A Review: The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion
by J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien
ISBN: 978-0007523221

I read the Lord of the Rings when I was about 8, having loved the BBC radio play starring Michael Hordern as Gandalf. Of course I wanted to read the Silmarillion too, but was always told it was hard going, which put me off. Then I tried it in my early 20s and didn’t get past the first few pages. Today, at (nearly) 46 I finished it.

The Silmarillion is hard going and, for the most part, unpleasant to read. It’s mostly the language used and that it reads more like a technical history than a story. It’s quite repetitive with battle after battle and no real progress for good or evil. There are so many different names and places and this makes it difficult to follow.

It gets better around Beren and Lúthien. Where it really gets interesting, and more enjoyable, is when it reaches the Third Age and there’s more about the rings of power and the characters I’m more familiar with from the Lord of the Rings.

I was disappointed that the scenes from the Hobbit film series with Radagast weren’t described in the Silmarillion, as I’d been led to believe they were. Someone must have made them up.

The recent Amazon TV series, the Rings of Power, doesn’t seem to be consistent with the Silmarillion either, for example, Gandalf didn’t drop from a ball in the sky and there’s no mention of Sauron rescuing Galadriel and sailing to Numenor.

Comments

I, Robot

The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog