The "Bible" of Middle-Earth, the "Silmarillion" stretches from the beginning of time to the departure of the Elves from Middle-Earth.Ī complete summary is impossible, because the book spans millennia and has one earth-shattering event after another. It's more than slightly staggering to consider: the epic fantasy "Lord of the Rings" to be the tail end of Tolkien's invented history. First, he was a philologist first and foremost, and so before the stories he invented languages. Now, the scope (which is extremely ambitious for any artist) was compounded by how Tolkien worked. No wonder Tolkien had such a hard time completing the work. Imagine how hard that would be to come up with your own mythological traditions as such. Imagine Homer completely inventing all the gods for his stories. Imagine the Greek and Roman mythologies, all those myths and gods, developed by one man. The scope of the book was a complete imaginary history, a totally self-contained mythology, all written and developed for his home country, England (my home country as well). Naturally, this begs the question why did it take him decades to write the book, and it still be unfinished after all that time? Well, to understand that, you need to understand two things: the scope of the project, and how Tolkien worked. "The Silmarillion", the book Tolkien spent all of his adult life writing, was, sadly, incomplete when Tolkien died at the age of eighty one in 1973. One is the Silmarillion, the legendarium proper, and then the 1977 "Silmarillion", which may or may not be what Tolkien envisioned. In Tolkien scholarship, there are two primary ways to refer to the "Silmarillion". It is Tolkien's primary work, but it's also his most troublesome, in more ways than one. Constructed as a prehistoric history of the Universe, the book has the cultural significance of the Bible in Tolkien's universe. In the Tolkien canon, "The Silmarillion" is the most highly contested of all his works. Tolkien describing his intentions for the book, which serves as a brilliant exposition of his conception of the earlier Ages of Middle-earth. This second edition features a letter written by J.R.R. THE SILMARILLION is the history of the rebellion of Feanor and his kindred against the gods, their exile from Valinor and return to Middle-earth, and their war, hopeless despite all their heroism, against the great Enemy. Thereafter, the unsullied Light of Valinor lived on only in the Silmarils, but they were seized by Morgoth and set in his crown, which was guarded in the impenetrable fortress of Angband in the north of Middle-earth. Within them was imprisoned the Light of the Two Trees of Valinor before the Trees themselves were destroyed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. The three Silmarils were jewels created by Feanor, most gifted of the Elves. The story of the creation of the world and of the the First Age, this is the ancient drama to which the characters in THE LORD OF THE RINGS look back and in whose events some of them, such as Elrond and Galadriel, took part. Tolkien considered THE SILMARILLION his most important work, and, though it was published last and posthumously, this great collection of tales and legends clearly sets the stage for all his other writing. Tolkien's imaginative writing, a work whose origins stretch back to a time long before THE HOBBIT. A number-one New York Times bestseller when it was originally published, THE SILMARILLION is the core of J.R.R.