Beleriand Revisited

When The Silmarillion was first released in 1977, it was the first major release of Middle-Earth material since Tolkien’s death. Whilst chunks of the backstory to Middle-Earth had been hinted at throughout The Lord of the Rings – and laid out openly in the appendices to The Return of the King – Tolkien had not quite laid everything out in full, not least because he still intended to publish some form of The Silmarillion during his lifetime. In fact, he’d suggested it as a followup to The Hobbit initially, before his publisher Stanley Unwin decided he didn’t like the early draft he’d seen and Tolkien set to work on The Lord of the Rings instead.

Indeed, Tolkien had originally wanted The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to be published together, or at least “in conjunction or in connexion” with each other, to the point where it became a matter of dispute between him and Allen & Unwin; in the early 1950s he actually tried to explore whether Collins would release the entire saga, only for Milton Waldman (a friend of Tolkien’s and his point of contact at Collins) to argue that not only was he not interested in The Silmarillion, but he also felt that The Lord of the Rings itself needed cutting back significantly.

Tolkien shifted back to Allen & Unwin and an agreement was reached: they would release The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien would not press the matter on The Silmarillion. It is possible that by this point Tolkien was having second thoughts as to how ready The Silmarillion was for release anyway. After writing the first material in his Middle-Earth writings in the midst of World War I, Tolkien would essentially revise the body of stories that make up The Silmarillion over and over again over the course of his lifetime, as we’ve seen in our look at The History of Middle-Earth, both experimenting with new structures and framing stories for delivering the information and tinkering with the structure itself.

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A major issue seems to be that Tolkien’s thinking on the philosophical, theological, and ethical principles underlying the whole shebang had evolved constantly over his lifetime, requiring extensive revisions to the material for consistency as well as increasingly difficult wrangling trying to work it all out. He would ultimately never complete the process of polishing The Silmarillion, though he had made clear enough decisions on which texts should go in there and what those texts would cover to allow Christopher Tolkien, assisted by Guy Gavriel Kay, to produce the text we currently have.

Their methodology ultimately boiled down to using the latest version of the segment in question Tolkien had produced, then filling in gaps and resolving inconsistencies with The Lord of the Rings by referring to earlier versions and, where those didn’t help, devising their own connecting material. As such, though the book is billed to Tolkien alone, Christopher and Guy’s fingerprints are indelibly impressed upon it.

Then again, there was no way we were going to get a “pure” version of the Silmarillion in the way Tolkien had conceived of it by the time Middle-Earth had reached its mature phase of development; it was always going to be the case that someone was going to have to make the editorial calls one way or the other as to what version of which story to use and how to paste over the cracks, and Christopher Tolkien had been close enough to the development of his father’s writing that there basically wasn’t anyone who was more qualified to do the job.

Regardless of how the broth was prepared, the actual reception was lukewarm, largely because The Silmarillion, whilst it is much more of a complete narrative than the Unfinished Tales or the fragmentary pieces collected in The History of Middle-Earth, or even the books bringing together more substantial tellings of stories from the Silmarillion like The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, or The Fall of Gondolin, is very unlike Tolkien’s more famous works. The narrative is very much not as accessible and endearing as The Hobbit; nor is it as richly detailed as The Lord of the Rings.

What you get instead here is pages and pages of background material, mostly in the form of a narrative history of the entire Middle-Earth cosmos from prior to the creation of the world to the end of the Third Age. What little exists of Tolkien’s thoughts on what the Fourth Age would bring largely consists of some out-of-the-way details on Aragorn’s reign as King in the Return of the King appendices and The New Shadow, an abortive attempt by Tolkien to see if he could pen a Fourth Age-based story before he decided that the era wasn’t really suitable for the sort of narratives he wanted to tell, so The Silmarillion pretty much encapsulates the entire span of Middle-Earth’s existence when it comes to matters of interest.

This means that the book takes a very different narrative mode from Tolkien’s more accessible novels. Whilst it does “zoom in” occasionally to give a somewhat more detailed account of a particularly important legend, it spends much of its time “zoomed out” to summarise epochal events in a rather dry manner. In addition, the text is not solely narrative in nature; some parts more closely resemble essays discussing a particular topic, like the political geography or Beleriand or an account of the Valar and their particular areas of stewardship.

