No, the good Oxford don was merely a translator and annotator of an ancient work of literature known as the Red Book of Westmarch. In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are presumed to have been written by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the Red Book also contained a large collection of ancient folklore known as Translations from the Elvish. It’s from this section of the Red Book that The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and Unfinished Tales are presumed to have originated.

To me, this is one of the truly fascinating things about Tolkien’s world that sets it on a higher pedestal than just about any other work of fantasy. Middle Earth extends beyond the printed page. Like the actor who stays in character between performances, Tolkien pretended in his letters and private writings that he really was just a quaint British scholar dusting off old books of lore.

Tolkien was an early example of the kind of complete, obsessive immersion you find today in devotees of Second Life or World of Warcraft. I can only imagine what the stuffier dons at Oxford must have thought of this elderly chap whiling away the hours alone pretending to be a scholar of an invented world, writing philosophical treatises about it, mapping it out, trying to smooth out its inconsistencies. Certainly Tolkien’s pal C.S. Lewis never went to such extremes with his Narnia fantasies. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about someone creating such a detailed, fantastic world — called “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — but even that was speculative fiction.

And so there’s something both satisfying and frustrating about this posthumous collection of stories. Unfinished Tales is really just a big hunk of Tolkien fetishism. You get JRRT at his most didactic, listing chronologies of imaginary kingships as if he were tracing the lineage of Jesus. You get Christopher Tolkien at his most pompous, pointing out all of the petty differences between versions of his father’s stories in lots of dry footnotes.

All this for what? Well, for stories. Fiction. And fiction about Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, no less. Sometimes I would finish some of the drier chapters of Unfinished Tales — say, the listings of the kings and queens of Númenor, or an account of the battles fought in the margins of LOTR by the Rohirrim — and really have to struggle to remember that this was all just part of a made-up story.

Because in the final analysis, what Tolkien’s doing with these stories isn’t scholarship or historical research. It’s pure fiction, just the same as the Flight to the Ford or the Council of Elrond or the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It might feel like scholarship, but it isn’t really. Tolkien’s a storyteller at heart; he just tells them in a different way than anyone before him.

That leads me to the frustrating aspect of Unfinished Tales. There are lots of these seemingly endless endnotes where Christopher Tolkien talks about the different versions of the story at hand. Did his father really intend for Ar-Adûnakhôr to be the nineteenth or twentieth king of Númenor? In the appendices of Return of the King he says one thing, in draft A he says another, in draft B he says a third thing, in a letter to a fan he wrote a fourth thing, and furthermore if you compare the dates of the drafts you find that… zzzzzz.

I mean, really, who cares? We don’t give an urn of warm troll spit about Ar-Adûnakhôr. He’s just one of the thousands of names in the margins. I felt like smacking Christopher across the face and saying, “You’re the frickin’ editor now, dude. None of this is really germane to the story your Dad was trying to tell. Nineteenth or twentieth, doesn’t matter — just pick one.”

For another example, take “The Quest of Erebor,” a behind-the-scenes look at how Gandalf came about getting involved with Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. Christopher Tolkien presents multiple drafts and fragments that his father wrote on the subject, with plenty of editorial commentary and endnotes in between. The drafts really don’t differ all that much. Any half-decent editor could have stitched together a 90% complete and cohesive narrative of “The Quest of Erebor” without adding a single word of their own.

As for the last 10% — why didn’t Christopher just take a co-author credit and flesh it out? We already know that Christopher found enough in the Túrin saga to put together a relatively complete Children of Húrin. Guy Gavriel Kay helped him finish The Silmarillion. Most of the tales in Unfinished Tales end with a long summary by Christopher Tolkien of how the rest of the story was supposed to go. It’s not like he was transcribing the words of Moses here — why couldn’t he just finish the ones that were close to being finished?

On further reflection, though, I can think of two words that summarize why you shouldn’t flesh out your father’s notes and outlines, and those words are “Brian Herbert.” (Read my take on the first three Dune prequels.) Besides which, Christopher had a very good justification for treating the material with the reverence of a historian: his Dad wanted it that way.

