The Silmarillion (1977)
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien · Published posthumously in 1977, edited by Christopher Tolkien · composed across five decades
Plot
The Silmarillion isn’t a novel. It’s a legendarium — a compiled mythology spanning tens of thousands of years, from the creation of the universe to the end of the Second Age of Middle-earth. Tolkien worked on it for most of his adult life and never finished a publishable version; his son Christopher assembled and edited the one we have from decades of drafts. What follows is the arc of the ages, not a linear summary.
The Music (Ainulindalë). The supreme deity Eru Ilúvatar exists in the Void and creates the Ainur, angelic beings. He calls them to sing a Great Music: “Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music.” The mightiest of them, Melkor, introduces discord — he wants to invent a theme of his own instead of harmonizing. Ilúvatar weaves the discord into a greater pattern and then shows the Ainur their music made real: the physical universe, Eä, “the World that Is.”
The World’s Making (Valaquenta). The Ainur who enter the world become the Valar, its stewards. Melkor corrupts, breaks, destroys their work; they rebuild. They create the Two Lamps, which he shatters. They retreat to the West and create the Two Trees of Valinor, which bathe their realm in light. The Elves awaken in the darkness of Middle-earth under the stars.
The Silmarils and the Oath (Quenta Silmarillion). This is the heart of the book. The greatest Elven craftsman, Fëanor, captures the light of the Two Trees inside three indestructible jewels: the Silmarils. He grows pathologically possessive of them — “Fëanor began to love the Silmarils with a greedy love.” Melkor, working with the monstrous spider Ungoliant, destroys the Trees, murders Fëanor’s father, steals the Silmarils, and flees back to Middle-earth. Fëanor renames him Morgoth (“The Black Enemy”) and swears with his seven sons an unbreakable oath of vengeance: “They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by the name even of Ilúvatar, calling the Everlasting Dark upon them if they kept it not.” Defying the Valar, they slaughter their fellow Elves to steal ships and sail into exile in Middle-earth, cursed by Mandos to eternal sorrow.
The First Age Wars. Centuries of hopeless, beautiful, catastrophic war between the exiled Elves (and their mortal human allies) and Morgoth. The book zooms in on the great tragedies:
- Beren and Lúthien. A mortal man and an immortal Elf-princess undertake a suicidal quest to cut a Silmaril from Morgoth’s iron crown. Through love and sacrifice they succeed. Lúthien eventually surrenders her immortality to die with Beren. The only unambiguously redemptive story in the book.
- Túrin Turambar. The Narn i Hîn Húrin — the tragic novella at the book’s core. Túrin, the son of the defiant hero Húrin, is cursed by Morgoth from birth. Despite immense courage he is manipulated into killing his best friend Beleg, unknowingly marrying his amnesiac sister Niënor, and finally, when he learns the truth, committing suicide with his own sword. A human Oedipus under a dragon’s spell.
- The Fall of Gondolin, the Fall of Doriath, the Third Kinslaying. One by one the great Elven kingdoms fall, some to Morgoth, some to Fëanor’s cursed sons, who keep fulfilling their oath long after it’s stopped making sense.
The War of Wrath and the End of the First Age. Eärendil the Mariner, carrying a recovered Silmaril, sails West to beg the Valar for salvation. They march on Middle-earth in overwhelming force, destroy Morgoth, cast him into the Void. The continent itself is broken in the process.
Akallabêth. The Second Age. Men are given the island kingdom of Númenor in reward for their role in the war. Over centuries they grow resentful of the “Gift of Men” — mortality — and, seduced by Morgoth’s surviving lieutenant Sauron, they sail to conquer the Undying Lands. Ilúvatar himself intervenes. Númenor sinks. The surviving faithful flee back to Middle-earth.
Of the Rings of Power. The bridge to The Lord of the Rings. Sauron forges the Rings in the Second Age. The stage is set for everything Tolkien’s novels describe. The long diminishment of the Elves begins, and the Dominion of Men takes over the world.
What the Book Is About
Tolkien is doing something almost no other writer in the twentieth century attempted: building a mythology from scratch. Not borrowing one, not adapting one — composing one, with its own theology, its own cosmogony, its own fallen-angel problem, its own theory of death, its own languages, its own thousands of years of pseudo-history. The Silmarillion is the scaffolding. The Lord of the Rings is a single story told in one corner of the world this book constructs.
The deep argument of the legendarium is about sub-creation — Tolkien’s own term for what artists do. Humans create because the divine Creator made creation itself; what we make is a shadow and a reflection of that original making. But sub-creation turns toxic the moment you start to possess what you’ve made. Aulë the Smith, who secretly makes the Dwarves, immediately offers them up to Ilúvatar: “As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made.” Ilúvatar grants them life. Fëanor, who makes the Silmarils, refuses to release them and, at the cost of everything, loses them forever. The two craftsmen are the book’s moral diagram. Make freely, give freely, and you participate in the Music. Make to possess, and you become Morgoth.
