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‘The Silmarillion’ Is a Dense Yet Highly Engaging Origin Story for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
As Game of Thrones draws to a close, and a new Amazon Lord of the Rings TV series awaits, J.R.R. Tolkien is sure to return as the king of fantasy (if he ever even left). Despite being dead now for nearly 46 years, Tolkien created, in Middle-Earth and the stories that take place there, a rich, vivid mythology that has ensured his immortality.
Many people first came to appreciate Tolkien’s work because of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy in the early 2000s. I was one of them. Only eight years old when The Fellowship of the Ring came out, I was not allowed to see either it or its sequel in theaters (though I did catch them later on DVD). But when my parents said they would let me see The Return of the King in theaters, I decided to read all of the books in the trilogy before the movie came out so that I would appreciate it properly. Even at age 10, I recall getting lost–in the best possible way–in the epic and fully realized world of heroism and mysticism that Tolkien had created. Seeing the last movie in theaters remains one of my best-ever theatrical experiences, and it confirmed my status as a Tolkien fan.
Looking for more ways to deepen my fanhood at the time, I came upon The Silmarillion, which I have now had the chance to discuss on an episode of the Legendarium Podcast. Described to me as the ‘Old Testament’ of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion gave the backstory to which the more famous trilogy is the culmination: the creation of the world, the early struggles between its gods, the plight of the elves, the coming of men and dwarves (and their own trials), etc. Delighted that there was more material to read, I dove right in…only to crash on a rocky shoal of confusing names, excessive detail, and quasi-poetic prose that seemed straight out of some ancient tome. I got only a few dozen pages in before giving up on The Silmarillion.
Only recently, as the excessive cultural cachet of Game of Thrones has turned me into a rabid anti-Game of Thrones reactionary, did I make myself go back and finish The Silmarillion as part of my first full rereading of all of Tolkien’s most popular work, also including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Rereading The Silmarillion, I could understand why, as a 10-year-old, I found it so daunting. The names were still myriad, and often confusing; the stories abounded, intersecting in ways sometimes unclear to me; and the prose had the same ancient tome quality that I recalled from my youth.
Yet these were far more minor complaints this time around. While 15 years ago, they kept me from getting lost in the work as I did in Lord of the Rings, now they could barely restrain my enjoyment of it. For The Silmarillion is a true epic, the product of a single mind (two if you want to count his son Christopher, who compiled and edited what his father never completely finished). Usually, epic traditions are the products of entire cultures and many authors, assembled over centuries or more. But in preparing a backstory for The Lord of the Rings (which–importantly–was never the focus of Tolkien’s writing, but rather the bulky bottom of the iceberg that allowed him to tell the tiny top of his most famous story), Tolkien just decided to create such a mythology of his own accord within a discrete period–a stunning achievement. Sure, others have followed his lead since. Yet many of them have gotten too lost in their creations, too high on playing god, to produce a work that also contained transcendent themes (or ended!).
For though The Silmarillion is an epic, of gigantic scope and scale, it is also strongly driven by individual actors and choices. Pride, arrogance, fate, hubris, irony, mortality–those all-too-human forces–play out among a cast of often larger-than-life characters nonetheless subject to them.
Indeed, it is hard for me to explain how, exactly, but The Silmarillion seems not merely like the mythic creation of its author, but rather like a window into an entire other tradition, heretofore unknown. Something about the way it was written strongly suggests that what we have is actually a translation from another language, now long forgotten, and that what we are reading pales in comparison to the actual story, now long disappeared. This is not to say The Silmarillion is a bad work; rather, that in depicting its own rich mythology, it successfully conveys a sense that what actually happened was somehow even grander than what we are reading. It is, at times, hard to believe all of this came from the imagination of one man. Tolkien himself felt similarly. He wrote that, in creating his legends, he “…always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there,’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing.’”