Tolkien wanted his mythology to be fragmentary and occasionally contradictory; he wanted these histories to read like summarizations of retellings of half-remembered legends. As if JRRT himself was only the latest in a long line of scholars attempting to construct a complete history of Middle Earth without access to the original source materials. I think he would be tickled to discover that his writings were being treated with the same scholarly fussiness that he himself employed.

Tolkien himself recognized the absurdity of all this, as son Christopher quotes him in the introduction to Unfinished Tales:

I am not now at all sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good — certainly not for me who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the curious effect a story has, when based on very elaborate and detailed workings, of geography, chronology, and language, that so many should clamour for sheer “information,” or “lore.”

If you want to see how far Tolkien’s self-awareness goes, look at the story of “Aldarion and Erendis,” which I couldn’t help reading as autobiographical. The tale concerns a prince of Númenor who strives to reconcile his love for a woman with his obsessive love of the sea. He spends years denying one or the other — either staying home and tending to his marriage, or voyaging afar on the sea and neglecting his wife. The resulting bitterness makes a sham of his marriage and sows evil in the Númenoreans that will eventually lead to their downfall hundreds of years later. It’s one of the best chapters in the book.

Now I don’t know much about J.R.R.’s wife Edith and what their marriage was like. But I’m sure there must have been many a tense night when J.R.R. secluded himself in his study with his funny little maps and philological note cards, leaving Edith to wonder if she should have married William the tax attorney instead. I’m sure a lot of women reading this story nod their heads, thinking about their husbands who like to seclude themselves in the attic and obsess over their online gaming/model trains/fantasy baseball/Civil War recreationism/whatever. (I don’t want to be sexist or exclusionary — but isn’t this kind of fetishism generally a male thing?)

“Aldarion and Erendis” stops somewhere in the middle, and J.R.R. left only scattered notes about where he intended to take the story, but it’s clear that things were headed for a bad turn. Aldarion’s desire for the sea and Erendis’ stubborn resentment cannot be reconciled. Tolkien always works in dichotomies — good vs. evil, Frodo vs. Gollum, fealty vs. treachery, etc. — and one could argue that the main “theme” of his work is how we make our way through the world by steering between these moral pylons. I wonder if Tolkien found this particular story too painful to finish.

Aside from “Aldarion and Erendis,” the Túrin fragments, and “The Quest for Erebor,” the other major treats of Unfinished Tales include:

• “Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin,” which contains a breathtaking scene of Ulmo, the lord of waters, appearing before a mortal Man (see the third book cover on this page), as well as a fantastic description of the hidden city of Gondolin
• “The Drúedain,” an essay about those jungle pygmy dudes that help Théoden’s army get to Minas Tirith in Return of the King, and including a short story, “The Faithful Stone”
• “The Istari,” an essay on the Order of Wizards that included Gandalf and Saruman, including some tantalizing information about Alatar and Pallando, the two “Blue Wizards”
• “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” which offers many of Tolkien’s musings on the First Couple of Lórien, including much speculation about Galadriel’s ban from returning into the West

If you haven’t gone much beyond Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films — if you couldn’t get through The Silmarillion — if you didn’t look longingly at the maps of Middle Earth in those volumes and hunger to know what was in those blank spaces — then don’t bother with Unfinished Tales. You’re the kind of person who’s probably never bought the Special Extended Limited Edition DVD version of a film specifically so you can listen to the Visual Effects Supervisor’s commentary, which wasn’t on the original DVD, which you also own. And this is okay. You’re what we call “normal.”

But if you think you just might have a touch of the obsessive fanboy in you, give Unfinished Tales a whirl. I think Unfinished Tales is about as geeky-obsessive as I get. I have no desire to slog through all twelve volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s “History of Middle Earth” series. Though I might just breeze through The Tolkien Reader if I feel up to it. And maybe Roverandom. And maybe Smith of Wooton Major…

Sador is speaking here about the race of Men, and his statement may sum up Tolkien’s recently published novel as good as any. Children of Húrin is a tale about fear and Man’s futile attempts to wrest honor and courage from the jaws of certain doom. It’s a major new work, though incomplete, and one of the clearest distillations of Tolkien’s thought since the publication of The Silmarillion in the late ’70s.

