The Silmarillion

• 1. Introduction

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  The Silmarillion begins not with a hero or a quest, but with silence, and then a song. Before the world existed, before stars or seas or the first living creatures, there was only music. That single image, drawn from the opening pages of J. R. R. Tolkien's most ambitious work, tells you everything you need to know about what kind of book you are holding. This is not an adventure novel. It is something far older in ambition: an attempt to create an entire mythology from scratch.

  Tolkien started writing the stories that would eventually fill these pages in 1914, a full half-century before the book reached readers. He was a British Army officer returning from France during World War I, writing in hospitals and on sick leave. The first complete story, "The Fall of Gondolin", was finished in late 1916. By the time he died, the project was still unfinished.

  His son Christopher published the book in 1977, edited with the help of a young Canadian writer named Guy Gavriel Kay. It topped bestseller lists and sold over a million copies. It also received some of the harshest reviews of any book that year. One critic called it "an empty and pompous bore". Another said Tolkien simply "can't actually write". A third predicted more people would buy it than would ever finish reading it.

  So what exactly is The Silmarillion, and why does it exist? The answers to those questions stretch from the trenches of World War I to the libraries of Oxford, from ancient Finnish poetry to the Book of Genesis, and through decades of scholarship that still cannot agree on whether the published book counts as a genuine Tolkien text at all.

• 2. A World Built in Song

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  Eru Ilúvatar, whose name translates as "Father of All", created the Ainur first: eternal spirits described as "the offspring of his thought". He gathered them together and set them a musical theme, asking them to build a great harmony from it. One Ainur, Melkor, whom Ilúvatar had given the greatest power and knowledge of all, broke away from the common melody and began to compose his own competing song. Three times Melkor disrupted the harmony, and three times Ilúvatar overpowered him with a new theme.

  From that cosmic musical contest, the world called Arda was born. The greater Ainur who descended to shape it became the Valar; the lesser became the Maiar. Among the Maiar who followed Melkor were those who would eventually become Sauron and the Balrogs. The Valar labored for ages to prepare Arda for Elves and Men, while Melkor destroyed their work over and over, so that the world was formed through repeated waves of creation and ruin.

  This opening section, called the Ainulindalë or "The Music of the Ainur", draws on a tradition scholars trace directly to St. Augustine's writings on music and to the medieval concept of the divine harmony, sometimes called the "music of the spheres". Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger identified this influence specifically, noting that the creation of the universe as a song harmonised by angels, disrupted by a fallen one, carries deep roots in medieval Christian cosmology.

  The Ainulindalë also carries a direct parallel to the conflict between Lucifer and God in the Bible. Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey draws that line explicitly, and quotes C. S. Lewis, Tolkien's friend, who observed that even Satan was created good. Tolkien has the character Elrond in The Lord of the Rings echo this exactly: "For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so."

• 3. The Jewels That Broke the World

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  Fëanor, son of Finwë the King of the Noldor, created three jewels called the Silmarils, which captured the living light of the Two Trees of Valinor, called Telperion and Laurelin. Those trees were the only source of light in the world before the sun and moon existed. Melkor, who had been released from captivity after feigning repentance, conspired with a dark spider spirit named Ungoliant to destroy both trees and steal the jewels. He also killed Finwë and fled to Middle-earth.

  Fëanor swore an oath of total vengeance: against Melkor, against anyone who withheld the Silmarils, even against the Valar themselves. He made all seven of his sons take the same oath. That single act of grief-fueled swearing set in motion a chain of war, betrayal, fratricide, and ruin that fills the longest section of the book, the Quenta Silmarillion, across 24 chapters.

  The tale of Beren and Lúthien sits at the center of this section and offers the book's most intimate story. Beren was a mortal Man; Lúthien was the daughter of the Elf king Thingol and the Maia Melian. Thingol refused to give his daughter to a mortal, and set an impossible bride-price: one Silmaril, stolen from the crown of Melkor himself. Beren and Lúthien actually succeeded. They entered Melkor's fortress, stole a jewel, and returned. Their achievement was so total that Lúthien later persuaded the Vala Mandos to restore Beren's life and allow her to renounce her immortality so they could share the same fate after death.

