The book is known for being difficult to approach and understand. The book is a stone soup of the most mouth-mangling names ever seen in print. A reader who swallows these is confronted with a dense mélange of mythology, theology, language, history, geography, and genealogy (all in a made-up world which doesn’t even exist!) which the reader is expected to master before any good stories are told. A reader who manages to mangle the material and master enough of it to continue is then thrown into a spider’s web of plot twists which hang on the thinnest strands of subtle elvish family relationships. The reader who ploughs ahead by sheer determination to read the actual narrative stories is then pitched and rolled on a sea of narrative which swirls from extremes of lush detail where even the most minor moment is belabored to an elliptical contraction which can summarize even the most interesting plot twist or daring deed in a few meager words. What can anyone make of all this? Those few and rare daring scholars who attempt to study the stages of composition of this work are likely to be overcome by the almost incomprehensible layer upon layer upon layer of elves who go through some of the most mind-boggling name changes over the almost sixty years of The Silmarillion’s development.Here, I attempt to write the guide I wish was available when I first picked up The Silmarillion around 1985, when I was about thirteen years old (which was the gold-covered, pocket-sized paperback edition). I had devoured Lord of the Rings over the previous year, and wanted more of the same to read: yet I found The Silmarillion incomprehensible and sought refuge in the last section about the third age. In this document, I try to provide a road map that shows how the parts fit together, and some landmarks for the reader to steer by.
Via Plep.
Posted by Amy in Readers & Reading, Speculative Fiction