Those who have already read The Silmarillion will find a lot that’s familiar here. (For those who haven’t, be warned that there will be spoilers here.) The Children of Húrin is just an expanded version of the tale of Túrin Turambar, the longest (and best) chapter from that book. Having just recently read The Silmarillion myself, honestly this tale doesn’t seem all that different from the previously published version; fragments of the story also appeared in Unfinished Tales.

Technically, The Children of Húrin can be read as a stand-alone tale. It has a beginning and an ending, for the most part. But I imagine that readers who had trouble getting through The Silmarillion will have a difficult time understanding the context of what’s happening here. Who is this Morgoth, exactly? What’s all this about Fëanor and his sons? Christopher Tolkien does a rather poor job in the Introduction at summarizing the larger context of the story. We’re left with passages like this:

The second son of Finwë was Fingolfin (the half brother of Fëanor), who was held the overlord of all the Noldor; and he with his son Fingon ruled Hithlum, which lay to the north and west of the great chain of Ered Wethrin, the Mountains of Shadow. Fingolfin dwelt in Mithrim, by the great lake of that name, while Fingon held Dor-lómin in the south of Hithlum. Their chief fortress was Barad Eithel (the Tower of the Well)….

Or, more concisely stated, Yawwwwwwwwwwn.

So here’s basically what you need to know. Once upon a time the Valar (the gods) invited the immortal Elves to the land of Valinor in the West. There Fëanor, the smartest Elf in the pack, made three one-of-a-kind jewels called the Silmarils. But the evil god Morgoth stole them and took off to the land of Beleriand. Fëanor and many of his people went after him, rebelling against the Valar and taking an oath never to rest until the Silmarils had been recovered. The Elves established a bunch of kingdoms in Beleriand and have been fighting Morgoth for a few hundred years now (with the help of the Edain, the good Men).

But the tale of the Elves is really not as crucial in The Children of Húrin as that of Men. The main character of the book, Túrin son of Húrin, is a Man, after all. And the book revolves around this character’s noble, yet futile, attempts to rise to greatness.

It’s said in The Silmarillion that Elves are bound to the Earth. The Elves are immortal, and even when they die their souls sit in the halls of Mandos (a Hades of sorts) until they’re eventually resurrected. But Men have been granted the gift of death by Eru the One, their Creator. This means that Men’s souls leave the circles of the world when they die and go someplace that nobody, not even the Valar, know where.

Fine. Except when Men first wake up after their creation, it’s Morgoth they stumble into first. Without the Valar around, Morgoth pretends to befriend the first Men and turns death — originally intended as a gift from Eru — into something to dread and fear.

Fear, as I mentioned before, is the predominant theme of Children of Húrin. And it seems to be the primary Achilles’ heel of Men in Tolkien’s world, one we see arise again and again throughout the book. Dorlas shrinks from facing the dragon Glaurung from fear; Brodda the Easterling conquers Dor-lómin but is afraid to harm Húrin’s wife Morwen; Mîm the Dwarf ultimately betrays Túrin’s hideout from fear of the Orcs who have kidnapped his son; and so on.

But the house of Húrin is a race apart. “This land might pass into [Morgoth's] dominion,” Húrin tells his wife. “But if things do go ill, I will not say to you: Do not be afraid! For you fear what should be feared, and that only; and fear does not dismay you.”

The faithful household retainer Sador tells Túrin that “a man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.” And so Túrin takes up arms against his foes even though others counsel him to hide and preserve his strength. Niënor stands in front of the dragon Glaurung and tells him to his face “The children of Húrin at least are not craven. We fear you not.” Húrin defies the will of Morgoth himself under torture in Angband, and brings down the curse of Morgoth upon him:

But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.

Húrin, undaunted, replies:

Such things you spoke long ago to our fathers; but we escaped from your shadow. And now we have knowledge of you, for we have looked on the faces that have seen the Light, and heard the voices that have spoken with [king of the Valar] Manwë. Before Arda you were, but others also; and you did not make it.

