How to Read The Silmarillion

Like many people, my first attempts at reading The Silmarillion stopped after a few chapters.  It is not what many people expect, the format of a novel that starts at a beginning and reads sequentially to the end.

The Amon Sul podcast in particular has provided some general help to encourage listeners to read The Silmarillion.  In particular, the “Last Homely House” sub-series focuses on The Silmarillion.  These two episodes (The Tree and the Axe, and  The Silmarillion Doesn’t Exist) from early 2021 provide a lot of practical advice about how to read it.

Instead of a novel with detailed story and character dialogue and development, The Silmarillion gives us a high-level narrative, with numerous characters – and they all seem to start with the same letter, F.  Reading the standard “novel,” we expect to try to keep up with the details and all the different characters.  Another common problem is to get “stuck” and quit at the geography chapter, (14) “Of Beleriand and Its Realms,” which gives descriptions of the sections of land, a type of writing reminiscent of several chapters in the Bible book of Joshua.

We can best approach The Silmarillion by thinking of it a compendium of Lore.  Some of the material is for reference (such as the geography chapter).  Some sections are self-contained stories (Of Beren and Luthien, for example) not dependent on other material.  The “Quenta Silmarillion” is a longer section of a sequential story, and one good approach is to read this part first, a high level narrative prose — and refer back to earlier chapters of reference material as needed.   It is okay to skip the geography chapter.  Further, it is best to not try to keep track of all the details and remember all the names, but get the grand scope, the overview.

Of note, when Christopher Tolkien arranged the material to publish The Silmarillion, which came out four years after J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, he made some key editorial decisions.  One such decision, that makes reading The Silmarillion more difficult, was to remove “the frame” that Tolkien had devised.  The original frame, or narrative device, that Tolkien had created, was similar to the familiar story pattern of a present-day character (usually an elderly person) talking to another, younger person and remembering and telling of their memories from long ago.  In this case, an Anglo Saxon man came in contact with an Elf Loremaster, who is telling the story to the Anglo Saxon person – thus connecting the history to our real world.  Later, Tolkien moved toward the idea of Bilbo for the narrative frame, that all of this is a translation by Bilbo – a continuation of the Red Book of Westmarch frame mentioned with reference to the hobbits and Lord of the Rings.  Christopher Tolkien chose to completely remove this frame, which might have helped readers, especially when The Silmarillion was first published.

Since The Silmarillion is in style similar to Medieval writings, we can read it in the way that medieval people read all literature – how they read the Bible, how they read pagan literature such as Homer’s The Iliad, as well as all other literature:

1. The literal/historical approach — the actual content of the story, the text itself
2. Allegorical / typological

Of course we all know that Tolkien “cordially disliked” allegory.  Tolkien by that meant the type of formal allegory that leaves nothing to the reader’s application and imaginative freedom — such as Pilgrim’s Progress — as well as reading Lord of the Rings as an “allegory” about the atomic bomb.  Yet Tolkien himself wrote allegorical stories – not of the formal allegory type, but more of a typological story. The story itself exists, and a deeper meaning is also present (what Tolkien termed mythical rather than allegorical):  Leaf By Niggle (see previous post), and Smith of Wootton Major.

Of note, it is okay to ask “how to find Christ in this passage” in Tolkien’s writings.  In the Middle ages, they thought it was okay to ask this question about The Iliad.

3. Ethical/moral — what does it teach us about virtue, actions of some consequences over others. The so what?
4. The hope in the story.  Its eschatological / end purpose — What hope does this passage point us to?  The Silmarillion has a lot of depressing stories, repeated accounts of failed cities and examples of “the long defeat.”

Tolkien shows us that there is always a sense of loss, a permanent loss.  The resurrected Christ is still bearing the wounds of His passion.  The wounds become transformed, but are not erased.  (In Revelation, we are told that God wipes away our tears; the tears are there still, they don’t vanish.)  As Tolkien observed, in his On Fairy Stories, “All tales may yet come true.” That includes the bad ones.  Hope does not work on the idea that everything is erased.  The hope is for redemption and the defeat of evil.  After all, we put up monuments for great battles where evil was defeated.  Hope does not depend on evil to exist, and yet it informs our lives, such that we only experience hope in the context of having experienced evil.

For next time, a look at the above four methods of medieval-style reading, in an example, one chapter in The Silmarillion:  Of Aulë and Yavanna.

Read Full Post »