Audio CD
Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (July 1, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0553455826
ISBN-13: 978-0553455823
Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.9 x 4.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.7 ounces
Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #4,755,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #40 in Books > Books on CD > Authors, A-Z > ( T ) > Tolkien, J.R.R. #1006 in Books > Books on CD > Literature & Fiction > Religious #1007 in Books > Books on CD > Religion & Spirituality > Fiction
In the Tolkien canon, THE SILMARILLION is the most highly contested of all his works. Constructed as a prehistoric history of the Universe, the book has the cultural significance of the Bible in Tolkien's universe. It is Tolkien's primary work, but it's also his most troublesome, in more ways than one. One thing you need to know. In Tolkien scholarship, there are two primary ways to refer to the "Silmarillion". One is the Silmarillion, the legendarium proper, and then the 1977 SILMARILLION, which may or may not be what Tolkien envisioned.THE SILMARILLION, the book Tolkien spent all of his adult life writing, was, sadly, incomplete when Tolkien died at the age of eighty one in 1973. Naturally, this begs the question why did it take him decades to write the book, and it still be unfinished after all that time? Well, to understand that, you need to understand two things: the scope of the project, and how Tolkien worked.The scope of the book was a complete imaginary history, a totally self-contained mythology, all written and developed for his home country, England (my home country as well). Imagine the Greek and Roman mythologies, all those myths and gods, developed by one man. Imagine Homer completely inventing all the gods for his stories. Imagine how hard that would be to come up with your own mythological traditions as such. No wonder Tolkien had such a hard time completing the work.Now, the scope (which is extremely ambitious for any artist) was compounded by how Tolkien worked. First, he was a philologist first and foremost, and so before the stories he invented languages. All of these languages (which would have taken a life-time to develop on their own) had their own history, and are so interlocked with the mythology that you cannot remove them.
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