For the most part, these essays are embedded right in the middle of the narrative parts, rather than being spun out as their own separate sections, which makes the book even more heavy going than it already is. In addition, Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay’s editorial process has left behind a number of sections in the wider text that essentially repeat what we are already told elsewhere – the essay on the Valar is essentially repeated very shortly after it appeasrs, for instance.

Things are further exacerbated by the weighting given to each section. The five works comprised in The Silmarillion – according to Tolkien’s own plan – are as follows:

• Ainulindalë, a creation narrative relating the formation of the cosmos and the coming of the Valar into Middle-Earth to act as its custodians.
• Valaquenta, the aforementioned essay detailing the Valar.
• Quenta Silmarillion, the history of the First Age as told from the perspective of the Elves, with a particular focus on the War of the Jewels fought by the Noldor against Morgoth, the fallen Valar.
• Akallabêth, a summary of the Second Age focusing on the foundation, decline, and fall of Númenor.
• Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, detailing how the Rings were forged by Sauron and the Elves in the Second Age and summarising in brief what was told in full in The Lord of the Rings.

Of these five the Quenta Silmarillion is by far the longest, with the other four components each essentially only being as long as a longer chapter of Quenta Silmarillion, which of course means that the book as a whole is heavily skewed towards the First Age. Of course, the Third Age is the era of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but the Second Age is very much the poor cousin here, and it’s evident both from this and from the balance of material in Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-Earth that, despite his best efforts, Tolkien simply wasn’t able to make the Second Age as interesting as the First and Third, being as it was essentially an interstitial period between the era dominated by the War of the Jewels and the era of the Rings of Power. This does have the unfortunate upshot that after the end of Quenta Silmarillion the next two sections feel rather anticlimactic, since they are either setting up or actively telling a story which we’ve all ready before.

The issues with the last two sections are exacerbated somewhat because they deviate from the mostly-chronological approach of the earlier sections; in particular, because the Rings of Power are only properly discussed in Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, some important narrative about what Sauron was up to in Middle-Earth before the Númenoreans took him prisoner is missing from Akallabêth, which means the Rings end up mentioned in passing before their importance is actually explained. Given that it’s unlikely anyone is trying to tackle The Silmarillion before reading The Lord of the Rings, this is probably not as much of a problem as it might have been, but it’s still kind of a weakness of the text.

Even within the Quenta Silmarillion itself – the largest and most developed section – there are issues. Thanks to the aforementioned Christopher Tolkien-edited books expanding on major First Age legends – The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, or The Fall of Gondolin – we can now better understand that some sections of the Quenta are more important than the others, and the rest is just there to provide setup and context for them, but this wouldn’t have been so evident when the book was initially released.

So The Silmarillion is a stodgy, difficult read, isn’t 100% pure uncut Tolkien, and isn’t really a conventional narrative novel in the way that The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings are; ample reason for it to get terrible reviews on release. So what’s interesting about it?

Well, for better or worse The Silmarillion is the most accessible way to get a solid overview of the mythic backstory to Middle-Earth that exists; the only alternative is to plough through the morass of The History of Middle-Earth, and that’s not really a sensible suggestion for anyone other than the most passionate of Tolkien fans. Good chunks of this backstory are kind of interesting in their own right, but the biggest effect of reading it is that it then lets you read The Lord of the Rings (and, to a lesser extent, The Hobbit) with a brand new perspective on it all which teases out a lot of aspects which you might otherwise miss. Parts of those stories which previously seemed like mysterious name-dropping of an indistinct past will make much more sense; the import of setting features like the Eagles will change; a lot of Gandalf’s weirder actions make sense. The setting won’t be entirely robbed of mystery – Tom Bombadil still won’t make much sense, for instance – but you will get a new appreciation of the depth of Tolkien’s worldbuilding, and it will be eye-opening enough that it will kind of feel like reading the books for the first time all over again.

The Silmarillion is also interesting as a book essentially concentrating on pure world-building for its own sake. This is the sort of thing which is much more plentiful these days, but was substantially sparser back in the 1970s, with the 1975 Star Fleet Technical Manual being the only other example I can think of with a similar level of mass cultural prominence.