If this confrontation sounds familiar, it should. It’s essentially a reworking of the Book of Job in the Old Testament. God allows the Devil to throw calamity after calamity on the hapless Job in an effort to test his faith; here Morgoth puts Húrin on a chair and bids him to watch how his children Túrin and Niënor fare against his onslaught of evil.

But here’s the interesting thing: Tolkien’s sympathies are with Túrin Turambar, much as they were with Fëanor in The Silmarillion. There’s a nobility in the character that overarches everything he does, even though it leads to ruin in the end.

It’s very interesting that throughout the history of Middle Earth — in all of Tolkien’s major works — the constant reaction of the Elves and the Valar, the “good guys,” is to run and hide. Confronted with Morgoth’s betrayal and Fëanor’s rebellion, the Valar wall off their sacred realm of Valinor and stay there. Thingol and Melian retreat behind the enchanted Girdle around the forest of Doriath. Turgon and Finrod make themselves scarce inside their secret realms of Gondolin and Nargothrond. And in The Lord of the Rings, three of the remaining Elvish lords — Elrond, Galadriel, and Thranduil — stay entrenched in their protected havens, while the fourth, Círdan, is basically just hanging out in Middle Earth to help hustle anyone who will go back to Valinor.

And the race of Men? Well, we’re the weak ones, the fickle ones, the Lesser Children of Eru. But while the sons of Fëanor bitch and moan about their stolen Silmarils for hundreds of years, it’s the Man Beren who actually dares to go to Angband and do something about it. When Sauron grows strong in Middle Earth during the Second Age, the Elves sit back and let it happen while the men of Númenor go forth and kick some ass. Even in the Third Age, the Men of Rohan and Gondor are the ones who are putting their butts on the line to challenge Sauron. Remember that in Tolkien’s Two Towers, there was no brave cadre of Elvish archers coming to the rescue at Helm’s Deep like in Peter Jackson’s film.

Nobody embodies this boldness and nobility so much as Túrin. Círdan sends a message to Nargothrond telling them, “Shut the doors of the fortress, and go not abroad. Cast the stones of your pride into the loud river, that the creeping evil may not find the gate.” But Túrin refuses to be a hostage to his fate and to huddle in a cave. He calls Círdan’s messenger “a runagate from war,” and says “it will still seem better in our case to muster our strength, and go boldly to meet our foes, ere they come too nigh.” The Elves run from the dragon Glaurung; Túrin insists on going forth to challenge him.

Unfortunately, the greatest attribute of Men is also what leads to their downfall. Remember Gimli saying in The Return of the King that “With its own weapons was [Mordor] worsted”? So it is with Men. If the impulse to rebel against fear and darkness is what inspires us to great deeds, it also leads to the pride that’s our undoing in the end.

Notice all the examples of handicap, decay, and degeneration in The Children of Húrin. There’s Sador Labadal, who accidentally sliced off part of his foot due to his carelessness with an ax (very symbolic, that). There’s Brandir, the clubfooted leader of the men of Brethil. There’s Gwindor, the Elf of Nargothrond who only escapes the dungeons of Angband after losing a hand. And then there’s Mîm, last of a dying breed of Petty-Dwarves devolved from greatness due to their pettiness and greed.

What happens to Túrin in the end? Túrin can’t rise above his circumstances. He seeks to ennoble the race of Men and restore his house to greatness; instead, time and again his pride blinds him to the better advice of those around him. Pitting himself against Glaurung the dragon is one thing; but to defy Morgoth? Remember that this is the dude that literally invented evil. He was the one who sought to mar Eru’s divine plan during the very act of creation itself.

So Túrin is doomed to slay his friends through many a case of mistaken identity. He leads the great Elvish fortress of Nargothrond to ruin, he unknowingly marries and impregnates his own sister, and he in general hastens the collapse of all Beleriand under the armies of Morgoth.

