Ancient Geeks: The Silmarillion

October 19, 2026

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The Silmarillion was J.R.R. Tolkien’s life’s work. Seriously, he worked on it his entire adult life. Published posthumously, it tells the story of the first two ages of his world, focusing on the tragic history of the Elves, with a great deal of human tragedy thrown in for good measure. Plus the creation of the world, the plots of an evil god, and the further plots of his protege. It’s more than a backstory to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit; it’s a mythopoeic saga that stands on its own.

It’s also a challenging read, which is why Tom tried to read a couple of times before, and failed. He succeeded in summiting The Silmarillion this time, with Steven’s encouragement. Steven read it long ago, and re-read it for this episode. What are our thoughts on this unique piece of fantasy literature, from the perspective of both a first-time reader and a long-time fan? Did it add to our enjoyment of Lord of the Rings? What are the best parts of this series of interconnected tales? Does anything rival the depth and breadth of its world-building? And to whom would we recommend this book?

Elves! The power of song! Elves! Treks across the world! Elves! Hubris! Elves! Who’s for Melkor? Elves! Sacred trees! Elves! Defying the gods! Elves! Balrogs and orcs and spiders, oh my! Elves! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

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11 responses to “Ancient Geeks: The Silmarillion”

James Joyner

October 19, 2026 at 9:15 am

I bought it shortly after it came out in paperback, maybe 1979, and don’t think I made it through. Aside from The Hobbit, though, I find Tolkien to have been a fantastic world-builder but a rather weak storyteller. The Lord of the Rings books were a slog for me because they’re discursive to the point of stream of consciousness.
1. JohnSF
  
  October 19, 2026 at 11:48 am
  
  I’m inclined the other way round.
  For me the LOTR storytelling enables a suspension of disbelief in the holes in the world-building.
  Tolkien was not a historian, and it shows.
  1. JohnSF
    
    October 19, 2026 at 4:59 pm
    
    Interestingly, along with indications of increasing ambivalence about his earlier “Valar as gods” approach, Tolkien was apparently in his last years contemplating a total re-write of The Silmarillion to drop all the “flat earth” (and “geocentric”?) bases of the mytho-history, which he increasingly viewed as an intellectually unsatisfactory mistake.
    
    But that entirely borked so much of the “legendarium” that he never got very far with it.
    It’s interesting that if you come across some of the later fragments of his writing, he was increasingly abandoning faux-epic for a more “realistic” style, and the tragedy of human beings caught up in war of Powers.
    Some of which later writing was included in the published Silmarillion
    
    “…Sitting in the shadow of the stone there was a woman, bent over her knees; and as Hurin stood there silent she cast back her tattered hood and lifted her face. Grey she was and old, but suddenly her eyes looked into his, and he knew her; for though they were wild and full of fear, that light still gleamed in them that long ago had earned for her the name Eledhwen, proudest and most beautiful of mortal women in the days of old.
    ‘You come at last,’ she said. ‘I have waited too long.’
    ‘It was a dark road. I have come as I could,’ he answered.
    ‘But you are too late,’ said Morwen. ‘They are lost.’
    ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘But you are not.’
    But Morwen said ‘Almost. I am spent; I shall go with the sun. Now little time is left; if you know, tell me! How did she find him?’
    But Hurin did not answer, and they sat beside the stone, and did not speak again; and when the sun went down Morwen sighed and clasped his hand, and was still; and Hurin knew that she had died.
    He looked down at her in the twilight and it seemed to him that the lines of grief and cruel hardship were smoothed away.
    ‘She was not conquered,’ he said; and he closed her eyes, and sat unmoving beside her as the night drew down.”
    
    1
Kathy

October 19, 2026 at 10:08 am

The description is so enthusiastic I’m almost sorry to skip it.
JohnSF

October 19, 2026 at 1:09 pm

Tolkien did indeed work on it continually, which was part of the problem of his not ever getting it finished, imho.

It’s interesting if you look at the Lost Tales how it began.
A philologers fascination with invented languages and their evolution in relation to an imagined history.
A poetic inclination that blended “elves” and “spirits of place” with a nostalgia for a fading rural England.
Various stories he told his children.
And a desire to create the missing “epic of the English” on a par with the Celtic/Romance “epic of Arthur”.
So emerges Aelfwine of England, the first narrator/protagonist.
And the Simarillion narrative develops.