The most compelling reason for the more casual Lord of the Rings fan to read The Silmarillion, however, is that it puts everything in Tolkien’s more famous work in context. It deepens one’s understanding of what happens there, and answer some questions about where some things came from. It also instills an appreciation for how, in Tolkien’s understanding, everything in The Lord of the Rings is merely a less impressive imitation or centuries-old echo of the ancient struggles depicted in The Silmarillion, a sort of “there were giants, in those days” aesthetic that often goes underappreciated in Tolkien’s immortal work.
At any rate, if you want to hear more from me (and others more qualified) about Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, check out my appearance on the Legendarium Podcast.
Published in Literature
It doesn’t ruin it. It’s just wrong. The books and other works are still brilliant.
Not exactly yes, not exactly no. It would be better to say that they have traces of Christianity. Tolkien has something sort of like that, but much more than traces.
Robert Wood’s book on this stuff is superb.
Skyler, it can’t be wrong if that’s what the author says he was doing.
It’s more debatable with other works. In the Christian era, it’s hard for an author of fiction to get away from Christian themes, because they dominate our culture.
And if they are explicit and obvious, then the tale usually turns into allegory, and the readers will reject it.
Of course it can be wrong. If I write a story about candy corn and say it’s a story about the ritualistic use of rhytons in the Neolithic age, that doesn’t make it true.
This makes no sense at all. If I write a story about candy corn, intending it to be symbolic of the ritualistic use of rhytons, then it is true. You may take it another way, but that was not the author’s intent.
It can sometimes be hard to determine an author’s intent, and I think that sometimes a story may have meaning beyond what the author intended. But the meaning definitely includes what the author intended.
I confess to having doubts whether Dumbledore is actually gay, however.
If the authors of Endgame have Captain America die in agony with his arms spread out in a successful effort to purchase the universe’s freedom from the Satanic Thanos, and if the authors of the movie say “No, this isn’t a Christian movie at all”–it will still be true that the movie is largely composed of Christian themes.
In the case of Tolkien, a clearer thinker than Rowling, his testimony about the books counts for a lot. It also counts that a scholar like Wood can back up his claims with really good evidence from the themes and dialogues in the writings of Tolkien. And it counts that ordinary morons like me can say of virtually everything wonderful in LOTR, “Hey, that’s like Jesus!” or “Hey, that’s that thing from the Bible!”
It’s not Christian allegory. It’s a story with an uncompromising Christian worldview.
Again, that’s such a loose standard. Almost anything can be “like Jesus.” He walked and talked and ate, after all. How about that, the Hobbit had a meal. Must be like Jesus.
Exactly.
That’s not the wonderful stuff in Tolkien.
I don’t want to go too far off-topic, but even gays and the Left are dissing Rowling for that bit of nonsense (according to Little Miss Anthrope who follows everything HP). They’re saying she didn’t write it in the books and it wasn’t portrayed in the movies, so it’s obviously her latest work of fiction to claim Dumbledore is gay — this one to try to appeal to gays and the Left. They’re not buying it.
Dumbledore was obviously gay. But he was marginalized by the cisgendered heteronormativity of the Patriarchy, so he stayed safely in the closet.
Yeah, right. And He rose from the dead, as did Gandalf. And He is the One True King who will Return, as was Aragorn (who has a divine bloodline, too). And He is the suffering servant bearing the sin of the world, as was Frodo.
But feel free to focus on eating, and drinking, and smoking, if you want.
You have to be quite a Tolkien nerd to know about Aragorn’s divine bloodline. He was descended from Elrond’s brother Elros, first king of Numenor. Their mother was Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Luthien Tinuviel, daughter of Melian — who was one of the Maiar, like Gandalf. This is a partially human lineage, too, because Tinuviel married the man Beren.
Beren son of Barahir, by the way, whose ring Aragorn wears. That’s what I call backstory.
I don’t think I qualify as a Tolkein nerd, but I’ve always wondered whether he had anything in particular in mind when he gave the Elves/Firstborn a different role from that of Men. The Elves were tied to the world and it seemed it was their responsibility to beautify and perfect it, while Men’s ultimate Fate was not of the world.
