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.

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