Then Tolkien writes The Hobbit in the mid 1930’s.
About the same time, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis agree to write a “space travel fantasy”, while Tolkein would do a “time travel” one.
Which on Lewis’s part produced Out of the Silent Planet in 1938 (followed by Perelandra in 1943 and That Hideous Strength in 1945, Lewis being rather better at getting books done, lol).
Tolkien never completed his side; but the unpublished Lost Road and Notion Club Papers essentially set out the story of Numenor and its fall.

So when Tolkien was being encouraged to write a “follow up” to The Hobbit, the sequence of the Silmarillion and the Downfall was there to provide a framework to which the “further adventures of Hobbits” was pulled towards, and The Lord of the Rings developed.

The connection of all perhaps being Tolkiens shift from “imagined epics” to a consideration of the possible bases of “falls from grace”: the Numenoreans sought “escape from death”, the elves “escape from deathlessness”.
Both attempts laid them open to being screwed over by Sauron.

And sets up the endings of LOTR, which are all tinged with loss and regret: the triumph and tragedy of Frodo, of Galadriel and Celeborn, and (arguably the real ending of the book) of Aragorn and Arwen.
When Aragorn is about to die:
“I say to you, King of the Númenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.”
And afterward, Arwen departs and accepts death alone in a deserted Lorien.
reid

October 19, 2026 at 2:12 pm

I, too, started to read it in my teen years and failed to complete it. (An anti-rite of passage?) I’ve come to realize from earlier podcasts that Dr. Taylor and I share a desire or need to understand “the world”, even a fictional one, and that’s certainly true here. But that desire could only take me so far….
Matt925

October 19, 2026 at 6:58 pm

I bought it in hardback when it came out but didn’t get through it all until at least a decade later. Upon reflection, Silmarillion is an amazing achievement in world building but was only enjoyable at a few points, and really added little to the enjoyment of (re)reading LotR.
As someone with a little training in history and archaeology, I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more in the raw form of JRRT’s drafts and notes, instead of an edited and partially-polished edition. It might be more fun to delve into the ancient history of Middle Earth in the form of fragmentary documents of varying style and completeness—as we do with actual history.
1. JohnSF
  
  October 19, 2026 at 7:32 pm
  
  It’s there in the published “unfinished” works.
  But Tolkien never really worked it all from earlier poems and “legends” into a narrative in novelistic form, and seems to have been increasingly unhappy and retconning a lot of the early writings.
  What rather small parts of it he did re-write fully are quite impressive, imho.
  He simply did not have the time left to re-do all of it.
  
  For instance, there is on fragment about the Numenorean attitude to those they considered “men of the darkness”:
  “Your time of dwelling in these hills is come to an end. Here the men of the West have resolved to make their homes, and the folk of the dark must depart – or be slain.”
  Tolkien was increasingly inclined to the view that those who followed the path of Power, even if initially “Good”, as liable to become arrogant, cruel, and in the end corrupted.
  
  There is also the same thing about some elves, especially the Feanorians: enemies of Melkor they might have been, but also often high-handed, implacable, and sometimes vicious.
  
  Which is perhaps why the Hobbits end up being the saviours of the world.
  They were not aiming at Power.
  
  See also Tom Bombadil, who could have obviously taken and mastered the Ring, if he had wanted to.
  But just had no such desire for Power.
  
  1
Hal 10000

October 19, 2026 at 9:13 pm

I read it. A bit of a slog but it has its high points. Jess of the Shire has a great YouTube video summarizing the whole thing.
JohnSF

October 19, 2026 at 10:16 pm

Contrary to some others here, I found The Silmarillion rather easy to read.
Just a bit obviously iffy as to what the heck the Valar thought they were up to, assuming their “godlike” stature, how unpleasant the elves often were, and how the cosmology was rather daft (on which point Tolkien himself came to agree).
It was not a finished narrative, because Tolkien’s plotting of it never worked out to that.
He devised a rather incoherent legendarium in his relative youth, and never really systematised it.
Given that, it’s remarkable how well LOTR adapted the pre-extant world to make a reasonably coherent end of it.
And that The Silmarillion was more or less configured to provide a prehistory of LOTR, and to set up the context of the moral failings of various parties: elves, Numenoreans, Saruman, etc.
And the partial redemption at cost of those failings by Frodo, Sam, Galadriel, etc.
Steven L. Taylor

October 20, 2026 at 11:51 am

One thing’s for sure: this topic has resulted in the most engagement of any episode subject to date!

I appreciate the thoughts!