Great question.
I think that the Elves being tied to this world was a curse to them. The entire theme of the story is downfall. Doesn’t Galadriel say something about “fighting the long defeat.” The Elves are fading and failing. They’re running off to Fairyland — a nice Fairyland, called the Blessed Realm — but it doesn’t seem as if there’s much for them to do there. And they’re stuck with the Valar and the Maiar. They don’t get to see the true Creator, Eru Illuvatar.
I think that this is similar to the angels. They are the servants of God, but not the children of God.
Tolkien emphasizes that death is the gift of Illuvatar to men. It doesn’t seem like a gift to us, because we don’t understand. But we may have some glorious fate beyond the circles of this world. Guess who is beyond the circles of this world? Illuvatar — God.
There’s also a strange hint that the Elves, and perhaps even the Ainur, are mortal after all. What happens to them when the world ends, if they are bound to it? Now this isn’t completely clear, because the early part of the Silmarillion has the Ainur present before the creation of the world, and the world is a manifestation of their song, including the discord of Melkor (aka Morgoth).
The eternal existence of men, beyond the world, is also an indication that in some sense, men are more important than the world. The world is temporary. Men are eternal.
As noted earlier, I read the Silmarillion the first time before many here were even alive.
Merely reanimating is hardly a Christian storyline monopoly. Jesus didn’t swing weapons around, either, to kill people in large quantities. That generally wasn’t his gig.
Gandalf-style big eyebrows aren’t Jesus’ thing either, but so what?
If a few themes also happen to be in Plato, Kant, Confucius, or Daoism I don’t see how that’s an objection either. Themes overlap in different people and traditions.
Can you name any of the moral or spiritual themes in Tolkien that isn’t in the Bible?
Many–perhaps dozens or scores–can be named that are. When you put them all together you’ll find things incompatible with Plato, Kant, Confucius, Daoism, and more. They won’t be compatible as a group with anything except Christianity.
The Ainur are immortal, this is clear, but they are limited. Morgoth, after the War of Wrath, was bound and cast out of the world, not destroyed. Saruman lost most of his powers, and while his bodily form was killed at last by Wormtongue in the Shire, his spirit lived on severely diminished. And it was even said that with the Ring destroyed, Sauron was not utterly annihilated, but would live on as a shade of malice with practically no real power left.
I think it’s really odd that the atheist is defending the sanctity of christianity, and many of the christians are calling a world of magic and monsters christian.
I don’t have anything deep to contribute here. As an atheist, after reading both, I always viewed Narnia as the obviously Christian story and LOTR as the subtly Christian story. And I always figured every fantasy story after these two that had a resurrection, which is a lot of them, wanted its own Jesus moment a la Aslan and Gandalf.
On this point I must say that this is one of those areas where atheists frequently err – in attempting to explain Christianity, and what they think Christianity’s rules and practices are to Christians.
Certainly you will find Christians throughout history claiming that story-telling of any kind, be it realist fiction or completely fantastical invention, should be eschewed. They would be in the minority (and in some cases the outrightly fanatical minority), and in any case such people miss a fundamental point about human nature and the purpose of story-telling.
We can look as far back as Beowulf to find Christians telling obviously fantastical tales, but tales nonetheless imbued with Christian elements and types (neither of which need be taken as strictly allegorical equivalences). Moving further ahead in time we find the Arthurian legends, and sundry similar tales and epics in France, Spain, Germany, and all other Christian lands. One can even read the lives of the saints and see in them elements that are entirely imaginative. Why?
Because the telling of tales is one way we can communicate truths of the universe. We also use tales to spur empathy or sympathy in ourselves, to use our imaginations to enter into realms and situations in which we might never directly find ourselves. In short, we use tales to explain and explore our humanity with each other.