In the end (as Tolkien tells in The Silmarillion), it’s not force of arms that conquers Morgoth. It’s the selfless mission of mercy to Valinor undertaken by Eärendil that causes the Valar to finally step out from their refuge and call on the help of Eru. Just the same, it’s not Aragorn’s army that ultimately wins the victory over Sauron in The Lord of the Rings; it’s Frodo’s pity in not slaying Gollum (and Bilbo’s, and Sam’s, and everyone else’s).

So are we to admire Túrin or pity him? Is he a character to look up to or a character to revile?

Perhaps, as I noted in my discussion of The Return of the King, one side of Túrin Turambar can’t exist without the other. In The Children of Húrin, it seems to me, Tolkien’s moral determinism strikes again. Túrin’s story isn’t so much a cautionary tale as it is an observation. Tolkien is saying: This is how Men are. This is how Eru created the world. This is the symphony the great Composer in the Sky has composed for us.

***

(One small side note: The book is filled with glossy full-color paintings from Alan Lee, which was an unexpected treat. Most of these paintings are quite phenomenal. But am I wrong to feel gypped that, in a book that spends so much time dealing with a dragon, there isn’t a single clear illustration of a dragon here? I admit dragons are a somewhat predictable topic for cover art on a fantasy novel. But I’m surprised that Houghton Mifflin would publish such a major commercial book with such a subdued and unassuming cover. You think the Tolkien estate twisted HM’s arms?)

***

(Another note: Why would Christopher Tolkien choose to omit the further material about Húrin’s death, which appeared both in The Silmarillion and The War of the Jewels? The fragment that appears in the book’s last pages feels jarringly incomplete. At the very least, I would have liked to see the scene where that little fucker Mîm the Petty-Dwarf gets what’s coming to him. Oh well.)

The Hobbit, by contrast, contains:

• A character who invents the game of golf by knocking the head of the goblin Golfimbul into a rabbit-hole
• Dopey trolls named William, Bert, and Tom, who speak in Cockney
• Goblins who sing doggerel verse like “Clap! Snap! The black crack! / Grip, grab! Pinch, nab! / And down, down to Goblin-town / You go, my lad!”
• Silly Rivendell elves who giggle too much and sing verses like “O! tril-lil-lil-lolly / the valley is jolly, / ha! ha!”

If you’re going to read the complete works of Tolkien properly, you definitely should not follow The Silmarillion with The Hobbit. (Read my take on The Silmarillion.) I was planning to read The Children of Húrin or Unfinished Tales next, but I don’t own copies of these books at the moment. So rather than get off my duff to go buy them, I decided to read the next Tolkien novel I had at hand, and now I wish I hadn’t. The works are so unalike in tone they don’t even seem to be written by the same person, much less take place in the same world.

Originally, Tolkien’s intent was to keep The Hobbit a light children’s fable with a few cameo appearances from the characters and places of his Middle Earth mythology. And so Elrond has a token role, and the swords of Gandalf and Thorin were made in Gondolin, and there’s a passage about how the Mirkwood elves were “descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West.” After giving a brief child’s overview of the difference between Light Elves and Dark Elves, Tolkien concludes unhelpfully, “Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People.”

There’s a lot of this irritating condescension throughout the course of The Hobbit, and at several points, I was tempted to just throw the book down and move on. The plot for the first half of the book goes something like this: Gandalf the wizard picks Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit of no special ability or importance, to accompany a band of dwarves on a quest, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Dwarves, wizard, and hobbit have unconnected adventure after unconnected adventure, wherein Bilbo largely sits back and does nothing. Bilbo stumbles on a magic ring by sheer luck, which allows him to sit around and smirk at the dwarves while still doing nothing.

Then something interesting happens: about halfway through the book, The Hobbit grows up.

Suddenly Bilbo is thrust into a position of responsibility. And then not only must he make the standard decisions that any hero must make — should I take responsibility? should I take command? should I risk myself for the sake of others? — but by the end he gets thrust into a number of more complex moral dilemmas as well.

