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A review by nigellicus
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
adventurous
dark
mysterious
5.0
I tried to read, this, I really did, back when I first finished The Lord Of The Rings and wanted more more MORE. The opening chapters defeated me, however, which really is a pity. I wasn't sure how to deal with a brand new creation myth, for one thing. As a Catholic teen, it seemed to close to blasphemy. As a Catholic teen who wasn't all that enamoured of being a Catholic, it was too much like religion. Then again the archaic language was also off-putting, and though the chapters were short, the reading was long, so it seemed to take forever to get to the point. So I gave up. Still, I must have dipped in and out of it, flicked through, read passages here and there, because this time I did read it, and quite a bit of it was oddly familiar.
I think the creation myth is interesting, because it isn't 'let there be light' or anything like it. Everything here starts with song, then comes the world. Getting light to the world is a long and fraught process, and, indeed, that's where a lot of the trouble comes from. First you have the lamps, which mean old Melkor knocks down, then you have the trees, which Ungoliant eats, then at last you have the sun and the moon, put up in the sky as a last resort where mean old Melkor can't get them.
Once you get past the creation myth and the descriptions of the Valar and the lands of the West, the story really kicks off, and keeps kicking all the way. We already know from the appendices that The Lord Of The Rings is only the tail end of a story that begins when Iluvatar starts the singing, a tale packed with the epic and the extraordinary, any one page of which could be spun into a trilogy of its own. The silmarils are created, Melkor steals them, Feanor, the first great elvish asshole, swears his vow, murders his kin, heads back to Middle Earth and the fun starts. So we have sieges and chases and betrayals and cruel fates and massive destruction and triumph in adversity and the whole damn thing. It gets especially Wagnerian around poor old Turin, a veritable Siegfried, and the whole shebang ends, appropriately, with a literal deus ex machina.
Marvelous stuff. Mythic grandeur, evocative with magic, drenched with evil, tragic with nobility and rife with unbearable sadness. I would have loved it.
There's also a bit about that fecker Sauron and the fall of Numenor, more detailed than the account from the appendices, and another chapter about the lead-up to the War of the Ring, more detailed in some ways and less in others, so they both make good additions if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am.
2021 - listened to this on audio, the recording by Martin Shaw is justifiably legendary in its own right.
I think the creation myth is interesting, because it isn't 'let there be light' or anything like it. Everything here starts with song, then comes the world. Getting light to the world is a long and fraught process, and, indeed, that's where a lot of the trouble comes from. First you have the lamps, which mean old Melkor knocks down, then you have the trees, which Ungoliant eats, then at last you have the sun and the moon, put up in the sky as a last resort where mean old Melkor can't get them.
Once you get past the creation myth and the descriptions of the Valar and the lands of the West, the story really kicks off, and keeps kicking all the way. We already know from the appendices that The Lord Of The Rings is only the tail end of a story that begins when Iluvatar starts the singing, a tale packed with the epic and the extraordinary, any one page of which could be spun into a trilogy of its own. The silmarils are created, Melkor steals them, Feanor, the first great elvish asshole, swears his vow, murders his kin, heads back to Middle Earth and the fun starts. So we have sieges and chases and betrayals and cruel fates and massive destruction and triumph in adversity and the whole damn thing. It gets especially Wagnerian around poor old Turin, a veritable Siegfried, and the whole shebang ends, appropriately, with a literal deus ex machina.
Marvelous stuff. Mythic grandeur, evocative with magic, drenched with evil, tragic with nobility and rife with unbearable sadness. I would have loved it.
There's also a bit about that fecker Sauron and the fall of Numenor, more detailed than the account from the appendices, and another chapter about the lead-up to the War of the Ring, more detailed in some ways and less in others, so they both make good additions if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am.
2021 - listened to this on audio, the recording by Martin Shaw is justifiably legendary in its own right.