The release of the Silmarillion would have been particularly welcomed by the RPG community (then in its infancy), and the fantasy end of the wargaming community that tabletop RPGs evolved out of. An interest in Middle-Earth on the part of wargamers and roleplayers had long been present – predating Dungeons & Dragons and influencing the shape of its earliest editions, with the original D&D booklets including overt references to Ents and Hobbits and Balrogs which would later be edited after stern talking-tos from various IP representatives.

Of course, Tolkien died before tabletop RPGs were a thing, and Christopher Tolkien was likely not giving much thought to the RPG community when preparing The Silmarillion. That said, it would not be until 1982 that the first official Middle-Earth RPG material would be released – this being A Campaign and Adventure Guidebook For Middle-Earth published by Iron Crown Enterprises as a system-agnostic release (ICE would later bring out Middle-Earth Role-Playing, an official Middle-Earth RPG based on their Rolemaster system). So before that, if you were running a Middle-Earth game then your most useful resources of worldbuilding information would have been The Silmarillion and the appendices to The Lord of the Rings.

I would argue that The Silmarillion may have had a significant effect on the developing RPG community, and not just because of the welcome Middle-Earth details it offered. These were obviously going to interesting to anyone intending to run a Middle-Earth campaign, and I am sure that the book was pored over closely by RPG referees and wargamers interested in including more First Age lore in their games.

However, more generally the book made it clear, even in an obscured fashion, that Tolkien had put an absolute ton of work into his worldbuilding, not all of which necessarily was explicitly disclosed in The Lord of the Rings but all of which ended up enriching the broader tapestry. It was a big, prominent demonstration that worldbuilding need not be improvised and arbitrary – it could also be considered, deliberate, and play to particular themes. This took more work, but the results were for some more rewarding.

Furthermore, The Silmarillion offered a look at how a worldbuilding-oriented product of its nature could be presented – and some pitfalls of that model of presentation. This is significant because there really hadn’t been much in the way of RPG products at that point which offered a sort of high-level overview of a richly developed game setting; plenty have come out since 1977, but the only pre-1977 example I can think of is Empire of the Petal Throne from 1975.

That product had a reputation for being rather inaccessible, but one suspects that this is partly due to M.A.R. Barker’s world of Tekumel drawing on cultural aesthetics that Western audiences were not used to and partly due to the fact that it was the first attempt to make an RPG with a setting quite that rich. Still, it was an eye-catching release at the time – a colourful boxed set in an era when 99% of RPG products were thin little softcover booklets.

1978 would see the release of the original version of RuneQuest, an enormously influential game whose fictional setting of Glorantha, like Tekumel, really didn’t resemble Middle-Earth in terms of aesthetics or underlying philosophy, but had a similar level of worldbuilding depth and attention paid to foundational themes, even though those themes were different. So when you lay out the timeline, you have 1975 offering up the Star Fleet Technical Manual and Empire of the Petal Throne, 1977 yielding The Silmarillion, and RuneQuest bringing up the rear in 1978.

Imagine being someone who was quite into RPGs and SF/fantasy literature in the mid-to-late 1970s – keep in mind that, as discussed in Jon Peterson’s Playing At the World, a good chunk of the success of D&D and other early RPGs arose from the fact that the games managed to reach beyond the typical wargaming audience and became popular among a significant additional audience in the genre fiction literary fandom.

Odds are that all four of those releases are, if not actually directly picked up and read by you, then at least are going to be on your radar. It may have long been apparent to you that the secondary worlds of speculative fiction or RPGs didn’t have to be mere cardboard backdrops supporting the story, and that worldbuilding in its own right could be an interesting hobby (even if the products of that hobby by themselves are not necessarily of interest to anyone who is not extremely interested in the setting) and can enrich the stories told in that setting. But it would not have necessarily been so evident to you how that sort of material might be provided in a non-narrative form. Now you have a brace of examples that have come along.

I think on the basis of the above you could plausibly argue that The Silmarillion may well have helped pave the way for the various products offering wide-scale overviews of RPG settings that would become a pillar of the industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Nobody has actively tried to imitate the format and style of The Silmarillion, and arguably they shouldn’t because it isn’t really a format and style any one person actually aimed for deliberately and it only exists in the form it does because Tolkien died before actually polishing it to the extent he wanted. In many ways it is a failed experiment. But in its failure it offered valuable lessons for the developers of RPG settings and other pure-worldbuilding products to come in the future.