6) The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

This is one of the long books I’ve been struggling through over the last few weeks. Funny to come back to it, twenty years after I first read it, now that The Lord of the Rings has had a longer time to settle into my subconscious.

This second edition comes with an unexpected bonus – a lengthy (19-page) letter from Tolkien to his publisher, written in 1951 (ie as the text of The Lord of the Rings was being finalised and twenty-five years before The Silmarillion was eventually published) in which he explains his purpose in writing the stories of Middle Earth. The key passage is this:

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of fairy-story the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendor from the vast backcloths which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our “air” (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe; not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be “high”, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

And as Tom Shippey points out, in his books and in the mini-documentary on the Peter Jackson DVD’s, he pretty much succeeded in this aim.

Nobody will ever start reading Tolkien with The Silmarillion – anyone who reads it will have already read The Lord of the Rings and will hope for background here. It’s nice to get some of the non-fictional hinterland as well as 350 pages of narrative; especially since the brutal truth is that the narrative isn’t especially good. I remember spending many hours poring over Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle Earth partly to work out what had actually happened in The Silmarillion. There’s lots of mythic portent, but also a strangely distanced feel about the action – for instance, an early event which we are repeatedly told is deeply traumatic, the Kin-Slaying at Alqualondë, is covered in less than a page.

There are only one and a half good stories in the entire book (the one being the story of Húrin’s children, the half being Beren and Lúthien). Particularly disappointing is Eärendil, who we’ve been hearing about ever since Bilbo’s poem about him in Rivendell half-way through the Fellowship of the Ring, and who indeed gets plenty of foreshadowing in the middle chapters of The Silmarillion; but it seems oddly flat when we finally get there.

That’s not quite fair; the Númenor story is pretty dramatic, with the hubris of Ar-Pharazôn, but at the same time has an odd internal structure, and the resonances of Avallónë/Avalon and Atalantë/Atlantis are simply distracting. And it seems quite unnecessary to have another 25 pages at the end recapitulating the plot of The Lord of the Rings in mythic voice.

I suspect that as time goes on I will gradually acquire all the various History of Middle Earth volumes, which may well clarify the extent to which these flaws were already present in the material or were introduced by either Christopher Tolkien or Guy Gavriel Kay, who helped him edit it. Of course Kay himself has turned out to be a superb novelist in his own right (judging from The Lions of Al-Rassan and Tigana; I can’t really blame Christopher Tolkien either for thinking that he had to make a judicious choice of which of his father’s manuscripts would be worth publishing, little realising that it would turn out to be worth publishing them all.

Still, I’m glad I’ve re-read it. Right, time to get kids in bed and watch my new Lord of the Rings DVDs!