Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Before Frodo and Sam, there were Beren and Luthien. A case for revisiting "The Silmarillion."
Feb 18, 2005 | In the last dread days of disco-dûr, in the midst of the Seventh Age -- known in perhaps a more familiar tongue as "the Nineteen Seventsies" -- there emerged from the House of Houghton Mifflin, and later from that of Ballan-tine, a great book of which much was expected, though few but the most ardent of devotees could wholly comprehend it. It has, in the Tolkienian spirit, valiantly returned.
"The Silmarillion," J.R.R. Tolkien's fantastically complex, comprehensive and, yes, uneven mythological narrative was his life's work -- the underlying structural legend of the world into which young Frodo Baggins would later walk, many millennia hence, on his arduous journey to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Its narrative principally concerns the time before "The Lord of the Rings," from the genesis of Eä and Arda (the universe and Earth, in Tolkien's legendarium) to the creation of Middle Earth and its denizens -- the divine, the Elvish, and the human, with nary a hobbit in sight.
"The Silmarillion" was published and edited by Tolkien's son Christopher, four years after the Oxford don's death in 1973, to largely negative critical reaction (The word "genesis" earlier was not idly chosen -- Tolkien's creation myth approaches both the tone and the style of the Bible and could be thought of as a "Bible of Middle Earth" of sorts, though Tolkien would certainly have stressed a distinction.) Its legacy is troubled, though for a time, quite like the One Ring, it passed from the minds of men (apologies -- the temptation to drift into legend language is impossible to resist sometimes).
Now a new generation, armed with extravagantly appendixed, extended editions of Peter Jackson's trilogy of films on DVD, has the opportunity to contend with its knotted and besotted history. The professor's pre-magnum opus has been re-released, bound in a gorgeously illustrated, and pleasantly weighty, hardcover edition that sits comfortably in your lap, just as all grand fairy tales should.
By virtue of aesthetics alone, this new volume of "The Silmarillion" should bring a great many more readers into fuller appreciation of not only the book but also Tolkien's universe at large. Exquisitely illustrated by Ted Naismith, who worked on Robert Foster's "Complete Guide to Middle Earth," this new edition is the model of what a 21st century, ancient cosmological text should look like, if that makes any sense. I feel almost silly for saying it, but it's a really pretty book: From the typescript to the spacious layout -- not to mention the extremely useful appendixes of genealogical tables, notes on Elvish pronunciation, indexes of names, and linguistic elements of Tolkien's two Elvish tongues -- the publishers have done well to give Tolkien's saga a tangible feeling of the momentous mythological history its author meant it to be.
But what exactly did Tolkien mean for us to make of "The Silmarillion"? And what the heck is a Silmarillion anyway? (I promise it's not just the name of a late-'70s progressive rock band.) The answers to those questions are conveniently found in a 1951 letter -- included in this volume -- which Tolkien wrote to his friend Milton Waldman, an editor at the publishing house then known simply as Collins. Christopher Tolkien explains that this lengthy letter was the result of his father's working out difficulties that arose over his insistence that "The Silmarillion" and "The Lord of the Rings" be published in "conjunction or in connexion ... as one long Saga of the Jewels and the Rings."
"The Silmarillion" as published is a compendium of five works: the "Ainulindalë," a cosmological myth that recounts the creation of the universe by Eru Ilúvatar (God) and the music of the (angelic) Ainur; the "Valaquenta," a comparatively brief description of the Valar and Maiar, supernatural beings; the "Quenta Silmarillion," or "Silmarillion" proper, which forms the bulk of the collection and recounts the fall of the most gifted kindred of Elves whose fate is tied to the Silmarilli, or Silmarils -- jewels into which was imprisoned the light of the world; the "Akallabêth," concerning the downfall of the Númenóreans -- the Kings of Men -- and the destruction of their Atlantean island Númenor; and finally "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age," which takes us from the forging of the One Ring through more familiar territory -- the passing of the Ringbearers into the Undying Lands at the end of the "Rings" epic.
Tolkien began work on "The Silmarillion" as early as 1917 when, as a British officer stationed in France during World War I, he was laid up in a military field hospital with trench fever. What began as a language lover's way to entertain himself by inventing creatures (Elves) who spoke invented languages (Quenya and Sindarin, derived from Finnish and Welsh), became a way for Tolkien to bestow upon his beloved England a mythology all its own. (For more on the life of Tolkien, please refer to Salon's own Andrew O'Hehir and his magisterial treatise on Tolkien's treatment by intellectuals.)
Tolkien wrote in the letter to Waldman, "I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English ... Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing." E.M. Forster had similar feelings, expressed in "Howards End": "Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our countryside have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here."
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