The Silmarillion

I'm still in a Tolkieny mood after my latest Lord of the Rings re-read so I thought I should give The Silmarillion another try. As with the earlier Tolkien posts, I'm not claiming any expertise, this is purely my personal response.

When I was nine or ten I started to notice that a lot of my favourite authors claimed The Mabinogion as an important influence. So I ventured forth across the wilds of Queen’s Park even unto the Kemptown Bookshop and picked up the Everyman paperback edition, only to discover when I got it home that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Obeying no narrative structures that I’d encountered before, and sometimes consisting of little more than long lists of names, the Welsh legends collected in The Mabinogion contained little on which my imagination could get a grip, and the book was quickly abandoned. But it turned out to be useful practice, because soon afterwards The Silmarillion was published, a new work by my favouritest author of all. I got a nice hardback copy for what I think must have been Christmas 1977 - but when I opened it and started reading I recognised a familiar sinking feeling...

After the success of The Lord of the Rings I'm sure Tolkien's publishers were hoping for a sequel: The Lord of the Rings 2 (All Your Favourite Characters Back In Another Whacky Adventure!) And Tolkien did briefly consider a sequel, The New Shadow, but he quickly abandoned the idea and returned to the mythology and dictionaries of Middle-earth on which he had been working since the first inklings of the story of the mariner Eärendil came to him in 1914. He was still trying to shape some of this material into a book when he died in 1973, and it was edited by his son Christopher and finally published as The Silmarillion.

Anyone who opens The Silmarillion thinking they're going to get Lord of the Rings style narrative has another think coming. I'm not sure what eleven-year-old me expected, but what I got was an account of the creation of the universe and of Middle-earth, full of unfamiliar names and places, and told in a style that's solemn, sonorous, and rather soporific. God (or 'Iluvatar') sings everything into being, aided by the angelic beings called the Valar. Aeons of darkness pass, the seas and stars are created, Elves, Dwarves, and finally Men arise, and huge conflicts rage, driven by Melkor AKA Morgoth, a fallen Valar who rebels against Iluvatar right at the start and ends up as Dark Lord of a sort of hell-on-Earth - Sauron is just one of his servants, and Mordor in The Lord of the Rings only an echo of Morgoth's strongholds of Angband at Utumno. Ranged against him are the rest of the Valar, who each take charge of a different element or aspect of Creation. They're a bit hands-off though, so most of the actual fighting is handled by Elf kings and eventually by the Men who aid them.

It's all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn't exactly grip: a thing happens and then another thing happens, and I kept finding I'd read three or pages without taking in any of the things. There are few characters as such, just a succession of Elves and Men (I kept forgetting which was which) whose motives and appearances are barely described. It feels like a sort of expansion of the Appendices from The Lord of the Rings, giving us a bit more info about what Orcs and Balrogs are, and filling in the details of stories which we glimpsed in fragments when Frodo, Aragorn and co referred to them in passing. I think one of the things which confused me a youngster is that the Middle-earth it's set in is an entirely different bit of Middle-earth from the one in The Lord of the Rings - we're in Beleriand, which is to the west of the regions we know, and all sinks into the sea long before The Hobbit kicks off. The landscape is for the most part as vaguely described as the people, so while I have absolutely clear pictures in my mind of the Misty Mountains, Fangorn, and the Shire, I have only the sketchiest idea of what most places in The Silmarillion look like.

It's entirely humourless, which doesn't do it any favours. I always think humour is a vital release valve for the inherent absurdity in works of fantasy or science fiction - High Fantasy in particular, if it doesn't set out to be funny from time to time, ends up being funny by accident when it topples over into High Camp. I think Tolkien is enough in command of his language and material to stop that happening here - which is an achievement, I suppose. Nevertheless, any summary of The Silmarillion would make it sound like D.C.Parlov's SkyFire Cycle in Brooklyn 99 - the kind of stuff that gives fantasy a bad name. The obsessive earnestness of it all reminds of those clairvoyants and eccentrics like Edgar Cayce or Charles W Leadbeater who, around the time Tolkien first started dreaming up Middle-earth, were busy peddling their visions of previous lives in Atlantis or astral travels to Mars. (At least Tolkien never tried to present his imagined world as anything but fiction.)