Now if the lives of the saints are are at times fantastical, does that mean they have no place in Christianity? No, we use them to illustrate ideals. In the podcast I linked earlier they discuss the life of Saint John Maximovich, a 20th century saint of whom there is still living memory (he only died in the 1960s). He is often depicted as barefoot because the legend of St. John is that he kept giving away his shoes to the needy. Did he do this? He was known to have done so at least once, but those who knew him said they never saw him barefoot. Why is he illustrated so? The ideal of him giving shoes to the needy is an ideal we are called to emulate.
So it ultimately is with Lord of the Rings – there are ideals and types in the heroes of that quest who, in various ways, exemplify ideals that Christians should strive for, just as Sauron and his allies and armies bear types we recognize as evil. It is especially this latter point that needs emphasis: Sauron is a figure of a fallen angel, a creature whose evil is of a type in utter rebellion against his creator, and who seeks dominion over the created world as the expression of that rebellion. There are many many tales outside of Christianity that, by contrast, express and understand Evil only as the Manichean opposite of Good, a force equal in magnitude to, and ultimately bound up with whatever “Good” happens to be. Christianity does not understand the universe this way – there are no Good and Evil opposite poles like in a magnet, but one single source towards which all are ultimately called. In the LOTR / Silmarilion universe, neither Morgoth nor Sauron will ever ultimately prevail, and they know this yet continue their rebellion out of spite.
To claim that you are somehow defending the sanctity of Christianity in light of all this is to misunderstand both Tolkien’s works, and Christianity both.
Beowulf explicitly references the christian god and worshipping it.
LOTR does nothing of the kind.
I dare say that I’ve had more theological studies than most people in this country and even most people here.
The association with christianity in LOTR is extremely vague, so vague as to be not really there. There are no ethics or morals exposed or treated in LOTR that are not claimed by any of the thousands of other religions and cultures of the world and history.
For most of christian history, to assert that a wizard falling down a gorge while fighting a monster and transfiguring into a more enlightened being would not at all be considered christian and might even have been considered blasphemous to do so.
You are rejecting the point because you insist on it the story being taken literally, and therefore deeming it blasphemous. There are many saints’ lives where the saint goes through some long and harrowing ordeal, and then returns from it transformed.
The historical-sloggy parts of The Silmarillion weren’t my cup of tea, either. But Ainulindale was the first creation myth (or the first but one) I could relate to. For one thing, it made it clearer what a creation myth is for.
Tolkien being comfortable being a Christian and writing a creation myth quite different from that found in Genesis made it easier to understand these stories as stories about our moral place in the world rather than stories about how stuff literally got made.
Do you argue with Arabs about proper Arabic grammar? Or the subtle meanings of the Quran, too?
Skipsul # 81 is right on. The Apocrypha has a nice fantasy story, for example. Fantasy elements are just part of the story. That’s why it’s what it is—story—fiction.
But what are the literary aspects of the story, what worldview is conveyed, and what sort of reality–fantasy elements aside–is the story set in?
I’m not sure what it would take for Skyler to see the Catholic/Christian underpinnings when he discredits the author himself. I’m afraid this is a fruitless effort.
I thought you were Buddhist. Do I remember wrongly, or did you change, or are you an atheist Buddhist?
Nor does the book of Esther, but so what?
LOTR is a story in context. The Silmarillion is the biggest chunk of that context. It begins with monothesism. “There was Eru, the One,” if memory serves. (The Elves call him Iluvatar.)
He creates the universe out of nothing. One of his best angels rebels. And the story ensues.
Why not engage my argument from # 77?
Just to take a couple of examples, pity/compassion as a primary virtue is actually not a thing in most accounts of Hinduism, Islam, or Confucianism. Piety / obedience to sacred duty isn’t really a thing in Buddhism or Utilitarianism. Recognizing an active providence helping us along the way–not really a thing in Kant. Etc.
To claim it as history–yes. To put it in fantasy, like the Arthurian legends, Beowulf, and that story in the Apocrypha–why not?
(And he’s resurrected, and maybe more powerful–but not more enlightened.)