Silmarillion - worth reading?

[satori01]

If you are under age 13, do not read it until you are older. Silmarillon has vast amount of names, many of which are similiar, and many of which follow paths that share many things thematicaly.
If you read LOTR and felt like you needed to experience more Middle Earth, than pick it up. If you like Silmarillon you might alse pick up the Lost Tales of Middle Earth, which includes different versions of some of the stories in the Silmarillon.

After publishing the Silmarillon, Christopher Tolkein regretted some of the editting he did for the book. The Silmarillon is less a book, but more the cobbling of a book from Tolkeins notes post morteum.

 

[MulhorandSage]

I loved it.

However, you have to approach it as a cycle of myths and folk tales, not a novel.

 

[Eosin the Red]

It is the best of the bunch and one of my favorite books period. I read a number of historical novels, history texts, and mythology books (encylopedia this, encylopedia that). If that says anything about me or the book.

 

[Archetype]

The Silmarillion is in fact Fantasy's closest thing to a Bible, a detailed and interwoven story about the creation of this "Secondary World's" universe. No other fantasy writer has come close to Tolkien's achievement, although no one has taken the decades that he did to carefully weave such a magnificent "backstory" together just right.

I give it a hearty thumbs up, but you do indeed have to be in a "historical" frame of mind to enjoy it, as others have noted.

One way to test if you are even interested in this kind of thing would to plop yourself down in one of the comfy chairs @ your local Barnes & Noble/Borders/equivalent, and flip thru Karen Wynn Fonstad's outstanding illustrated resource The Atlas of Middle Earth.

This amazing cartographical effort has pages and pages of maps, regionally coded population, language and culture divisions, and more dealing with the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth. It is a spectacular visual aide for the reading of any Tolkien's admittedly complicated works, but most importantly it illustrates much of the hard-to-visualize Creation Mythology laid out in The Silmarillion. (Where was the entrance to Valinor again? How far north was the fortress of Angband?, etc.) If you are not intrigued by the maps of Beleriand, or don't care where the hidden city of Gondolin is located, or why it's presence was a strategic block to Morgoth's expanding power, or any of a dozen other interesting things that pop up when you look thru the Atlas, you probably won't want to read the much harder-to-grasp text of The Silmarillion.

As for me, I couldn't put it down, and often go back to re-read chapters of it years later.

Hope this helps you decide.

 

[shilsen]

I loved it.

However, you have to approach it as a cycle of myths and folk tales, not a novel.

Good point. I think it's worthwhile to take the same approach with The Lord of the Rings, which is not a novel so much as a strange hybrid between novel and epic.

 

[sniffles]

I'll join the chorus of those who love reading The Silmarillion - I've lost track of how many times I've read it, and I go back to portions of it frequently for inspiration. But it is definitely an acquired taste. It's not a novel. If you don't enjoy reading non-prose writing such as Shakespeare or The Odyssey and you didn't like the narrative style of LOTR, you probably won't enjoy The Silmarillion.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

As someone whose favorite fantasy is Tolkien's, let me say this:

I'd rather have my testicles ripped out through my nostrils than read the Silmarillion again.

It took me three readings to finally understand it, and when I finally got it, I was disappointed. Your mileage may vary.

 

[Ilium]

I actuallly failed to read LotR the first time I tried. All the names and references threw me. A few years later I picked up the Silmarillion and read that. The style is pretty King James-like but I enjoyed it. Then I tried LotR again and all of a sudden it made sense. There are so many passing references to things that are explained in detail in The Silmarillion.

So I not only recommend it, but I think you might get a better appreciation for Lord of the Rings once you've read it.

But if you don't like flowery language, you're probably not going to like it.

 

[Xyanthon]

I am a big fan of fantasy literature, history, archaology, mythology, anthropology and several other ologies I suppose. I guess for those reasons I found Silmarillion even morefascinating than the Lord of the Rings itself. I really enjoy all of the behind the scenes stuff and how things came into being that is presented therein. However, it does get confusing and if you had problems with the language of LotR, then Silmarillion may not be what you are after.

It seems that you stated your main goal was to get into reading real history. If that is the case and you like LotR, I'd recommend reading some of the history surrounding the epic poem Beowolf. Alot of what J.R.R. Tolkien wrote was inspired by early English mythology and folk tales. It is even said that part of the idea of the creation of Middle Earth was to create a sort of new english mythology. A book that I highly recommend that talks about the history of Beowolf and the early English mythology from a real world historical perspective is: Beowulf and Grendel : The Truth Behind England's Oldest Legend.

I think if you are a fan of fantasy gaming or literature, reading real world history and mythology just makes the reading of fantasy literature so much richer and gives a deeper appreciation of it. I'd also recommend the Ring Cycle (the Ring of the Neiblung- also another source of Tolkien's inspiration). Here's a list of books that I've gotten over the past 6 months that I can heartily recommend (with some graphic novel interpetations of Beowolf and the Ring of the Neiblung - totally awesome stuff):

English Medieval Knight 1200-1300 (Osprey Publishing)
English Medieval Knight 1400-1500 (Osprey Publishing)
Knight of Outremer AD 1187-1344 (Osprey Publishing)
English Longbowman 1330-1515 (Osprey Publishing)
The Arthurian Handbook (Second Edition)
God's Warriors : "Crusaders, Saracens and the battle for Jerusalem" (Osprey Publishing)
Castles : Their Construction and History (Dover Books on Architecture)
The History of Castles: Fortifications Around the World
Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World : Equipment, Combat Skills and Tactics
The Year 1000 : What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium
1066 : The Year of the Conquest
The Collected Beowulf
Ring of the Nibelung Volume 1: The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie (Graphic novel, very good stuff)
The Ring of the Nibelung Book 2: Siegfried & Gotterdammerung: The Twilight of the Gods
Beowulf and Grendel : The Truth Behind England's Oldest Legend
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation
Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe: Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions
The Norse Myths (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)
The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy
Norse Mythology : A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs
Gods and Myths of Northern Europe
Le Morte D'Arthur : King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table
The World of King Arthur
The History of the Kings of Britain

And that is just a short list of some of my more recent reading! Anyway, yes, the Silmarillion is a good read if you are into history, anthropology, etc... If, like you said you were interested in getting into real world history, then just do it! There are many cool things out there to read (as you can see I'm sort of into the whole Western/northern European thing). There is so much out there that it can be overwhelming but being well read is definately not something you'll ever regret!

 

[Celtavian]

re

I enjoyed The Simarillion. The tales are mythical, but written as though they were historical. Gives alot of background that makes reading Lord of the Rings more pleasurable.