to the aid of the people of Middle-earth, and with the combined forces of the elves, men, and Valar they are finally able to defeat Morgoth. Manwe, the lord of the Valar, banishes Morgoth to the void, a black space of nothingness from which there is no escape.
In "The Silmarillion" by J.R.R. Tolkien is an epic tale where the forces of good are up against the seemingly endless forces of evil. If they fail then the world will fall into the darkness. But by keeping hope alive and never giving up the forces of good are able to keep evil at bay and in the end the triumph over it. This is the never-ending fight between good and evil. Where good starts out against seemingly unbeatable odds, but in the end they find away to defeat evil. Good always triumphs over evil; this is the basic principle for this book and many others like it. In this book the setting is extremely relevant to the theme. It places the reader in a magical world with elves, dragons, monsters, and great warriors. The battles events that take place and the characters that were involved in this story wouldn't have worked in a different setting. A mystical world threatened by a dark and evil lord, courageous warriors fighting to save their homelands and to defeat evil in their world forever. The time period that this all takes place in is also very relevant. This book is meant to set up the history that takes place before any of his other books. It sets up things that come into play later in the book, and things that happen in completely different books. The chronological order that events happen in have a big effect on the way the story the book tells comes together. The setting plays a major role in making the theme of this book work as well as it does. The magic power of the elves played a huge role in the forces of good winning over the forces of evil. When Morgoth is banished to the void the power of the Valar along with the elves was the only thing that allowed the people of Middle-earth succeed. This is one of the more important aspects of the setting, the characters and creatures in Middle-earth. Without all of the different types of people in the book the story wouldn't have worked like it did. Even though the theme is the classic theme of good verses evil, the setting and characters in it take this simple theme and make it into an epic story that is both very believable and realistic, but also very complex and thought provoking.
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Summary: Brilliantly Interweaved Mythology
Review: Contrary to popular belief, the Silmarillion is Tolkien's true masterpiece. It is a culmination of the man's life-long love of mythology, poetry, and language. The Lord of the Rings cannot be truly understood nor fully appreciated without a deep reading of the Silmarillion. Read the Lord of the Rings, then read the Silmarillion. Then read Lord of the Rings again, and then re-read the Silmarillion. You will be amazed at how intricately the plots are woven together, piecing together the elaborate tales from the beginning of time through the adventures of Frodo in Return of the King. An absolute masterpiece.
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Summary: The foundation of the other 4 books
Review: I agree with the previous reviewers who suggest you read the 5 books in the following order: The Hobbit, LOTR, and THEN, if you've gotten into the previous 4, dig into The Silmarillion. The Hobbit obviously has a very light style; the 3 LOTR books have a much more serious, epic tone; and the Silmarillion is told in a much more abbrieviated, academic style that requires you to pay attention. Contrary to the horror stories you've heard, the Silmarillion is not nearly as convoluted and heavy as the old testament. I mean, come on, man, it's got a talking dog in it! Well, then again, the old testment had a guest appearance by a talking SHRUB, for crying out loud. But nevermind that. The point is this: if you were all busted up when our Nine Fingered friend and his buddies went sailing off to the Grey Havens and you'd like spend a little more time with that world without it becoming a full-time hobby, then, yeah, you'll want to read this. It acts as the foundation of the other 4 books-- why stop now?
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Summary: Beautiful
Review: From the master of fantasy comes this jewel of jewels. The Silmarillion is the story of the Silmarils, the most precious gems ever crafted. In telling the story of these treasures he presents the tale of the creation of middle-earth -- a sort of mythological beginning which involves a hierarchy of greater and lesser gods and later brings the creation of the elves. It also tells the story of Morgoth, the first great dark lord under whom Sauron was only a lieutenant.
As the elves divide, multiply, and spread upon middle-earth, changes gradually take place, and strife appears. Soon men are created, and the dwarves come out of the east. Wars rage and Morgoth wreaks havoc upon the land with his army of balrogs and dragons. This, then, is the story of the first age of middle-earth.
Along with the tale of the Silmarils comes a story of Numenor, the ancient land where men dwelt and from whence came the lord of Gondor. Also included is a tale of the forging of the rings of power, and an account of the first defeat of Sauron. Altogether, this book encompasses the first and second ages, as well as a sketch of the events of the third.
For true Tolkien fans, this will be a wonderful addition to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's writing style is beautiful, and the story is very well written. Any fantasy fan will enjoy this book greatly. It should be remembered, however, that this book has more of a mythological base, and there is less attention to detail and much less dialogue than the Lord of the Rings. Instead it is told as a sort of epic history, given as an overview rather than a detailed account.
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