The Silmarillion
Sep. 15th, 2007 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSomebody had to remind me: today is the thirtieth anniversary of the official publication date of The Silmarillion.
I'd gotten my first glance at part of the book nearly three weeks earlier at Mythcon, where Jim Allan, then probably the leading scholar among Tolkien fans, had brought along a dummy copy of the volume. It had the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta, and the rest was blank pages. I got my hands on a complete copy on Saturday, September 3rd, 1977, on a date to visit the Black Point Renaissance Fair. This was with Annette, whom a few of you may remember. She'd gotten a call the day before that the copy she'd preordered had come in, so we stopped in at the small bookstore (now long gone) on the way up. She drove her little VW and I tried to read The Silmarillion aloud above the engine noise for the two-hour drive. Buying my own copy waited, I think, until The Other Change of Hobbit finally got their rather-delayed shipment. I still have that copy.
Some of us who'd been waiting years for this book were a little disappointed, I think. It wasn't another Lord of the Rings, but a summarized telling of high and mighty events without anything hobbit-like in them. And that's as it should be, for it emerged years later that The Silmarillion began as a summary of more vivid, close-up stories that Tolkien had written in his youth, The Book of Lost Tales and the Lays of Beleriand.
I'd been hoping for concrete appendical additions to Middle-earth history, and for those I had to wait for Unfinished Tales three years later. It took a while to learn to appreciate the really sumptuous prose of The Silmarillion - I still think the Ainulindalë is the most beautiful thing he ever wrote - and to realize how enriching to one's understanding of the rest of Tolkien's creation it was to learn just who Húrin and Túrin were, for instance, or what long-ago excesses had made the Elves of the Third Age so abashed and humble.
In those days an old-time Tolkien fan was one who'd read his works before the paperbacks came out in 1965. Later on, an old-time Tolkien fan was one who'd read him before The Silmarillion. (Now it's one who'd read him before the movies.) As the newer fans grew up, people who knew not the days before The Silmarillion and had read it in their teens or even earlier childhood, along with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it emerged that many of them came to consider The Silmarillion their favorite Tolkien work of all. They had no anticipation to overcome, so they were freer to appreciate it on its own merits, which turn out to be considerable.
Not long earlier, Taral had drawn an illustration of a 21st-century Worldcon dealers' room, with piles of legendarily unpublished (or unwritten?) books, like The Silmarillion and Heinlein's The Stone Pillow. Now The Silmarillion is there, taking its place as just one of Tolkien's notable works. We've lost the initial thrill of seeing it, but we have it to read any time we want. Good.
I'd gotten my first glance at part of the book nearly three weeks earlier at Mythcon, where Jim Allan, then probably the leading scholar among Tolkien fans, had brought along a dummy copy of the volume. It had the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta, and the rest was blank pages. I got my hands on a complete copy on Saturday, September 3rd, 1977, on a date to visit the Black Point Renaissance Fair. This was with Annette, whom a few of you may remember. She'd gotten a call the day before that the copy she'd preordered had come in, so we stopped in at the small bookstore (now long gone) on the way up. She drove her little VW and I tried to read The Silmarillion aloud above the engine noise for the two-hour drive. Buying my own copy waited, I think, until The Other Change of Hobbit finally got their rather-delayed shipment. I still have that copy.
Some of us who'd been waiting years for this book were a little disappointed, I think. It wasn't another Lord of the Rings, but a summarized telling of high and mighty events without anything hobbit-like in them. And that's as it should be, for it emerged years later that The Silmarillion began as a summary of more vivid, close-up stories that Tolkien had written in his youth, The Book of Lost Tales and the Lays of Beleriand.
I'd been hoping for concrete appendical additions to Middle-earth history, and for those I had to wait for Unfinished Tales three years later. It took a while to learn to appreciate the really sumptuous prose of The Silmarillion - I still think the Ainulindalë is the most beautiful thing he ever wrote - and to realize how enriching to one's understanding of the rest of Tolkien's creation it was to learn just who Húrin and Túrin were, for instance, or what long-ago excesses had made the Elves of the Third Age so abashed and humble.
In those days an old-time Tolkien fan was one who'd read his works before the paperbacks came out in 1965. Later on, an old-time Tolkien fan was one who'd read him before The Silmarillion. (Now it's one who'd read him before the movies.) As the newer fans grew up, people who knew not the days before The Silmarillion and had read it in their teens or even earlier childhood, along with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it emerged that many of them came to consider The Silmarillion their favorite Tolkien work of all. They had no anticipation to overcome, so they were freer to appreciate it on its own merits, which turn out to be considerable.
Not long earlier, Taral had drawn an illustration of a 21st-century Worldcon dealers' room, with piles of legendarily unpublished (or unwritten?) books, like The Silmarillion and Heinlein's The Stone Pillow. Now The Silmarillion is there, taking its place as just one of Tolkien's notable works. We've lost the initial thrill of seeing it, but we have it to read any time we want. Good.
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Date: 2007-09-15 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 07:16 pm (UTC)I have thought for at least twenty years that "Túrin" was Tolkien's greatest story and wanted a fuller version. What we eventually got slightly disappointed me, not because it isn't every bit as good as I'd hoped, but because I'd already read pretty much all of it.
I still think the Green Hill of Tuna was one of your finest moments.