OK. Just finished the LOTR trilogy. SPOILER AHEAD SPOILER AHEAD SPOILER AHEAD At the end, when Frodo, Gandalf, and a couple of others head off to the Grey Havens…
I understood the Grey Havens to be a place akin to the Christian concept of Heaven-- that is, the souls of the dead enter there and remain in eternal bliss (assuming they were worthy, that is). People who are living may also enter there and inherit something akin to eternal life (provided they are elves or have the blessing of the elves, as did Frodo & Gandalf).
The Grey Havens (Mithrond) was an actual port city on the west coast of Middle-Earth. It’s the “stepping-off” point for the journey they’ll make to Valinor to join the Valar. The journey is only partly on the seas of Middle-Earth, and eventually leaves the plane of men completely.
But the Grey Havens is completely physical and has been where it is since the flooding of Beleriand.
I read LotR three or four times when I was a pimply teenager. I hope to make time to read it again before Peter Jackson’s first movie comes out next Christmas.
But I wouldn’t encourage anyone to read Silmarillion. It’s like reading one of the books of the Bible that’s all “begats” and “Canaanites this” and “Hittites that.” It took me three attempts to get through, and I felt no better for the experience.
I am so with you, five. I don’t know how many times I read the books (five? seven?) I even read them out loud to my kids when the oldest was about 9. But I have never been able to make it through the Silmarillion. The Appendices are sufficiently accesible, tho.
When Judgement Day comes, God is going to divide the souls of men into two categories. Those who have read the Silmarillion shall be saved. Fiery damnation for the rest.
I happen to adore the Sil, perhaps more than LOTR even. If you are troubled by the biblical cadences and genealogies, then skip them and read the following tales. If you haven’t made it to the Lay of Leithian, Turan Turambar, Beren and Luthien, the Fall of Beleriand, etc…then I highly suggest that you do so.
I’ve recommended this before and I’ll recommend it again: get your hands on a copy of Tolkiens Letters, edited by Humphrey Carpenter. There’s a lot of background info on the stories (and on Tolkien himself) and it’s a good, accessible read. It adumbrates the whole Silmarillion thing without the lofty prose style.
I mean, how the hell else would you ever find out who the hell Feanor was. Or Beren. Or Thingol. Or Earendil. Or any of those damn people with the little symbols on the box of the box set.
It just adds another dimension to the whole story.
It took me several tries to get through the Silmarilion. I don’t think Tolkien ever meant to publish it, and it was just sort of put together by his son and various editors posthumously,IIRC. If you are hoping for any sort of linear novel, don’t bother trying to read it. There are some great stories mixed in with the lineages and history time-line, but you’d be better off trying to approach it as a reference book rather than a novel.
If you do get through it, you might test your mettle against the “Kalavala”, which I am working my way through(slowly). More of that Norsky-stuff.
Well, I’ve read the Silmarillion many times, and I love it - but bear in mind that I also enjoy reading history books. Back in college I wrote a 40-page paper comparing the Turin story to the Siegfried myth. Tolkien really knew his sources.
Gods he did. I can’t think of any scholar this century who understood northern literature quite like Tolkien. It’s just a goddamned shame that he did not publish more scholarly material to benefit the rest of us.
If you have done serious scholarship into Tolkien’s Germanic sources I can only hope you have read The Road to Middle Earth by Tom Shippey. A fabulous Anglo-Saxonist and a student of Tolkien’s, Shippey brings rare depth, insight, and sensitivity into the realm of Tolkien criticism. If you haven’t read it, order it today. Sadly it is out of print, but that shouldn’t stop you.
And I thoroughly second scratch1300’s suggestion of the Letters. My only complaint about them is that they are poorly indexed. But a wonderful read all the same.
Lucie commented that she did not believe Tolkien ever intended to publish the Silmarillion.
To the contrary, this was the driving force of his life from the day the Hobbit came out (1934?) on.
Whether he ever intended the book that Christopher Tolkien put together after his death in response to public demand and entitled The Silmarillion to be published, is quite a different question.
From what I understand, it was Tolkien’s desire to publish the legends of the First Age at length, in a LOTR style, under that umbrella title, since they do mesh together as a history of the Silmarils much as the close-of-the-Third-Age stories mesh as a history of the Ruling Ring.
However, what he invented as “background” for the LOTR beyond what was already in existence as unpublished First Age material led him to feel that for consistency he needed to rewrite the entire First Age myth complex. And he was already an old man when he began to do this, and for a few years was still on the full-time faculty of Oxford. Besides which, his typical writing style closely resembled the typical thread here, which heads off in directions the OP never intended.
Net result: only a small portion of the at-length epic Silmarillion was in place at his death. What Christopher then did was to take what he could of that, summaries of the other material he had prepared over the years, and miscellaneous other First Age material, and cobble together from them a book that had something loosely resembling a sequential prose style and more-or-less equivalent “depth” in all sections, and publish that in response to popular demand.
Depending on how interested you are in the background history of Middle-Earth, I’d also suggest the series of volumes that Professor Tolkien’s son Christopher put together posthumously from the notes he left behind. Be warned, though, that they’re not coherent novels. I love them, but then I’m the kind of person who goes crawling through them trying to reconstruct a Quenya and Sindarin vocabulary/grammar so I can translate the Silmarillion back into its original language. I wish I still had the time, energy, and attention span to do that kind of thing…
To address the OP, insofar as it hasn’t been dealt with, rastahomie hypothesized:
Well, as noted above, the West (Aman, the Blessed Land) and not the Grey Havens is what we’re talking about in such eschatalogical questions. Mithlond was simply the port of embarkation for sailing there.
However, it’s important to recall that Tolkien was a practicing Catholic Christian and a leading scholar of medieval times as well.
In quick summary, the Elves (as was true of the longaevi, the medieval spirits that inhabited the world about us) are “tied forever to the Circles of the World.” Their destiny, in the Tolkien mythos, is to live with the Valar, the angelic demiurges who are responsible for Middle-Earth, in Aman. (Valinor is the inhabited part of that continent, the areas north and south of it having other names; Valmar or Valimar is their capital city.)
Men, on the other hand, have “a destiny beyond the Circles of the World” which the Valar are forbidden by the One to tamper with. Death in this context is seen as a freeing from the world (at least before the Shadow influences man to fear it) to enter upon that ultimate destiny.
The exceptions are interesting: Earendil and Elwing, Halfelven, are entitled to Aman, with Earendil having the duty of sailing his ship bearing the surviving Silmaril, which is the Evening/Morning Star; his father Tuor is accounted as one of the Eldar (despite being a man by ancestry) through his marriage to Idril and his work for Ulmo (=Neptune) as regards Gondolin; Beren and Luthien, he being a man and she being half Elf and half Maia (“enlisted” angel, as opposed to the Valar, who are “officer” angels), go to the human destiny beyond the world, as, ultimately do Aragorn and Arwen.
Trying to write a Christian mythos set B.C. left Tolkien with a need to avoid religion in the story, and the sole hint of the ultimate destinies of the two races is in one line quoted in Unfinished Tales, to the purport that “at the end of time the choirs of the Valar and of the Two Kindreds will make a new music before the throne of Iluvatar.”
Also bear in mind that The Western Isles were the pre-Christian British idea of paradise after death.
Tolkien was a professor of anglo-Saxon and he drew on ancient British and Norse mythology to build Middle-Earth.
I had quite a laugh visualizing Gandalf the Grey nibbling on continental breakfast in his wizard’s robe, or conspiring with Aragorn in the lounge near the piano bar (Are wizards good tippers?).
I wish I still had the time, energy, and attention span to do that kind of thing…