And this is where The Hobbit ventures into territory that’s most peculiar for a children’s novel. Whereas the first two-thirds of the book is quite simplistic, the last third is strangely psychological and postmodern. I hadn’t remembered this from my previous readings, and I wish I could give Tolkien credit for planning such ambiguity from the beginning. But the book doesn’t read that way. It reads more like a tale that’s quite content to bumble along for a while until Tolkien discovers some use for it.

In the book’s last third, the dragon Smaug, until now just a convenient cipher of evil, turns out to be strangely human. He’s hoarding Thorin’s ancient treasure — but as Tolkien clearly points out, he doesn’t really have much use for it. It’s not like Smaug can cart some of that gold down to Laketown and go on a spending spree. So why does he hang on to it? Here Tolkien starts talking about how the wealth casts a “spell” and an “enchantment” on all who see it. Why does Smaug guard the treasure? Because he can’t help himself. He’s compelled to.

But not only is the treasure not much use to Smaug — it’s not much use to Bilbo or Thorin’s company either. “Had you never thought of the catch?” the dragon tells Bilbo. “A fourteenth share, I suppose, or something like it, those were the terms, eh? But what about delivery? What about cartage? What about armed guards and tolls?” Men, elves, dwarves, goblins, and dragon were all living in a nice-if-imperfect equilibrium before Thorin’s arrival, with the gold safely tucked away in legend. But now suddenly the arrival of Thorin’s company and their lust for gold has thrown everything into chaos.

Once the dragon has been disposed of (thanks to the much-too-convenient appearance of an English-speaking bird), things get even more unsettled. Not only do the men, elves, and dwarves all begin squabbling over who deserves what share of the money — but Tolkien goes out of his way to give everyone a pretty damn good claim too. Men deserve a share because their gold is mixed in the hoard, and they slew the dragon, after all; the elves deserve a share because they stepped in to aid the Laketown people after their town was destroyed, at great personal risk to themselves; and the dwarves deserve a share because they inherited it in the first place.

And it’s here where Bilbo makes the redemptive move that proves he’s a hero and not just a bystander. He pilfers Thorin’s prized Arkleseizure Arkenstone jewel and tries to use it to bring a peaceful settlement to the conflict. It’s a moral labyrinth that’s quite beyond the prepubescent audience the book’s opening chapters are written for: Bilbo steals something valuable that’s not his, lies to and betrays his friends, and then gives it away to provide the men and elves bargaining leverage to secure peace.

Having made his point about the corrosiveness of wealth and the moral greyness that clouds everything (cf. the oath of Fëanor from The Silmarillion), Tolkien decides he’s had enough. He quickly wraps things up with a rather anti-climactic battle at the end, which reads like an excerpt from a more adult work altogether, and Bilbo goes home.

In fact, the whole novel reads like a condensed, simplified version of The Lord of the Rings. Both works have a quest that begins with moral clarity and ends in ethical confusion; a seductive evil at the heart of the quest that warps the minds of those around it; and hobbits who begin the tale as small, insignificant players but eventually find a place on the wider stage. Some of the principle characters are conquered by evil and pay for it with their lives; others persist to the end because of their innate humbleness and resistance to greed.

Whether fortunately or unfortunately, Tolkien wasted enormous amounts of time and energy later in life trying to smooth out the inconsistencies between his three major and somewhat incompatible works (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion). He went back and made a few alterations to the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter where Bilbo encounters Gollum and finds the One Ring. And he very cleverly hinted in the marginalia of LOTR that Bilbo Baggins himself was responsible for writing The Hobbit — thus providing a convenient explanation for the jocular tone. The Hobbit therefore isn’t just a children’s tale, but a hobbit children’s tale, told by a hobbit, and told by a somewhat self-important hobbit who isn’t exactly a disinterested third party.

So there’s The Hobbit, in a nutshell: a pleasant children’s tale that morphs suddenly into an unsettling adult one, with some clumsy footwork to try and justify the shift. If Tolkien had never finished The Lord of the Rings and his son had never posthumously published The Silmarillion, we might be remembering The Hobbit as an odd, yet charming, story that began as high adventure and found postmodernism along the way.