  The Silmaril Beren brought back ultimately passed to Eärendil, who used it to cross the sea to Aman and convince the Valar to finally intervene against Melkor. Flying in his ship Vingilot, Eärendil led an assault against Melkor's dragons, whose commander was a creature named Ancalagon the Black. The war destroyed most of Beleriand, which sank into the sea. The last two Silmarils were seized by Fëanor's sons Maedhros and Maglor, but the jewels burned their hands because their oath had made them unworthy. Maedhros threw himself into a fiery chasm. Maglor cast his jewel into the sea and wandered the shores of the world ever after, singing his grief.

• 4. The Island That Drowned

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  After Melkor's defeat, the Valar gave the island of Númenor to the three loyal houses of Men who had helped fight against him. The Dúnedain, as these people were called, received long lifespans and great wisdom through the favor of the Valar. Elros, son of Eärendil and the first king of Númenor, lived to be 500 years old. The island itself lay closer to Aman than to Middle-earth, a sign of special favor.

  Sauron, the former chief servant of Melkor, re-emerged during the Second Age and tried to conquer Middle-earth. When the Númenóreans marched against him with overwhelming force, he recognised he could not defeat them in battle, so he surrendered and allowed himself to be taken as a prisoner to Númenor. There he corrupted the king, Ar-Pharazôn, by encouraging his envy of the Elves' immortality and stoking resentment toward the Valar who had withheld it. The people of Númenor began to fear death so intensely that their obsession with avoiding it only weakened them and shortened their lives.

  Sauron urged Ar-Pharazôn to sail against Aman itself and seize immortality by force. The king assembled the mightiest fleet Númenor had ever seen and launched that invasion. The Valar called on Ilúvatar directly; he destroyed the fleet, drowned Númenor in a great wave, and remade the world, removing Aman entirely from the reachable earth so that no mortal ship could sail there again.

  Sauron's physical form was destroyed in the cataclysm. As a Maia, his spirit survived and returned to Middle-earth, but he could no longer take the fair form he had previously worn. The surviving loyal Númenóreans, led by Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anárion, landed on the shores of Middle-earth. They founded two kingdoms: Arnor in the north and Gondor in the south. Isildur had saved a seedling from Númenor's white tree, the ancestor of the tree of Gondor. Elendil's line would eventually reach the events described in The Lord of the Rings.

• 5. Fifty Years in Draft

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  Tolkien began writing what would become The Silmarillion in 1914. His stated ambition was to create an English mythology, one that would explain the origins of English history and culture, a project he worked on for the rest of his life without completing it. The Ainulindalë section followed "The Fall of Gondolin" in 1917. By 1926 he produced a 28-page synopsis called the "Sketch of the Mythology", written to explain background material to his friend R. W. Reynolds, not for publication.

  In 1937, buoyed by The Hobbit's success, Tolkien submitted a fuller version called Quenta Silmarillion to his publisher George Allen & Unwin. They rejected it, describing it as obscure and "too Celtic". They asked for a sequel to The Hobbit instead; Tolkien began what became The Lord of the Rings. He deeply wanted to publish both works together. When that proved impossible, he set The Silmarillion aside to prepare The Lord of the Rings for readers.

  In the late 1950s, Tolkien returned to The Silmarillion, but his attention shifted toward its theological and philosophical foundations rather than its narrative. He had developed doubts about elements that stretched back to the earliest drafts. During those years he wrote extensively on such questions as the nature of evil in Arda, the origin of Orcs, and the customs of the Elves. He attempted to bring the mythology into line with a Round World version of the creation story, but was persuaded against this in 1946 because it would have conflicted with texts already published in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

  Tolkien died leaving the legendarium unedited, which presented his son Christopher with a task that would take years. The published corpus eventually ran to twelve volumes in Christopher's History of Middle-earth series. Christopher commented in 1983 that, had he taken more time and had access to all the texts, he might have produced a substantially different book.

• 6. The Editor's Dilemma

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  Christopher Tolkien enlisted Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian writer chosen through family connections, to help edit the materials. Kay spent a year with him in Oxford working on the project in secret. The pair's task was to select, arrange, and where necessary invent material from a corpus of documents described as "a creation of unceasing fluidity": some polished, some hasty outlines, some superseded the moment they were written, some left in mid-sentence with names still changing mid-document.

  One chapter in particular, "Of the Ruin of Doriath" in the Quenta Silmarillion, had been left untouched since the early 1930s. Christopher had to construct a narrative almost entirely from scratch to fill it, working within what he understood of his father's intentions. Randel Helms stated directly in 1981 that "The Silmarillion in the shape that we have it is the invention of the son not the father".

  Christopher acknowledged in his 1983 foreword to The Book of Lost Tales that publishing without a frame story had been a mistake. The legendarium itself had always imagined a fictional editor, whether the sailor Ælfwine or the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, who had gathered and translated the tales. Without that framing device in the 1977 book, there was no suggestion within the narrative of how the stories came to be written or by whom. He wrote plainly: "This I now think to have been an error."

  Scholar Gergely Nagy offers a counter-reading: because the book has genuinely been edited and compiled by a single human figure working from many sources, it actually fulfills the very thing Tolkien intended his mythology to be. In Douglas Charles Kane's 2009 book Arda Reconstructed, researchers gained what Nagy called "a hugely important resource", a thorough accounting of exactly which sources, variants, and editorial decisions Christopher used to construct each section of the 1977 text.

• 7. Light as a Central Symbol

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  Verlyn Flieger's 2002 book Splintered Light, which Gergely Nagy notes was the first full monograph written about The Silmarillion, identifies a single thread running through every section of the book: the progressive fragmentation of light from the moment of creation onward. The Two Trees of Valinor, Telperion and Laurelin, gave light to the Blessed Realm. Their destruction by Melkor and Ungoliant was the first great diminishment. The Silmarils themselves were made from that captured light. When the trees died, the Silmarils became the only remaining containers of that original radiance.

  From there, the light kept fragmenting. Eärendil, carrying a Silmaril, was transformed into the Morning Star, his ship Vingilot sailing across the sky. The White Tree of Númenor, whose seedling Isildur saved before the island drowned, carried that lineage forward into the Third Age. Flieger's argument is that this is not incidental imagery; it is the book's structural backbone, connecting cosmology to politics to individual lives across thousands of years of fictional time.

  A secondary creative theme that scholars have identified is what Tolkien called secondary creation, or mythopoeia: the idea that a fictional world can be beautiful precisely because it mirrors God's primary creation. The Ainulindalë enacts this directly. The Music of the Ainur is simultaneously an aesthetic event and a cosmological one; the act of making something beautiful is what brings the world into being.

  Nagy observes that Tolkien went to remarkable lengths to inhabit this concept. He created facsimile pages from the Dwarves' Book of Mazarbul, the ruined record found by the Fellowship in Moria, as physical objects. He thought of his mythology as consisting of texts within the fictional world, documents written and translated by characters inside that world. Nagy argues that Christopher, by inserting himself as editor and compiler in the functional role Bilbo Baggins was meant to occupy, made the published book do what Bilbo's book was supposed to do.

• 8. Reception and Influence

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  Allen & Unwin brought out the first hardback edition in 1977, and the book reached the top of bestseller lists that October. The reviews, however, were harsh enough that Tolkien's publisher Rayner Unwin called them "among the most unfair he had ever seen". Time magazine complained that the book had "no single, unifying quest and, above all, no band of brothers for the reader to identify with". The School Library Journal dismissed it as "only a stillborn postscript" to Tolkien's earlier work. Robert M. Adams of The New York Review of Books called it "an empty and pompous bore" and predicted that most buyers would never actually read it.

  A few reviewers took a different view. John Calvin Batchelor, writing in The Village Voice, called The Silmarillion "a difficult but incontestable masterwork of fantasy" and praised the characterisation of Melkor specifically, calling him "a stunning bad guy" whose chief weapon was "his ability to corrupt men by offering them trappings for their vanity". The New York Times Book Review acknowledged that what was "finally most moving" was "the eccentric heroism of Tolkien's attempt".

  Over time, the book's cultural presence grew through music and other media. In 1998, the German power metal band Blind Guardian released a concept album titled Nightfall in Middle-Earth with 25 tracks, all detailing events from the book. The Norwegian classical composer Martin Romberg wrote three symphonic poems inspired by it: "Quendi" in 2008, "Telperion et Laurelin" in 2014, and "Fëanor" in 2017, premiered by orchestras in Southern France between 2009 and 2017. The British rock band Marillion and the Swedish death metal band Amon Amarth both took their names from the book; Amon Amarth is Sindarin for "Mountain of Doom".

  HarperCollins published a paperback edition in 1999. An illustrated edition with colour plates by Ted Nasmith followed in 2008, after Nasmith had been commissioned in October 1996 to create the artwork. By that point the book had been translated into at least 40 languages. In 2019, the French newspaper Le Monde described it as "the book by J. R. R. Tolkien that rules them all".