Bob R Bogle's Reviews > The Silmarillion

In the late 1970s I was in the vanguard of high school nerds who read The Lord of the Rings and such forbidden material as science fiction and fantasy. In the conservative little town where I lived, readers of genera fiction were pariahs. None of us could have anticipated the last few decades in our time, when big-budget science fiction movies are a staple celebrated by the masses. The bigger difference today is how few high school students appear to read books at all.

I bought a copy of The Silmarillion a year or so after it was published in 1977, and I think I was first able to work my way through it in about 1980. It's hard going. I think I re-read some or all of it again a few years later. I read The Lord of the Rings several times many years ago and listened to various audio performances a number of times, and watched the Peter Jackson movies far, far more times, but I'm far from being a Tolkien scholar. I always preferred science fiction, which was more plausible (see below). But a few months ago, when I had an opportunity to read a new (or old) book, I fondly reached for The Silmarillion, which I probably hadn't touched in, maybe, 20 or 30 years.

Already familiar with what I was getting myself into, I must say that this time around I was impressed, and a little surprised, with how coherent and harmonious the various tales which the book contains are in truth. Christopher Tolkien is to be congratulated for this achievement, regardless of the difficulties which the text presents to the reader. It's generally accepted now that these tales are foundational to understanding all of Tolkien's corpus, and easy or hard, The Silmarillion is a mountain which any fan or student of Tolkien must climb, even though it's also true that JRR Tolkien himself almost certainly (certainly) would never have authorized the book to be published. I'm most struck by the darkness of the story of Túrin Turambar, as it seems so out of step with the kind of story which Tolkien otherwise most often preferred: those in which light triumphs over darkness. I'm especially curious about the origins of this story, but as I said, I'm no Tolkien scholar. Still, several more volumes of Christopher Tolkien's contributions remain unread on my shelf, and maybe eventually I'll learn more.

Recently I've become aware of controversy concerning the literary credentials due JRR Tolkien according to those in the literary Establishment, and I'd like to address a few words to that dissonance. Specifically, it's said that those who refer to themselves as "the literati" in general reject Tolkien and what is referred to as "high fantasy" wholesale. Although jealousy is implied to be a cause of the conflict, inasmuch as The Lord of the Rings continues to enjoy broad appeal and to be a smashing success among the, er, "unwashed" book-buying public, it seems to me more probable that the root cause of the conflict is the nature of fantasy-writing itself. While the intelligentsia prize most literary heroes possessed of depth of character who confront the problems of a plausible world, high fantasy tends to be most concerned with intricately detailed worldbuilding and heroes who confront the problems of implausible worlds. The presence of fanciful races (Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, monsters, etc.) are intrinsically fanciful and so are implausible. (Science fiction presumably bivouacs between these poles, as its most compelling works involve intricately detailed worldbuilding that produces presumably plausible worlds.) Another problem with Tolkien, or so I imagine the literati might argue, is the brooding presence of Fate, or a kind of constitutional Destiny, controlling all drama in the world. Surely WWI, if nothing else, annihilated any lingering reliance on a higher power guiding our sad world through its fits and pangs. Belief in, or reliance on, such antebellum belief structures absolves us of responsibility for the world we create, through our deeds and, more often, by our misdeeds, heedless of any but the most immediate consequences, usually measured in dollars. Doubtless it's startling to some that a WWI veteran, as Tolkien was, could have emerged from that carnage with such an antiquated belief system intact. It smacks, in a deeply psychological way, of the very escapist nature with which fantasy is often pejoratively branded. More importantly, an abiding sense of moral predestiny necessarily causes damage to the story-production engine which drives a writer of fiction. If the very nature of the universe conspires to inevitably overthrow Dark Lords, properly dressed in the mantles of those ultimate deus ex machinas, the Ainur of the Far West, the writer's task becomes easier to bear: create a depressing, disastrous landscape and send in the godly beings to restore order. Indeed, it could be argued that the rejection of Destiny is central to the project of the Lost Generation and all who came after. Few of today's politicians, however, embrace that notion that we've moved beyond primordial Good versus Evil, as doing so might require them to fulfill roles as stewards of the world rather than as both auctioneers and profiteers of dwindling resources.

Some readers possess a brand of monomaniacal fervor concerning the intricate details of their preferred texts: Tolkien, Joyce, Melville in Moby Dick, Frank Herbert's Dune universe, and so forth. I am attracted to such complex and multilayered texts, and probably that's what has appealed to me most about Tolkien. Still, I must admit that in my recent reading of The Silmarillion my mind wandered now and again, or maybe more than that, and the reason was because of the implausible world problem I mentioned before. I mean, I'm deeply vested in reading about and learning about history and science, and when I'm reading about Elves and imaginary worlds where all the rivers run north to south and the mountain chains show no evidence of underlying geophysical processes but only a need to fit the story being told, well, I have to ask myself: why am I bothering with this when I could be reading about something with a firmer connection to the real world? Even mainstream fiction takes place in a stand-in for the real world, or at least for a plausibly believable world. An intricate history is probably necessary for compelling fantasy, but is it sufficient? Or rather, can fantasy ever be made sufficient to stand on its own as creditable literature?

I'm not going to answer these questions, which many have already debated. I've already explained why my attention wandered while reading this book. This re-read I found to be better than I remembered, though not so potent to keep me spellbound. And maybe too that's partly because of the different seasons in life when I've come to Tolkien.