***

(Actually, if you want to think about it another way, The Hobbit provides a nice little allegory to the U.S. situation in Iraq. Bush/Thorin decides he’s going to slay the dragon/Saddam Hussein. The dragon/Saddam warns that while evil, he’s actually a stabilizing factor in the region, and that his death will only cause chaos. Once the dragon/Saddam is gone, Bilbo Baggins/Colin Powell attempts to find a peaceful compromise, only to be tossed out on his ear by Bush/Thorin. Previously subdued rival factions — elves/Sunnis, men/Shiites, dwarves/Kurds — begin bashing each other to pieces. Meanwhile, foreign infiltrators — goblins/Iranians, wargs/Syrians, eagles/British — pour over the border…. How far do you want me to go with this?)

This will probably be my fourth round trip through the whole cycle, the first being sometime around 1978 and the last coming somewhere around 1996. So as I go back and revisit Middle Earth, I’m going to blog about my impressions here. I assume just about everybody in creation has either read the series or seen the Peter Jackson films by now, so I won’t worry about spoilers.

*****

I’m always struck by people who claim to love The Lord of the Rings but find The Silmarillion impossible to read. In the same vein, I wonder exactly why LOTR readers from the ’60s and ’70s went so gaga over it.

To me, The Silmarillion is what the whole thing is about. The Silmarillion is the cake of Tolkien’s work, while The Lord of the Rings is largely the frosting. (Which might leave The Hobbit as that gooey ribbon of fudge that runs through the middle.) Now there’s nothing wrong with indulging in a nice big dollop of frosting — I’m a sucker for that salty-sweet stuff they put on cheap grocery store cakes — but it’s more satisfying when you’ve got something to anchor it.

So if you’ve read The Lord of the Rings and you haven’t read The Silmarillion — or at least spent long hours studying the appendices in Return of the King — then you’re missing the Big Picture. You don’t really know what Tolkien was up to. You’ve got a great adventure story with some fabulous characters and a peerless amount of detail around the edges, but that’s about it. For many people, that’s enough.

So what was Tolkien up to? Once you see the entire tapestry laid out, you realize that J.R.R. Tolkien was writing one of the world’s great parables about mankind’s Fall from Grace.

The main thread of The Silmarillion chronicles the rebellion of the Elf Fëanor against the Valar, the gods who are his shepherds, teachers, and protectors. Both are faced with the treachery of the evil Morgoth, who mars the world the Valar built and steals the Silmaril jewels Fëanor created. The Valar choose to fence themselves inside their land of Valinor and leave Morgoth to his own devices; Fëanor, on the other hand, refuses to accept compromise. He announces he’s going to leave Valinor and do whatever it takes to recover the Silmarils. And in doing so, of course, he overreaches and drags his whole people down with him over the next thousand years.

Call it blasphemy, but to me, Tolkien distilled the essence of the Fall from Grace much better than the actual Bible does. I find the Old Testament frequently hokey and morally confused, while Tolkien’s achievement in metaphor is a beautiful, transcendent, and clear as a bell. (Keep in mind, of course, that I’m an atheist.) The story of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden strikes me as ludicrous and almost laughable; but when I read about Fëanor’s exile from Valinor in The Silmarillion, I get it.

The Bible uses all kinds of metaphors for Heaven. It’s a pasture, it’s a garden, it’s a place in the clouds, it’s a kingdom full of light. All metaphors that must have been really impressive to the nomadic desert-bound Jews who first heard them. But for us, these images don’t have so much potency. Paradise is a garden? Dude, if I want to see a transcendently beautiful garden, I can drive to Delaware and see Longwood Gardens.

