The Silmarils are central to everything that befell Middle Earth including the Elf/Dwarf tensions. Everything comes back to the Silmarils.
But the SIL as published is definitely not the story that JRRT was envisioning at the end of his life. CJRT did pull it together, and did his best to keep it from conflicting with LOTR, but to do so, he didn’t include a lot of his dad’s later revisions to the tale. The backstory of Galadriel and Celeborn, for example. The origins of orcs for another.
What we end up with is a SIL that really is not quite canon, in some ways of thinking. Because the canon continued to change up until JRRT died.
And I love Shaw’s reading of SIL too.
Or hear the Professor himself read from The Hobbit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VOdv2RE4jg
True. But the end product is as canon as anything can be, particularly something that is a collection of myths and legends from a variety of sources (the different elf people having different tellings of the same story in the same way as the Gospels).
One of the many joys of playing LOTR Online in the light of listening to the Silmarillion is all the wonderful little touches the designers have imported into it.
Walking among the ancient ruins that strew the landscape becomes so much more poignant when you know what it meant that they were bought down.
I’m just concerned to establish the distinction between the Silmarillion, which is the history and myth of Middle Earth and the Histories which are JRR’s jottings, flase starts and faltering steps to the mythos embodied in the Sil and coming to climax in LOTR.
The Histories are more than that, though. They contain things that JRRT considered to be the new ‘canon’ but did not get embodied into SIL.
JRRT would have regarded SIL as incomplete, and while I love it (more perhaps than LOTR), I love imagining SIL as JRRT intended it, expanded and incorporating the stuff from UT and HOMES and things yet to be even written down.
CJRT has already written about how he’d do SIL differently, if he could, now that he’s really delved into his dad’s notes. Much from HOMES would have been moved into SIL.
I so completely regret not having delved into this thread earlier, but by the time I got around to looking at it the first time, it was already several pages and so I put it off, and put it off, and put it off. But last night I actually sat down and dug in, and now I’m caught up and everyone has already said everything before me!
Okay…the dwarves and the elves. There’s a LONG history of distrust and dislike, broken only by rare spans of time like the partnership in the Second Age between the Elvensmiths of Eregion and Durin’s Folk in Moria (then called Khazad-Dum by the Dwarves). The major problems began waaaay back in the First Age when the Dwarves first started entering Beleriand (the western part of Middle-Earth). The Elves, not realizing they were actual sentient people, hunted them for years (as in, stalked through the woods and hills and killed). Eventually, a truce was called and the Elves realized the Dwarves were a Free People, and the Dwarves started providing craft goods to the Elves. Thingol, the king of the Sindar (grey Elves), had just obtained a Silmaril (a magical jewel…until (or unless) you read the Silmarillion, just consider these roughly equivalent to the Rhinegold from Wagner’s operas…they pretty much just as cursed) and has commissioned the Dwarves to set it into a necklace. The Dwarves become inflamed by desire for the Silmaril (partly because of their own tendency to goldlust and partly because of the curse) and kill Thingol, fleeing his kingdom for their mountain cities. The Elves of Beleriand go after them, slaughter them, and recover the necklace with the Silmaril.
That’s only the beginning of the enmity, really.
For some reason, when I write about Middle-Earth, I start sounding like the narrator of Monty Python and the Holy Grail…
I’d like to have a Super-Canon Silmarillion edition. And once Volume 20 of the Histories (The Laundry Lists of JRR Tolkein) comes out I’m sure we will.
Volume XXI (Graffiti Found On The Walls Of Restrooms JRR Tolkien Was Known To Use)
Thanks for the further backstory info, all, and the clarification on the calendar and dwarves/elves dynamic. That was interesting stuff indeed in your spoiler box, kenobi.
Glad you finally leapt the abyss! I can’t believe the thread has lasted this long – I’m usually a threadkiller of such epic proportions the CIA has my face on its Most Wanted posters. But even I can’t stop the rolling tide of LOTR fan conversations on the SDMB.
