The Silmarillion

What is it about Tolkien that draws me back, again and again?

Just finished reading The Silmarillion, for the second time. I can’t remember when I read it first; probably I read the first two books during the summer of 1980, and I read the majority of the book sometime in the late-eighties. It’s a sizable work divided into five books. The first two deal with the creation of Middle-Earth and its pantheon of gods (who all the serve the One, Iluvatar, with the exception of Melkor). The middle and by far the longest is the actual Silmarillion, the song of the silmarils, which tells the epic of the Elves in Middle-Earth and their war with Melkor over the stolen jewels called silmarils. This is followed by two codas: one, the Akallabeth, the story of the destruction of the island Numenor (comparable to our Atlantean myths), and a synopsis of the history of Middle-Earth up to the War of the Rings, which is the subject of The Lord of the Rings.

Goose bumps broke out all over my body.

It may just be something that can’t be explained or put into words. Perhaps you just have to be the type of person that ‘gets’ this stuff. I don’t know. But I do know that there is something in J.R.R. Tolkien’s works that elevates them above the thousands of other sword and sorcery books. And it’s not just that it was the first (because it may not have been), though he did set the mark so very high. But – what draws me back to Middle-Earth?

Tolkien’s primarily interest was linguistics. His books are filled with language, creating a self-contained realistic world. Names, cities, fortresses, rivers and mountains. All are derived from his languages. Quenya, High Elven. Other forms of elvish, such as Noldorin, Sindarin. The language of the dwarves. The speech of men. Even the language of evil, spoken by the orcs, the legions of Melkor.

He was also concerned with creating a mythology. A ‘mythopoeia,’ something akin to such early epics as Beowulf and the Teutonic myths that the English peoples did not have. This is where you would place The Silmarillion. It is a viable mythology more fleshed out and wonderful than anything comparable, ‘real’ that I have ever read. He tackles creation, the existence of evil, heroism, self-sacrifice, corruption and treachery, and redemption.

What is the main reason I fell in love with Middle-Earth?

I think it has something to do with this: a romanticised view of man. I don’t mean ‘romanticised’ as in ‘fictional,’ but more like something that belongs to a heroic past. Something we don’t see much of anymore, if at all. Something that’s been scoured away by post-modernism, or whatever you label the trendy, snarky, meaninglessness that permeates our society today. Tolkien’s world was sharply dichromatic: black and white. No shades of grey. In fact, once you began looking for grey, you were no longer white, in the sense of being pure, clean, good. You had a choice you had to make. Who will you serve? The black or the white? Both sides want you, desperately. But choosing the white is often a path of great tribulation, great hardship, pain, and struggle, with no guarantees except that you were on the side of Purity, Cleanliness and Goodness. Our world today cringes at such a choice. And we are less for it. And that is probably the main reason I am drawn towards Tolkien, and the hard choice his world and his characters face.