But Tolkien? Tolkien writes about the great lamps of Illuin and Ormal that the Valar built to light the world, which Morgoth overthrew — and then about the trees Telperion and Laurelin grown by the Valar to replace those lamps, and how Morgoth poisoned those — and about the second-rate tree Galathilion the Vala Yavanna made to remind the Elves of those original trees — and the seedling of that tree named Celeborn, which was planted on the Elvish island of Tol Eressëa — and then the seedling of that tree, Nimloth, that the Elves gave to the Men of Númenor — and then the fruit of that tree that Isildur managed to smuggle out of Númenor before its destruction — and then the sapling of that tree Isildur smuggled out of Minas Ithil when Sauron destroyed it — and then the sapling of that tree planted by the twenty-seventh king of Gondor, until it died — and finally the sapling of that tree which Aragorn finds in The Return of the King.

Now that’s a Fall from Grace. That’s a metaphor for the spark of God’s majesty continuing on despite adversity and debasement which I can understand.

But similarly, Tolkien puts this divine spark inside of us, too, the readers. We’re (theoretically) remote descendants of the people of Gondor, who were descended from the people of Númenor, who were descended from the Edain that helped out the Elves in their battles against Morgoth. And we’ve also got in our blood strains of the Elves (through the marriage of Beren and Lúthien) and strains of the gods (through the marriage of Thingol and Melian the Maia). It’s remote, it’s diluted, but it’s there in all of us.

This presumes, of course, that you are of white European descent. Which leads to one of the most controversial — and least understood — elements of Tolkien’s world. If you’re not a white European, according to Tolkien’s mythology, you’re descended from one of the wicked tribes of men who fell under the sway of the evil god Morgoth.

Racist? Sure. But it’s only right that Tolkien should put things that way, and I’m glad Peter Jackson didn’t try to appease these cries of racial insensitivity in his films by casting a bunch of polychromatic hobbits. Why? Not because I believe in that kind of white-is-right bullshit — but simply because Tolkien’s other major purpose in writing these stories was to create an alternate Anglo Saxon mythology.

These are the tales that the Anglo Saxon warriors told around the fire after everyone got sick of hearing Beowulf for the five hundredth time. And when you’re tired from a day in the field hacking away at people that don’t look like you, the last thing you want to hear is how these enemies are just misunderstood souls with their own culture, history, and moral compass. You want to be reminded that you’re a true defender of the faith, the one doing God’s duty, and they’re the heathen scum not fit to scrape the mud off your boots. Otherwise, why go back out there to fight the next day?

Tolkien wasn’t attempting to create a complete and self-contained universe. He was engaging in an exercise of nationalistic mythology. It’s an attempt to construct an entire folklore, history, and set of morals for a people from the ground up. And in that sense, it has to rank among the most ambitious undertakings in modern literature. Tolkien might not have been one of the world’s great prose stylists — boy, there are some clunky passages here — but as a worldbuilder he’s unparalleled.

And make no mistake about it, the world Tolkien is building here is ours. It’s no accident that the map of Middle Earth looks a heck of a lot like Europe, and it’s no accident that the polite, happy, good-natured, British-seeming hobbits live not too far away from where Tolkien’s own England would fall on the map. (View a larger version of the map to the right on Wikipedia.) The dark-skinned Haradrim live where Africa would be, and the noble, civilized Gondorians are in a great position to found Greece and Rome in a few thousand years.

So The Silmarillion is full of tales of purposely one-sided nationalistic folklore. It’s got plenty of heroism and adventure and derring-do. It’s got love, rebellion, betrayal, comedy, tragedy, romance, redemption, and sacrifice.

But The Silmarillion also provides a crucial framework for The Lord of the Rings that’s somewhat elusive if you read the latter without reading the former. Without The Silmarillion, Galadriel’s just a queen afraid of losing her realm; with it, she’s the last remaining Noldor and participant in Fëanor’s rebellion, hesitant to give up all she’s built in Middle Earth and beg forgiveness from the Valar. Without The Silmarillion, Aragorn’s just the heir to an old kingdom who comes into his own and regains the crown; with it, he’s the last descendant of the Edain, the elf-friends who fought against Morgoth, and the Númenoreans, the once proud people who rebelled against the Valar and fell into ruin.

The thing that struck me the most reading The Silmarillion this time was how short the book was. Excluding the index, it’s only 300 pages. So what are you waiting for? Pull that sucker off the shelf and tell me your thoughts about the book.