The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion
by J.R.R. Tolkien
read: 2014

I would have had a lot of trouble getting through The Silmarillion if not for Professor Corey Olsen's course on J.R.R. Tolkien's works. Tolkien's fascination with names is distracting - he will often give three or four names for something and few other distinguishing details. The prose style is often lifeless, akin to a textbook. But Professor Olsen introduces a concept at the beginning of his lecture series on the book: events in The Silmarillion echo other events in the book, in other works of Tolkien, and other mythological and religious stories. These echoes paint a fascinating, almost fractal pattern reverberating through the world - we see the same behaviors, flaws, tragedies, and triumphs repeated, but writ smaller and smaller as time goes on. We start out with the Valar opposing Morgoth and end with Elves and men against Sauron (and in The Lord of the Rings, men and hobbits against an even weaker version of Sauron). The inhabitants of the world become more and more distant from Iluvitar, the creator of all - in a way that it's not hard to imagine Tolkien (a devout Catholic) finds mirrors our society's relationship with God.