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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Archetype" data-source="post: 3080333" data-attributes="member: 40688">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.</blockquote>

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