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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8797981" data-attributes="member: 59082">A bit more on the The Silmarillion. In many ways, it truly is the "Bible of Middle-earth." Not just because it presents the mythology, but because it is a limited slice of a much larger body of stories.I'm not a Biblical historian, but as far as I understand it, both the Old and New Testament are just selections of stories - the former just a fraction of Hebrew sacred literature and apocrypha, and the latter just some of the gospels and stories of Jesus, with the Gnostic Gospels essentially being selected out (e.g. Thomas, Mary Magdelene, etc). The Bible as we know it was selected to present a coherent sacred text, yet also one that served the political purposes of the early Catholic Church. So, for instance, they didn't include the story of Lilith, the first wife of Adam who left him because she wanted to be his equal, or the Book of Enoch, which describes angels copulating with women and creating the nephilim (giants), which the Ancient Aliens crowd has latched onto (I mean, how cool is that?!).But there is a crucial difference: the Bible was compiled with a socio-political agenda in mind, whereas the Silmarillion was not. Meaning, Christopher Tolkien didn't exclude stories about the Maiar having sex with humans and breeding them to be cute hobbits, or Elves genociding dwarves, etc. He tried to create a comprehensive picture of the First Age, in particular, and the total arc of Tolkien's great story, from the Song of the Ainur to the Fourth Age.</blockquote>

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