The other great theme is mortality. Tolkien takes the Christian concept of death and does something strange with it: he calls it the Gift of Men. “It is one with this gift of freedom that the children of Men dwell only a short space in the world alive, and are not bound to it.” Elves are immortal but bound to the world — they fade with it, grieve endlessly, watch everything they love decay. Men die and escape. When the Númenóreans try to refuse the Gift, demanding to live forever, the island sinks. Tolkien is refusing the consolation most fantasy reaches for. Immortality is the curse. Death is the mercy.
The book’s final word is profoundly ambivalent. Morgoth loses. But the Two Trees are gone. The Silmarils are scattered — one in the sky, one in the sea, one in the deep earth. The Elves are leaving. The magic is fading. Men inherit a broken world. Tolkien called this the “long defeat” and argued that within a Christian framework it was still possible to write hopefully inside it. The Music encompasses even the discord. Evil serves a greater design it cannot see. But the losses are real and Tolkien refuses to pretend otherwise. The last pages of the book are an elegy.
The Cast
Eru Ilúvatar. The supreme deity. He initiates the Music, he responds to Melkor’s rebellion by weaving it into a greater theme (“For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful”), and he intervenes directly only once — to sink Númenor. He’s the designer whose design is bigger than the rebellion against it.
Melkor / Morgoth. The fallen angel of the legendarium. The mightiest of the Ainur at the beginning — “from splendour he fell through arrogance to contempt for all things save himself.” His primal act is not violence but possession: “‘This shall be my own kingdom; and I name it unto myself!‘” Everything that follows — the corruption of the Trees, the theft of the Silmarils, the enslavement of Men — flows from that one claim. He is Satan and Prometheus and the Norse giants rolled into one figure, and he is eventually thrown into the Void, defeated but not quite gone, because his malice is already seeded in the world.
Fëanor. The greatest and most terrible of the Elves. His mother died giving birth to him — “never again shall I bear child; for strength that would have nourished the life of many has gone forth into Fëanor.” He creates the most beautiful objects in the world and cannot release them. His oath damns his entire line and kills thousands of his own people. He dies in a blaze of his own rage: “so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke.” He is the book’s central tragic figure — a Lucifer among the Elves, the artist corrupted by his art.
Beren and Lúthien. Tolkien’s great love story and the one mortal-immortal pairing the legendarium allows. Beren, a hunted human outlaw, dares to love the Elf-king Thingol’s daughter; Thingol, trying to get rid of him, demands a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown as the bride price. The two of them succeed — by love, by music, by Lúthien’s willingness to lay down her immortality. They’re buried in the same grave under the name “Beren and Lúthien,” which is what Tolkien had carved on his and his wife Edith’s actual gravestones in Oxfordshire. This is the story he cared about most.
Túrin Turambar. The book’s Achilles — or rather its Oedipus. A young warrior doomed by Morgoth’s curse on his family. Every heroic act he performs brings greater ruin. He kills his best friend by mistake. He slays a dragon. He unknowingly marries his own sister, who walks into the river when she learns. He talks to his own black sword: “‘Hail Gurthang! No lord or loyalty dost thou know, save the hand that wieldeth thee… Wilt thou therefore take Túrin Turambar, wilt thou slay me swiftly?‘” The sword says yes. He falls on it. He is the argument in human form for the horror of fate.
Eärendil. The mariner who sails the Silmaril to the West and begs the Valar for salvation. He ends the First Age. His Silmaril becomes the Evening Star. He’s the figure who shows that mortal action matters — that a single voyage can save the world, even after the gods have stopped intervening.
Symbols
| Symbol | What it signals | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| The Two Trees / the Silmarils | Divine light captured by artistic genius, then lost forever | Valinor and Fëanor’s vault; one Silmaril eventually becomes the Evening Star |
| The Music of the Ainur | The universe as composition; free will and providence harmonized | The Ainulindalë, the creation scene |
| The sea | The longing for the West, the lingering echo of the divine Music | The whole geography of the legendarium; Ulmo’s voice calling Tuor |
| Morgoth’s iron crown | Power built from stolen beauty | Angband, until Beren and Lúthien cut the Silmaril out |
| The sinking of Númenor | Hubris meeting ultimate limit; mortality as the refused gift | The Akallabêth |
| The Grey Havens (not in this book but looming) | The long goodbye of the Elves; the diminishment of magic | The unwritten horizon the book aims at |
Key Debate
Free will or divine providence? The Music of the Ainur stages this debate explicitly. Melkor introduces his own theme, trying to assert a will independent of Ilúvatar’s. Ilúvatar responds: “For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” The argument is Augustinian — evil is permitted but encompassed, rebellion serves a design it cannot see. Ilúvatar wins on metaphysical grounds, but Tolkien doesn’t use that victory to cheapen the human cost. The Elves who die still die. Fëanor’s oath still ruins everyone it touches. Providence redeems the story globally; locally, it doesn’t soften the grief.
