The Silmarillion (Paperback, Reissue)

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)

The forerunner to The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion tells the earlier history of Middle-earth, recounting the events of the First and Second Ages, and introducing some of the key characters, such as Galadriel, Elrond, Elendil and the Dark Lord, Sauron. The Silmarillion is an account of the Elder Days, of the First Age of Tolkien’s world. It is the ancient drama to which the characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in whose events some of them such as Elrond and Galadriel took part. The tales of The Silmarillion are set in an age when Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, dwelt in Middle-Earth, and the High Elves made war upon him for the recovery of the Silmarils, the jewels containing the pure light of Valinor. Included in the book are several shorter works. The Ainulindale is a myth of the Creation and in the Valaquenta the nature and powers of each of the gods is described. The Akallabeth recounts the downfall of the great island kingdom of Númenor at the end of the Second Age and Of the Rings of Power tells of the great events at the end of the Third Age, as narrated in The Lord of the Rings. This pivotal work features the revised, corrected text and includes, by way of an introduction, a fascinating letter written by Tolkien in 1951 in which he gives a full explanation of how he conceived the early Ages of Middle-earth.

General

Imprint:	HarperCollins Publishers
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	April 1999
First published:	July 2001
Authors:	J. R. R. Tolkien
Dimensions:	178 x 111 x 30mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Mass Market
Pages:	443
Edition:	Reissue
ISBN-13:	978-0-261-10273-6
Categories:	Books
LSN:	0-261-10273-7
Barcode:	9780261102736

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