Well, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and started reading the Silmarillion. I’m about two thirds of the way through it, so it looks like I’m actually going to finish it, but it is indeed a chore. All those impenetrable names, all those unpronounceable countries, all those baffling maps and endless genealogies and footnotes. Good grief. I cannot believe this man Tolkien spent an entire lifetime putting together this endless, and yet eerily similar (or should I say repetitious) fantasy world.

And why bother? The story is pretty much the same, you can start wherever you like and it reads about the same, one endless battle after another, noble folk and evil folk. There really is no beginning and no end. Just one endless scroll of rune-strewn toilet paper, like a light-year long roll of asswipe with a Moebius strip twisted into it. Start and stop wherever you like, by the the time you’ve read a dozen pages it all starts sounding the same anyway. Its like being lost in Mirkwood, after a while you wonder if you’re just wandering in circles, going over the same ground again and again. I’m posting these comments now because I don’t think anything really new or conclusive is going to emerge from the next hundred or so pages I still have left to plow through.

So why bother? I don’t even like fantasy. Well, I used to feel the same way about the Ring Trilogy and I finally got to appreciate the sheer beauty of that work, the characters, the prose, the philosophy, the language. I also followed the same strategy, I got the unabridged audio CD box set and the mellow tones of Martin Shaw guide me along as I read the text in parallel. The coherence and philosophy of the Trilogy is lacking, and there is no plot to speak of, but at least the language is still there, like reading while listening to the King James version or Shakespeare, recited by God and the Bard, respectively. Yes, it is magnificent prose, but there doesn’t seem to be much going on.

Yes, I know the Silmarillion gives us the setting and history behind the Trilogy, it sets the stage where those events happen, and where all those ruins, critters and monuments that litter the landscape come from, but is it really necessary? It reads like an ancient text, all narrative and exposition and description, but no character or motivation. It is historiography, but there is no order or pattern superimposed on it as we are wont to force (perhaps unjustifiably) onto our own histories. I am told people are noble or evil, but I don’t know why, and no one seems to be ambiguous and confused, like we all are in the real world.

I don’t know. Maybe I was spoiled by Jackson’s films, which gave me a gorgeous visual and auditory image, crafted lovingly by those who revere the work, I could hang the text on faces and landscapes I could later identify with. But I am in awe of the total fantasy universe Tolkien created here…why? The Trilogy does indeed cast some light into our own world and its inhabitants and events, but all the rest? I sometimes wonder if it was the horror of the Great War he was running away from. Still, Tolkien wrote books, had a career, raised a family, enjoyed the fellowship and earned the respect of gifted men…he led a good life, he was not a broken man. I don’t think the answers lie in the Silmarillion.

At any rate, I don’t regret the experience, I am enjoying it, but I will never come back to these early ages of Middle Earth again, and I certainly won’t bother to delve into any of the other scholarly products and assorted retellings the Tolkien estate is constantly grinding out. Although I’m sure I will re-read the Trilogy, perhaps several times, before I die.