The original condensed Silmarillion

I see where camwyn has posted a retelling of Tolkien's Silmarillion in one thousand words.

Pretty amusing, and it reminds me that I wrote my own "Condensed Silmarillion" in less than 300 words back in 1977, in a fit of overload, having read the book three times in the first month after publication - once just to read it, once as research so that I could write what turned out to be the first ever published chronology of the First Age (in the Minas Tirith Evening-Star of the American Tolkien Society), and once as part of a two-person team reading it aloud for the benefit of some blind friends who didn't want to wait for the talking book version to come out. (In those days audiobooks for the non-blind were almost unknown, and talking books often didn't appear for years.)

Reading the whole book aloud on a tight schedule was hungry work, and every time we saw a reference to "The Green Hill of Túna" it made us hungrier. So I baked one. Fish loaf with parsley on top.

So: "The Condensed Silmarillion." It went something like this. ( Read more... )

This was the text of the playlet "The Return of the Shadow ... Puppets" as performed by The Not-Ready-for-Mythcon Players in 1996, and on that page you may also find a link to the alliterative surfer epic Beowatch we did the next year. Yes, Mythcons can be fun.