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Set in a time far earlier than Tolkien's master works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, this is the epic history of the elves, and the grand story of the creation of Tolkien's magical world. The Lord of the Rings narrated the great events at the end of the Third Age; but the tales of The Silmarillion are legends deriving from a much deeper past, when Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in Middle-earth, and the High Elves made war upon him for the recovery of the Silmarils. Never published in the author's lifetime, The Silmarillion is an essential compendium for all Tolkien fans. It will be published in five consecutive volumes, each completely unabridged. The series contains not only the Quenta Silmarillion, but four other short works: the Ainulindale, Valaquenta, Akallabeth and Of the Rings of Power.
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Comments about The Silmarillion:
It reads like genesis if the bible and gives the history of the world the hobbit live in. A great story but one you have to follow closely.
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Comments about The Silmarillion:
Oh man. The way Tolkien wrote this book is hauntingly beautiful. I think I first read it way too young, and found the plot hard to follow, and the tragedy in it just broke me.
After reading now that I'm older, I'm completely mindblown! I can't describe this book with mere words. The characters are purely amazing with so much life and personalities that either leave you in awe or frightened. Although the various foreign names and places are hard to keep count of and quite hard to pronounce, I still really enjoyed it. I just wish it wasn't so tragic, and the elves ... are so different than in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I guess after so much loss and slaughter, they kind of just wanted to live as peacfully as they could.
But seriously ... I love it. Some of the characters will be with me forever while others will pass out of memory.
But I would recemmend reading Lord of the Rings first, or this book won't mean a lot to you. The elves truly have a dark and violent past, I can tell you.
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The total volume of Tolkien's Middle-Earth manuscripts is vastly greater than that of the completed Lord of the Rings, but it seems to be a near-hopeless tangle of variants and unfinished reworkings in both prose and verse. From the great body of material dealing with the "First Age" of Middle-Earth, Tolkien's son Christopher has compiled a prose narrative of the events surrounding the making and eventual loss of the three jewels called the Silmarils, many centuries before the Wars of the Ring. The protagonists are chiefly Elves. They appear here not as the steadfast, transcendent figures of the Ring books, but in their youth as a fiery and much-divided race capable of uglier passions than any of the "good" characters in the trilogy. The telling is uniformly solemn and distanced, compressing a great range of events into a schematic summation that is a far cry from the varied, immediate narrative of the Ring story. Taking a negative view, one might say that this is not a book or even a fragment of one; it is a grandiose outline showing the Tolkien style at its most determinedly pseudo-biblical. But the alternative view is more to the point: even these truncated materials shed an astonishing amount of "historical" light on The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion proper is the largest single chunk of "history," but it is accompanied by four shorter chronicles which first establish the foundations of Middle-Earth (an explicit Creation-myth) and then convey the great sweep of history from the Silmaril wars to the Wars of the Ring. Turning back to the trilogy from this new prologue, one finds the intrinsic grandeur of Tolkien's design re-illuminated at every stage. It is now sadly clear that we shall have no more Middle-Earth books - that is, books in their own right. But thanks to the efforts of Christopher Tolkien, we may be privileged in coming years to follow a progressive and dazzling enrichment of the book we all thought we knew. (Kirkus Reviews)
ISBN: 9780261102736
ISBN-10: 0261102737
Audience:
General
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 480
Published: November 1991
Dimensions (cm): 18.9 x 15.2
x 3.1
Weight (kg): 0.256
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