But if you stick with The Silmarillion some good stories do arrive. The tale of Beren and Luthien is a cracker, and features a fantastic scene where the star cross'd lovers, aided only by a talking dog, break into Morgoth's stronghold and prise one of the Silmarils from his iron crown (a story which gives Sam Gamgee comfort hundreds of years later on his way into Mordor). But wait - a talking dog? Why yes: Huan the wolfhound is big enough that Luthien can ride on him, tough enough that he defeats Sauron in the form of a monstrous werewolf, and wise enough that he understands speech and is very occasionally able to speak himself. He sounds silly, but he's actually kind of cool, and not quite like anything else that I've encountered in Tolkien's work. Beren and Luthien told Lord of the Rings style would have made a good novel, I think.

So too would the story of Túrin, which follows it. Lacking the cheerier and talking-dog-related elements which make Beren and Luthien more fun, it's a doom-laden and ultimately tragic tale, but still a good one.

In fact, most of the stories in The Silmarillion are doom-laden and tragic; Morgoth's rebellion has flawed the world, and everything good in it is forever failing and being corrupted and falling away: I suppose this is all part of 'the long defeat' which Galadriel spoke of in The Lord of the Rings. The penultimate section deals with the rise and fall of Númenor, whose kings are eventually seduced by Sauron into making a forbidden voyage to the west in search of eternal life in the Valar's home on Valinor, leading to the breaking of the world - an apocalyptic event which combines elements of both Noah's flood and the sinking of Atlantis, and seems to involve the whole planet being changed from a flat world into a globe - henceforward, mortals who sail west will just go round it, and only the Elves can follow the old, straight road out to the undying lands - a rather neat idea. The survivors of Númenor sail east and found Gondor, and the final section basically re-tells the story of the War of the Ring.

So that's The Silmarillion, and I'm not really sure what I think of it. I can see why it didn't grab me when I first read it. (If I'm recalling correctly it was 1978: Star Wars had just been released, dressing up a lot of familiar Tolkienian story beats in exciting new sci-fi drag. I didn't dislike The Silmarillion, but it could hardly compete.) Reading it again, I find it impressive, but in the same way that a scale model of St Paul's Cathedral made from matchsticks is impressive - someone has clearly expended great skill and love on it and doubtless derived much personal satisfaction from doing so, but I'm not sure it has a lot to offer anyone else. Perhaps Tolkien thought so too - it's important to remember that he never published it. In the end, all we really needed to know about Númenor, Beren, Eärendil and the rest we were told in passing in The Lord of the Rings. What it really proves is something I dimly perceived when I was writing my earlier Tolkien blogs - the importance of hobbits, who add so much humour and human (or hobbitish) interest to the stories in which they appear. Tolkien's vision of a 'mythology for England' may have begun with Eärendil, but it's Bilbo Baggins and his relatives and neighbours who turned it into something with the power to engage and endure. If the phrase 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,' hadn't popped into his head one day I doubt we would ever have heard of Middle-earth at all.

I'm assured that some of the stories from The Silmarillion are told to better effect in volumes published even more posthumously - The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, The Fall of Gondolin - so if you only really know The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and want more Middle-earth perhaps those are the ones to go for, but I haven't read them, and reviews seem mixed to say the least.

Alternatively, you could try The Mabinogion instead. I went back to it a few years after my disappointing first encounter and liked it much better (probably helped by the fact that I was reading the Dragon's Dream edition with Alan Lee's illustrations, surely one of the most beautiful books of the 1980s). And those long lists of early Welsh names came in very handy whenever I needed extra characters in Here Lies Arthur.

The pictures in this post are The Great Day of His Wrath by John Martin, and The Deluge by Francis Danby, both in the Tate Gallery. They're nothing to do with The Silmarillion, but they sort of capture the mood. The Silmarillion cover design is by Tolkien himself.