Mortality: curse or gift? The deep theological argument of the legendarium. Men are given death; the Númenóreans come to see this as a curse and demand immortality. The Valar, trying to explain, send them the Messengers: “‘And the Doom of Men, that they should depart, was at first a gift of Ilúvatar.‘” Men refuse the argument. The island sinks. Tolkien is explicitly refusing the immortality fantasy that most of his genre lives on. The Elves, who have what Men want, spend the book grieving — because an immortality bound to a fading world is a curse, not a gift.
Possession vs. sub-creation. The third and subtlest debate. Aulë makes the Dwarves in humility and gives them up. Fëanor makes the Silmarils in pride and holds them tighter until they destroy him. Melkor doesn’t make anything — he can only corrupt. The pattern runs through every major figure: what you create is measured by whether you can release it. Ulmo’s warning to Turgon gets the whole ethic into one line: “Love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart.” The book’s strongest moral position.
How It’s Written
The Silmarillion doesn’t read like a novel and isn’t meant to. Tolkien wrote it in deliberately archaic, elevated prose — closer to the King James Bible and the Elder Edda than to anything twentieth-century. Sentences have an Old-Testament rhythm; names pile up in long genealogies; whole chapters summarize centuries. The effect is supposed to be a reading of ancient scripture rather than a narrative in the modern sense.
Christopher Tolkien, in his introduction, explains the technique: “my father came to conceive The Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity (poems, and annals, and oral tales).” The book is framed as a later-age anthology of legends, which is why the tone shifts — the Beren and Lúthien chapter is more intimate because it’s “compressed from a great Lay”; the Narn i Hîn Húrin is almost novelistic because it’s supposed to be from a near-contemporary source. The flat narration of the kingdom-falls is annals-style because that’s what an annal would do.
The structure is liturgical. Ainulindalë (the Music), Valaquenta (the Valar), Quenta Silmarillion (the main narrative), Akallabêth (the Downfallen), Of the Rings of Power. Each has its own voice. The whole thing is shaped like a sacred text — creation, rebellion, long defeat, eschaton — and this is intentional. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, was building a secondary world that could hold a religious imagination without quite being a religion.
Connections
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces — Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. The Silmarillion is one of the great twentieth-century generators of Campbell-shaped stories: Beren and Lúthien, Túrin, Eärendil. Whether Tolkien was using Campbell is debatable; that Campbell’s framework describes these stories almost perfectly is not.
- The Divine Comedy — Dante on Christian cosmology as epic architecture. Tolkien is doing the twentieth-century equivalent — a sacred text in three movements, each genre pitched to the region of the afterlife (so to speak) it’s describing.
- The Iliad — the epic-hero catalogue, the warrior code under doom. Túrin is Achilles with the tragedy dialed all the way up — same rage, same excellence, same inability to escape fate. Tolkien read Homer in Greek; the debt is deliberate.
- The Odyssey — the long voyage home. Eärendil is an Odyssey in a single chapter: the mariner who sails impossibly far and returns with salvation. Tolkien’s sea is Homer’s sea with Christian theology poured into it.
- The Knight in the Panther’s Skin — Rustaveli’s heroic-chivalric code under a religious architecture. A medieval epic that, like Tolkien’s, treats friendship, loyalty, and doomed love as the central virtues. Different continent, similar mythic weather.
- Don Quixote — the modern novel consciously parodying the medieval-epic tradition Tolkien is reviving. Where Cervantes empties out the chivalric romance, Tolkien rebuilds it with twentieth-century philological rigor. They’re the opposite ends of a four-century conversation about how to take the mythic past seriously.
Lineage
Predecessors
- the-divine-comedy (c. 1320) — sacred cosmology as literary architecture
- the-iliad (c. 8th century BCE) — the doomed warrior under fate; the epic-hero catalogue
- the-odyssey (c. 8th century BCE) — the voyage as myth; the sea as threshold
- the-knight-in-the-panthers-skin (12th century) — the chivalric-religious code under a Christian architecture
- The Prose Edda and the Elder Edda (13th century) — Norse mythology, Tolkien’s primary structural model (not yet in this vault)
Successors
- Most twentieth-century fantasy that treats myth-building seriously, from Le Guin’s Earthsea to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, operates downstream of what Tolkien proved possible here