The Silmarillion

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Summary: A book concerning the First Age of Middle-Earth.
Review: This book is concerned with the Lord of the Rings. It is an account of the Elder days or the first age of middle Earth, where the children of Iluvatar constructed Middle Earth. It is a great book and it was published four years after the death of the author , J.R.R. Tolkien.

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Summary: Marvelous Exploration of Middle Earth
Review: Anyone familiar with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is familiar with just how much work J.R.R. Tolkien put into the world he created, Middle Earth. Songs and poetry extolling ancient heroes, tales of the history of Middle Earth and the Ring...Middle Earth always seemed alive because of those details (even if, like me, you skipped over most of the songs and poetry). The time Tolkien spent building that massive backstory was a big factor in the success of The Lord of the Rings, because the tale held together as if it truly were history rather than fiction. The Silmarillion helps flesh out a lot of that backstory.

Somewhere between a Bible of Middle Earth and a history text, The Silmarillion is not a story in the sense of The Hobbit of The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is more like a collection of short stories telling about the history of Middle Earth leading up to the War of the Ring, from the creation of the world to the wars against Morgoth and the destruction of Numenor. The Silmarillion helps to flesh out the world Tolkien created and provides a great deal of additional depth to the stories told in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as helping the reader to more fully understand Tolkien's magnificent creation.

If you're looking for a ripping good read, you should look elsewhere: this is pure exposition, as another reviewer noted. But if you enjoyed The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and would like to understand more about Middle Earth, you'll enjoy The Silmarillion.

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Summary: Fanatics Only
Review: This is interesting if you really enjoyed the Lord of the Rings, and you want to learn about Tolkien's meticulous development of the backstory. It would also be helpful to anyone who is engaged in a roleplaying game based on Middle Earth. Overall, most people will enjoy Unfinished Tales more than this book--because it is a lot lighter and more story-oriented.

However, do not be deceived: this is no novel. It is told in a historical-narrative format, and is extremely dense. Even if you loved Lord of the Rings, it is unlikely that you will enjoy it. This is essentially exposition, not storytelling.

In time, when Tolkien receives the literary recognition he is truly entitled to, I envision high school students reading excerpts of the Silmarillion as part of learning about the process of worldbuilding that went into twentieth-century fantasy literature. Unfortunately, they will find this task boring--hopefully they will enjoy Lord of the Rings anyway.

If you are a Tolkien fanatic and you really want to see this process in action--if you want to understand what happened in the thousands of years prior to the Hobbit, and want to know the lineage of all the main characters--this book will be for you. However, I'd advise reading Unfinished Tales first. This deals with a lot of the same material in a more readable format.

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Summary: the bible of middle earth
Review: if one should describe this epic book, he should say that he is reading the bible of middle earth. not only that the way in which tolkein describes each and every detail in the tales that are told in this book but he also gives it light and he guides youe imagination so you can actually seean image in your mind. this book involves gods,profits,heroes ( which didnt exactly ment to be heroes ), evil within, evil without and much more elements that are similar to our holy book. the book gives you a much better understanding of the relations between all folks of middle earth ( including magicians! ) and spreads out the history of the events that lead to the last war and the begining of the age of men.
i strongly recomend that every fantasy books lover should read this book and i feel that everyone who enjoyes beautifull language and litretuer shoul try and read it.

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Summary: Listen before you read!
Review: I tried several times to read The Silmarillion, but usually became bogged down with the names and lost in the various places. However, after listening to Martin Shaw's wonderful melodic voice, the story seemed to fall into place. Hearing the names aloud makes them all the more real, and for any lover of LOTR I highly recommend hearing this tale at some point (but especially for those who've tried to read it and found it wanting!).

It's also a great way to get a clearer picture of the fantastic history of Middle Earth .

