The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion is a collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's works, edited and published posthumously by his son Christopher R. Tolkien, with assistance from fantasy fiction writer Guy Gavriel Kay.

Overview

The Silmarillion comprises five parts:

The Ainulindalë ("The Music of the Ainur") - the creation of Eä, Tolkien's world
The Valaquenta ("Account of the Valar") - a brief description of the Valar and Maiar, the supernatural powers within the Eä
The Quenta Silmarillion (Silmarillion Proper, Tale of the Silmarils) - the history of the events before and during the First Age, which forms the bulk of the collection
The Akallabêth - the history of the Downfall of Númenor, which takes place in the Second Age
Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age - a very brief account of the circumstances which led to and were presented in The Lord of the Rings

This five-part work is also informally associated by some readers with Bilbo's three-volume Translations from the Elvish, mentioned in The Lord of the Rings.

These five parts were initially separate works, but it was the elder Tolkien's express wish that they be published together. Because J.R.R. Tolkien died before he could complete a full rewrite of the various legends, Christopher scavenged material from his father's older writings to fill out the book. In a few cases, he devised completely new material.

The Silmarillion, along with other collections of Tolkien's works, such as Unfinished Tales, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and The Road Goes Ever On, form a comprehensive, yet incomplete narrative that describes the universe within which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place. The History of Middle-earth is a twelve-volume examination of the processes which led to the publication of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion through looking into J.R.R. Tolkien's initial rough drafts and through commentary by Christopher Tolkien.

The Silmarillion is a complex work that explores a wide array of themes inspired by many ancient, medieval, and modern sources, including the Finnish Kalevala, the Hebrew Bible, Norse sagas, Greek mythology, Celtic mythology, and World War I. For instance, the meaning of the name of the supreme being, Ilúvatar (Father of All) is borrowed from Norse mythology. The archaic style and gravitas of the Ainulindalë resembles that of the Old Testament. The island civilization of Númenor is reminiscent of Atlantis—one of the names Tolkien gave that land was Atalantë, although he gave it an Elvish etymology.

Among the notable chapters in the book are:

"Of Beren and Lúthien"
"Túrin Turambar" (closely associated with Narn i Hîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin in Unfinished Tales)
"Of Tuor and The Fall of Gondolin"
"Of Eärendil and the War of Wrath"

Development of the text

The earliest drafts of The Silmarillion stories date back to as early as 1925, when Tolkien wrote a 'Sketch of the Mythology'. However, the concepts for characters, themes, and specific stories were developed starting in 1917 when Tolkien, then a British officer stationed in France during World War I, was laid up in a military field hospital with trench fever. At the time, he called his collection of nascent stories The Book of Lost Tales (which became the name for the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth). These stories comprised an English mythology intended to explain the origins of English history and culture (as Greek mythology explains the origins of Greek history and culture).

Many years after the war, encouraged by the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien submitted an incomplete but more fully developed version of The Silmarillion to his publisher, George Allen & Unwin, but they rejected the work as being obscure and "too Celtic". The publisher instead asked Tolkien to write a sequel to The Hobbit, which became his significant novel The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien never truly abandoned The Silmarillion, however. In fact, he regarded it as the most important of his works (according to the preface to The Silmarillion), seeing in its tales the genesis of Middle-earth and later events as told in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He renewed work on The Silmarillion after completing The Lord of the Rings, and he greatly desired to publish the two works together. But when it became clear that would not be possible, Tolkien turned his full attention back to preparing The Lord of the Rings for publication.

In the late 1950s he again began work on The Silmarillion, but much of his writing from this time was more concerned with the theological and philosophical underpinnings of the work than with narratives themselves. During this time he wrote extensively on such topics as the nature of evil in Arda, the origin of Orcs, the customs of the Elves, the nature and means of Elvish rebirth, and the "flat" world and the myth of the Sun and Moon. By this time, serious doubt had entered about some of the fundamental aspects of the work that went back to the earliest versions of the stories, and it seems that Tolkien felt the need to solve these problems before he could produce the "final" version of The Silmarillion. In any event, with one or two exceptions, he never did much work on the narratives in the remaining years of his life.

After Tolkien's death

For several years after his father's death, Christopher Tolkien compiled a Silmarillion narrative. Christopher's intentions seem to have been mostly to use the latest writings of his father's that he could, and to keep as much internal consistency (and consistency with The Lord of the Rings) as possible. As explained in The History of Middle-earth, Christopher drew upon numerous sources for his narrative, relying on post-Lord of the Rings works where possible, but ultimately reaching back as far as the 1917 Book of Lost Tales to fill in portions of the narrative which his father had planned to write but never addressed. In one later chapter of the "Quenta Silmarillion" which had not been touched since the early 1930s he had to construct a narrative practically from scratch. The final result, which included genealogies, maps, an index, and the first-ever released Elvish word list, was published in 1977.

Due to Christopher's extensive explanations (in The History of Middle-earth) of how he compiled the published work, much of The Silmarillion has been debated by the hardcore fans. Christopher's task is generally accepted as very difficult given the state of his father's texts at the time of his death: some critical texts were no longer in the Tolkien family's possession, and Christopher's task compelled him to rush through much of the material. Christopher reveals in later volumes of The History of Middle-earth many divergent ideas which do not agree with the published version. Christopher Tolkien has suggested that, had he taken more time and had access to all the texts, he might have produced a substantially different work. But he was compelled by considerable pressure and demand from his father's readers and publishers to produce something publishable as quickly as possible. Some, including Christopher Tolkien, contend that parts of the Silmarillion are more a product of the son than of the father, and as such its place in the Middle-earth canon is hotly debated.

In October 1996, Christopher Tolkien commissioned illustrator Ted Nasmith to create full-page full-colour artwork for the first illustrated edition of The Silmarillion. It was published in 1998, and followed in 2004 by a second edition (ISBN 0618391118) featuring corrections and additional artwork by Nasmith.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Christopher Tolkien published most of his father's Middle-earth-related writings as the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series.

In addition to the source material and earlier drafts of several portions of The Lord of the Rings, these books greatly expand on the original material published in The Silmarillion, and in many cases diverge from it. There is much that Tolkien intended to revise but only sketched out in notes, and some new texts surfaced after the publication of The Silmarillion. These books also make it clear just how unfinished the later parts of the Silmarillion really were: some parts were never rewritten after the primitive Lost Tales.

External links

Chronology of The Silmarillion
"The World of Tolkien" by John Gardner; a book review of The Silmarillion, published in The New York Times (October 23, 1977)

Middle-earth books | The Silmarillion

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Overview

Development of the text

After Tolkien's death

See also

External links