Just Silmaril Things

I listened to the Silmarillion a couple months back. Strong recommend! That’s it, that’s the post, cut here.

This was my first time through the JRR Tolkien Basement Tapes. (The History of Middle Earth are the Bootleg Series I guess?) He’s the genre’s Mount Fuji, I know, but when I was a kid I bounced off the Valaquenta. I wanted to know about Beren and Luthien and the ride of Fingolfin and the fall of Gondolin and Gil-galad and the battles against Morgoth, and all that’s in there, but you also have to get through an exhaustive description of each Valar first, and the long long journey of the elves west to Valinor. It’s of a piece with the epic / scriptural models, yes, the Bible has its begats and the Iliad has Book 2 where Homer does the Marvel Comics crossover event team-up page for every Achean culture hero, but it was rough going for this expectant eight-year-old. Though I ran out of steam right after the death of the trees, when the tragic cascade begins. Maybe it was dread that stopped me.

The Silmarillion’s models were meant to be spoken, and comes into its own when read aloud—not a book, a proclamation. Andy Serkis’ version is the one I listened to, wonderful for the breadth of character—the recording opens with a long letter by Tolkien about the themes of the project, and Serkis’ delivery in the professor’s voice makes a wonderful contrast to the main work’s high elven bardic pronouncement. The medium fit the message.

Toward the end, we get a brief overview of the Rings of Power and the Third Age—surprisingly brief compared to the depth of saga so far. I was excited for this part, in the way you’re excited about seeing a favorite character pop up in a long-running series. And there it is, at the end: a paragraph or two of the “Heir of Isildur,” “Curnir the traitor,” “the King of Rohan,” and so on, culminating:

Yet in that hour was put to proof that which Mithrandir had spoken, and help came from the hands of the weak when the Wise faltered. For, as many songs have since sung, it was the Periannath, the Little People, dwellers in hillsides and meadows, that brought them deliverance.

For Frodo the Halfling, it is said, at the bidding of Mithrandir took on himself the burden, and alone with his servant he passed through peril and darkness came at last in Sauron’s despite even to Mount Doom; and there into the Fire where it was wrought he cast the Great Ring of Power, and so at last it was unmade and its evil consumed.

I love this last paragraph for how wrong it is, how insightfully wrong. When I was listening to it the first time I didn’t even catch the factual errors (“and there into the Fire where it was wrought he cast the Great Ring of Power”??? did frodo write this). I was so caught on:

…and alone with his servant…

That’s Sam. That’s all Sam gets in the Silmarillion! This isn’t outrage I’m feeling here, not precisely, it’s wonder. Is this intentional? An accident of composition? A joke of Guy Kay’s or Christopher Tolkien’s? Personally I imagine the Professor himself, philologist, student of text and tale, laughing Somewhere unguessed by elves. Hour after hour of declamations about the House of Feanor and the line of Isildur, and here at the last, in the grand chronicle we must imagine being transcribed by some great bard: a moment of betrayed perspective, a reader’s sudden sharp consciousness of an unreliable text.

Of course it’s unreliable, it’s a transcribed oral tradition! But this is the one point in the fantasy of the Silmarillion on which we, the readers, proceed with authority. We can check the bard’s math. We were there, Gandalf: we were there at the close of the Third Age. Frodo did not cast the ring “into the Fire where it was wrought.” “Alone with his servant!” No Gollum at all—imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings that doesn’t understand Gollum! (And I thought that a version that didn’t understand Faramir was a crying shame…) The previous paragraph mentions the Witch-King falling at the battle of Pelennor Fields, but says nothing at all about Merry, or Eowyn.

Two thoughts, divergent. First: how amazing, at the end of a magisterial text, to invite the reader to rethink the whole damn thing. Not to undermine it, to lampoon or lambaste—but to encourage new questions, new depths of thought, insight: who else was there? At the ride of Fingolfin, at the kinslaying of the Teleri? What haven’t we seen, for the light of all this majesty? What isn’t told? What has been forgotten?

Second: there’s something to be learned here about form. It is impossible to write the events of the Lord of the Rings as a novel without Sam standing forth as one of the great heroes of the story. Without Eowyn’s (and Merry’s) defeat of the Witch-King assuming pride of place as the story’s great triumph of arms. Without Gollum. Yet in the epic mode, in the saga mode, it’s almost impossible to mention Samwise Gamgee, the old Gaffer’s son, gardener of Bag-End—let alone to praise him with great praise.

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No major announcements today—I’m deep in the lab on something exciting, but it’s “basic research” exciting, not “product for immediate rollout” exciting, so I can’t share much. Nice to get the pens full and the ink flowing again, though.

If you’re looking for a good summer read, I adored Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, a lighthearted and fun fantasy riff.

Take it easy, and happy reading!

(edit: mixed up Merry and Pippin! What I get for firing off a post without letting it simmer…)