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Summary: Mythology of Middle-Earth
Review: You really have to be in the right mood for The Silmarillion. I love it, but I realize it's not for everyone. This is the "big story" J.R.R. Tolkien worked on all his life, but never completed. His son, Christopher Tolkien, does an admirable job of assembling this collection of myths into a coherent whole. What is Middle-Earth? Where did it come from? Where did the Elves come from? What happened in the First Age? How did Númenor fall? There are so many questions answered in this book, as well as basic questions, like how the world was created (by music! awesome!), that are just fun to read. However, the early part of The Silmarillion is a tragedy.

Imagine, if you will, two glorious trees, one with silver leaves and one with gold, that shine with their own inner light and illuminate the city of the gods. An elf, Feanor, uses the skills he has learned from the Valar (gods) to enshrine some of the light of these two trees into three brilliant jewels called the Silmarils. The dark lord (Morgoth) steals the jewels and heads off to Middle-Earth. The rest of the book entails the wars and tragedies that result as the Elves try to recover the Silmarils by force. This is high mythology, with heavy, dark content. At the time I read it, The Silmarillion was unlike anything I had ever read. Quite frankly, I haven't found any other fantasy series nearly so captivating (I am a science fiction fan, by disposition). This is not just swords and sorcery fare; Tolkien has some serious moral points to make, and he makes them subtly while telling you a grand tale, akin to the Odyssey.

This is not a happy book. There is much sorrow in it and many tales of loss. But you cannot have loss without having gained something first, and Tolkien conjures up amazing images of faerie cities and uncountable riches. When those riches are lost, it is only through the moral weakness of those who possess them. You won't get much of that in Conan. The success of modern fantasy is owed in no small part to the success of "The Lord of the Rings," but before LOTR, in Tolkien's mind, there was The Silmarillion; and this is the real story he wanted to tell. Read and enjoy.

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Summary: Good luck
Review: I am a major fan of Tolkien, and I love the Lord of the Rings.

That said, if you can make it through this book, you deserve extra Hobbit points. It's basically the Bible of Middle Earth. I'm not saying it's bad. It's just a major struggle to get through. If you aren't a super-die-hard fan of Tolkien, stay away from The Silmarillion.

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Summary: Alright
Review: This book was alright, u really had to concentrate to understand it, it reads similar to the bible. Its worth it to check it out.

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Summary: A view on the silmarillion
Review: The Silmarillion is the single greatest mythological book since the greeks wrote their mythologies. It is as if A re-amigining of an utterly heathen literary tale from a christian writer which tolkien was. The only desciption I can give of tolkien was he studied wholly heathen works as a Professor of Linguistics, and tried to put them in a christian mold, or rework them as had the writer of beowulf. He was always perplexed as to why he, a christian was drawn to these stories. But a good heroic tale seems to be his aim. A hearkening back to the time of his nordic and english ancestors before the norman conquest, and christianization.

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Summary: Good book
Review: In the collection of stories about the history and creation of Middle Earth, author J.R.R. Tolkien skillfully uses diction to help describe his different elaborate worlds and uses the diction to help relate the separate stories in the novel to each other as well as to relate the plots to other stories in different novels.
Tolkien's diction in the stories helps the reader to understand and identify all of the characters and their relationships with each other. He uses very descriptive word choice throughout the novel, but he describes the differences between the major villain Melkor and the numerous heroes of the novel not only directly in the plot but indirectly through the fact that Tolkien uses more civilized and elegant words to describe the heroes in contrast to the crude and sinister words that Tolkien used to describe all of the evil in the novel. One of the key components in The Silmarillion is the jewels the Silmarils, which are the most valuable and beautiful jewels in Middle Earth. Tolkien describes The Silmarils with different words depending on who possesses the Silmaril at the time, Melkor or a hero.
The word choice in The Silmarillion is reflected in the diction of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with similar, if not the same, words used to describe situations and plot threads that are related in the two stories. The most well-known of this is the love stories of Beren and Luthien in The Silmarillion, compared to the later story of Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would make Luthien and Arwen both very beautiful with his descriptions, and he would make Beren and Aragorn both willing to do anything so that they would be allowed to love the beautiful Elves.
Tolkien's diction is very distinctive and influential in this story as well as in his other novels and it helps to create the depth and believability that has been common and expected of Tolkien's novels.