i started re-reading the silmarillion yesterday on an impulse and i'm having a really good time with it, more so than i was expecting to honestly.
like a lot of folks, i read a lot when i was a kid and into my teens before really falling off. this was around when i was 16, 17? i think it was a one-two punch of having a really, really bad english lit teacher, and becoming much more aware of my tastes in other mediums.
i never stopped reading altogether, but i became a one or two books a year kind of person for a long time. i still loved to read whenever i did so; but the part of my brain that made me binge books was still dormant.
for whatever reason, circa 2018 (9 years later!) i started reading quite a lot again. i don't really remember what the book that did it was. towards the end of the year i downloaded a really good little reading list app that let me keep track of what i'd read, how much i liked it, and how much i wanted to read. i read a lot of absolute bangers that year but the one that stuck with me most was 'The Lions of Al-Rassan' by guy gavriel kay. i could try and give it a synopsis, but i think it best to say of all history's fantasists i think kay's prose might be the most beautiful. i've read a lot of his stuff since then, and aside from the aforementioned the one that stuck with me the most is his 'Sarantine Mosiac' duology which yes, is where the screen name comes from.
the vibrancy with which that city is painted made it a very easy place to identify with. but, beyond that, there's a recurring phrase within those books (and many of the books written since) - sailing to sarantium, idiom which means to seek ones fortune. it always stuck in my head for some reason, like song lyrics (kay is very good at at). my favourite deployment of it is in another book, written years later, set years later, but not read so many years later. sarantium has fallen, and been renamed (it is, at its core, kay's vision of constantinople). a character finds himself on a journey to then sarantium, now asharias and ruminates that, despite its 'fall' he finds himself sailing to sarantium. the phrase haunts him like a ghost and i find it haunts the back of my thoughts too.
anyway, this reads me back to the silmarillion, because the last paragraph of christopher tolkien's forward to the first edition is, of course "In the difficult and doubtful task of preparing the text of this book I was very greatly assisted by Guy Kay, who worked with me in 1974-1975."
i of course knew that kay had helped organise and compile the silmarillion but seeing it there on the page, words i must have read as a child but that i now possessed context for really hit me. there was a palpable sense of returning home.
i think i read the silmarillion twice before this. once probably the year the return of the king movie came out, and once in my mid teens. i liked it very much; i like all of tolkien's work very much, despite all the caveats an adult, possessed of all the terrible context, must, as moral imperative give to that. i re-read the lord of the rings in 2018 because it seemed to me a terrible thing to have never read it with an adult's understanding. on balance, and trying to be measured, i would probably say it is the greatest work of fiction i've ever read. some beliefs i suppose are immutable.
i never liked the silmarillion as much. again i liked it very much, but i found it a much more difficult book. so i was surprised at how much i enjoyed it, picking it back up. part of it is simply that, having acquired a master's of research in medieval history, my idea of what constitutes difficult prose is now, very, very different. another is that i know approach it from a sense of nostalgia, rather than discovery. but i think my taste's have shifted.
i always found it very easy to sink my teeth into the middle parts of the quenta silmarillion; the 'heroic' tales of turin and beren. which is not surprising really. but the beginning, the theological part i never enjoyed. and i think that's where my taste is, this time around i enormously enjoyed reading what is, in essence, tolkien's attempt at writing the book of genesis. i find the theology of it all, and the construction of it, fascinating and enormously rewarding. simply put, it hits for me in a way it never used to; i find myself totally enamoured with what tolkien is going for.
here are a couple of passages i that particularly stuck out to me:
"His (Melkor) envy grew then the greater within him; and he also took visible form, but because of his mood and the malice that burned in him that form was dark and terrible. And he descended upon Arda in power and majesty greater than any other of the Valar, as a mountain that wades in the sea and has its head above the clouds and is clad in ice and crowned with smoke and fire; and the light of the eyes of Melkor was like a flame that withers and pierces with a deadly cold."
in terms of pure imagery, i find it incredibly striking. nobody could do it like tolkien. here is another:
"Wisest of the maiar was Olorin. He too dwelt in Lorien, but his ways took him often to the house of Nienna, and of her he learned pity and patience. . . of Olorin that tale (the quenta silmarillion) does not speak; for though he loved the Elves, he walked among them unseen, or in form as one of them, and they did not know whence came the fair visions or the promptings of wisdom that he put into their hearts. In later days he was a friend of all the Children of Illuvatar, and took pity on their sorrows; and those who listened to him awoke from despair and put away the imaginations of darkness."
because, of course, on returning home it is always of great comfort to find gandalf there.
i really liked writing this. i wish i had the juice to write more stuff like it more often; the thoughts float around my head but sitting down to do it feels near impossible. this goes for fiction too. both are restrained by the profound, crippling embarrassment i feel sharing any of the shit in my head. i don't know where it comes from and i certainly don't know how to overcome it.
finished my silmarillion re-read yesterday. took me a while, mostly because i got pretty distracted from it. i think it’s a pretty remarkable achievement, flawed as it is in many ways. there’s a power and a melancholy to it than is genuinely entrancing. those stories have stuck clearly in my head for so many years now and they’re going to remain there for the rest of my life i suspect.
for the curious, i blitzed through the back chunk of the quenta silmarillion in one sitting, so everything post beren and luthien. it’s just too much of a bummer to stretch it out piecemeal - the fall of beleriand is genuinely very affecting and the mood of grandiose melancholy is really arresting.