I disagree. It doesn’t have elves and dwarves and dragons, no, but I think it’s lodged firmly in the fairy-story category.
Tolkien firmly insisted that “Leaf by Niggle” was a fairy story, while simultaneously defining “fairy story” in such a way as to very clearly exclude it. I think that he was just in cognitive dissonance from avoiding using the a-word.
Not quite.
I read HOBBIT in 6th grade, I think. My teacher liked me and gave me it and the Narnia books for Xmas. Loved Lewis, liked Tolkien. We didn’t have a lot of money, so I checked books out from the library more than I bought. Our local library had only THE TWO TOWERS, in an edition lacking even a “Okay, here’s what happened last time” preface, so I never got past the first couple of pages.
In 2001, a friend of mine insisted that I go to FELLOWSHIP with him. I agreed mostly because the theatre was a trivial walking distance from my apartment. To my surprise I absolutely loved it (and still do). I bought the books a while later.
The only one of Jackson’s trilogy I do not like is RETURN OF THE KING. Of the other two, FELLOWSHIP is mostly brilliant with one major flaw and a few minor ones; TOWERS is nearly as brilliant, but builds on the minor flaws of its predecessor; and KING is mostly dreck, but has…let me count…four wonderful sequences. It’s better viewed on DVD, since that lets you skip the dreck.
Oh, and SILMARILLION is better than LOTR, and far, far better than HOBBIT.
Another way to approach reading SIL for the first time is to do so with a copy of Fonstad’s “Atlas of Middle Earth” on your lap. That really helped me get it.
I too find SIL more enjoyable than LOTR, tho not by much.
UT’s pretty good too, and all the HOMES volumes relating to writing of LOTR are quite accessible to the non-SIL reader
God, I miss KWF. I can only imagine what she’d manage to do with Wheel of Time or Song of Ice and Fire. I’d kill for a Fonstad atlas for either or both of those series…
I like the Silmarillion, but I agree with the suggestion that maybe you might want to skip the first section. It’s… not the finest way to start the book. In fact, I find that the later in the book a given story is, the more I tend to like it.
Ainulindalë (the first section) daunted me quite a bit at first, but now it’s one of my favorite parts of SIL, and I can even recite chunks of it from memory.
I wondered about this too. Thanks for asking, Chronos, and for answering, Skald. It’s still a bit disconscerting to think that there was a time when you hadn’t read everything.
I seem to recall Ursula LeGuin describing a similar first encounter with LOTR.
I’m going to have to give The Silmarillion another try. The last time I read it was at least 30 years ago, after my first time through LOTR, but it didn’t make much of an impression on me.
I guess I have to try Simarillon again as well. Tried to read it not that long ago, and found it drier than a mummy’s ass. Perhaps I’ll skip ahead a bit, and work my way back to the beginning.
I actually tried (very briefly) to back-translate Ainulindale (no time for diacritics right now) into proto-pidgin Quenya. IIRC, it was either Lost Tales or Unfinished Tales that had a Quenya/Sindarin root-glossary in it. I quickly discovered that it wasn’t anywhere near as complete a glossary as I wanted it to be and that I wasn’t going to be able to deduce Tolkien’s Quenya grammar from first principles, so I dropped the idea. This was well pre-WWW, so I had no supporting documentation other than what books had been published to that point. sigh
I really actually endorse this method. In fact, if you’re feeling intimidated, just skip ahead to “Of Beren and Luthien” - sure, there might be some stuff you’ll be missing in terms of background, but it’s a coherent tale in its own right, and it’ll help start “pulling you backwards” in the chronology. Or if you don’t want to start like 3/4ths of the way through the book, or you feel like you want the “background first”, try starting with Valaquenta. (Though I still feel like a lot of Quenta Silmarillion can be read out of order with little harm to the reader.)
Seconding this. I’ve read several other translations, and Tolkien’s is by far the best. Other translations have read like boring academic exercises, Tolkien’s is genuinely beautiful prose.
Many people like the “distant horizons” feeling that Tolkien evoked by setting LotR in a world with a back history. if you are one of those, don’t read any of the other books.
If you do move into the writings of the First Age, then I think The Silmarillion is an indespensible first stop. It provides a framework for the understanding of all the others.
Unfinished Tales is worth reading, if only for the tale of Tuor, the death of Isildur and the revelation of the location of the tomb of Elendil.
Of the History of Middle-Earth, my favourites were the Lays of Beleriand, the Treason of Isengard (for the expansion of Bilbo’s poem about Earendil) and Morgoth’s Ring. Others were OK; I particularly struggled with volume 9, which I have only read the once and never returned to.
I too like Ainulindale, though unlike you I’m too lazy to do the diaeresis. But it shouldn’t be read first by a virgin.
Ok it’s early in the morning and I’ve just started my coffee, but I’m entirely missing the meaning of this. Other than the similarity in names I can’t figure out why you linked to a Russian politician. Apologies for my mis-spelling Beleriand though.
[QUOTE=Qadgop the Mercotan]
Another way to approach reading SIL for the first time is to do so with a copy of Fonstad’s “Atlas of Middle Earth” on your lap. That really helped me get it.
[/QUOTE]
If you’re too poor for this, the Encyclopedia of Arda is an excellent free online resource that has tons of maps and a huge index of people, races, lands, etc to pore over. I believe it was Qadgop who actually linked this for me recently, and I’ve since found it an invaluable resource when reading the books.
And Christopher Tolkien has found a new napkin covered in his father’s writing : The Fall of Arthur.