The history you describe of Elves hunting Dwarves is awful. I’m not surprised there’s heldover resentment, even after a truce.
It’s interesting that you mention Wagner. Naturally the various almost-Norse names in LOTR have made me think of his works; I think I’ve read that part of Tolkien’s interest in develping these stories was coming up with a similar British legend/mythological history. But I was doing some Googling on various characters the other day and found a message board discussion that I was about to click on when I noticed that it was in fact on the infamous white supremecist community beginning with the word Storm. Blech! And then I thought to myself: huh, how are they coopting Tolkien’s mythology for their own scuzzy viewpoint? In a way, I can sorta see it, with the importance of certain bloodlines being implicitly nobler than the others, but it still seems to go against the message of Tolkien’s work. I didn’t click on to see the discussion, because I’ve never been there and never will, but I was a bit creeped out and indignated for some reason.
LOL! Totally. I mentioned myself earlier that it reminds me of the Icelandic Saga of Eric Njorl as narrated by Eric Idle.
Maybe he finished writing about the Fall of Gondolin on some restroom stall wall somewhere…
Somewhere, we’ll learn that Gondolin was a brand of urinal cake used in Oxford mens’ rooms. 
There are eons of fascinating history lying underneath LOTR. The Silmarillion can read as kind of dry, but the events are…majestic is probably too weak a word. There’s a ton of underlying history behind Elrond and Aragorn, including the fact that Elrond is Aragorn’s great-great-great-great-etc.-uncle. The intermingling of the families and races that produced Elrond and Elros is mind-boggling when you consider just what’s in their family tree. The history of the Drowned Lands is tragic and glorious all at once. The massive tragedy of The Children of Hurin (despite my continuing dislike of Turin) is up there with Shakespeare’s more lurid ones (in plot, not necessarily in prose). As is the tragedy of the sons of Feanor and the Silmarils.
Seriously, I’m a lore freak. Whether it’s Middle-Earth, Dune, World of Warcraft…doesn’t matter, I can discourse on it for hours. Tolkien threads generally make my entire week. So thanks!
Vol. XXII: Things Tolkien Is Thought To Have Muttered in His Sleep, as Overheard by Family and Friends.
D’oh! Of course, I meant the one slain by Turin.
If you get the version recently compiled into a standalone novel, I’d say that it’s the best English prose I’ve seen. Even as every trial and tribulation imaginable befalls Turin, you still can’t help but enjoy reading it, the writing is so good.
I’m not a fantasy fan either and was skeptical but my daughter got me to watch it. If you like stories about good and evil, you will love it. I even loved the characters.
Part of the motivation may also be that Tolkien was (IIRC) attempting to create a *purely English *mythology, one to replace whatever had been wiped out as various waves of mainland ethnic groups invaded and colonized.
Choie - AFTER you (and BigT) read the LOTR you can expose yourself [if you want] to the reams of scholarly criticism printed about the man and his work. You can find critics who say the extreme social conservatism found in the books appeals to fascists. You will find historians who point out that Tolkien himself disliked Hitler, and had no love for the wars which saw his friends killed and his own son put in harm’s way. You will also find feminists who decry the lack of women in the books, and others who point out what a progressive character Eowyn is, considering the author’s Victorian writing milieu. Or you can ignore all this and stick with Bored of the Rings and/or DM of the Rings. You can even love the movies and not like the books. And when you read the books you can skip/skim the poetry if you like. What a glorious geekdom.
Although, if you hang out with us Perfesser Geeks, you’ll eventually learn the history all the way back simply through osmosis, because we just can’t shut up about it!
I can shut up about it any time I want.
I choose not to, though.
It is awful. It also happened about 8,000 years ago. A large part of why the races don’t get along now is just because they’ve never gotten along. No one is directly still bitter about any of the various first and second age events that fed the fire, but the abiding distrust has sunk in pretty deep.