The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion (Quenya: [silmaˈrilliɔn]) is a collection of mythopoeic stories by the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, edited and published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien in 1977 with assistance from writer Guy Gavriel Kay. The Silmarillion, along with many of J. R. R. Tolkien's other works, forms an extensive though incomplete narrative of Eä, a fictional universe that includes the Blessed Realm of Valinor, the once-great region of Beleriand, the sunken island of Númenor, and the continent of Middle-earth, where Tolkien's most popular works—The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—take place. After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien's publisher Stanley Unwin requested a sequel, and Tolkien offered a draft of the stories that would later become The Silmarillion. Unwin rejected this proposal, calling the draft obscure and "too Celtic", so Tolkien began working on a completely new story; it eventually became The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion has five parts. The first, Ainulindalë, tells of the creation of Eä, the "world that is." The second part, Valaquenta, gives a description of the Valar and Maiar, supernatural powers of Eä. The next section, Quenta Silmarillion, which forms the bulk of the collection, chronicles the history of the events before and during the First Age, including the wars over the Silmarils that gave the book its title. The fourth part, Akallabêth, relates the history of the Downfall of Númenor and its people, which takes place in the Second Age. The final part, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, is a brief account of the circumstances which led to and were presented in The Lord of the Rings. Because J. R. R. Tolkien died leaving the materials unredacted, Christopher Tolkien gathered material from his father's older writings to fill out the book. In a few cases, this meant that he had to devise completely new material, though within the tenor of his father's thought, to resolve gaps and inconsistencies in the narrative.The Silmarillion received a generally poor welcome on publication; it sold well, but not at the level of The Lord of the Rings. Scholars, too, found the work problematic, not least because the book is an unauthorised construction from the large corpus of documents and drafts also called "The Silmarillion". Scholars have noted, however, that Tolkien intended the work to be a mythology, penned by many hands, and redacted by a fictional editor, whether Æfwine or Bilbo Baggins. As such, the scholar Gergely Nagy considers that the fact that the work has indeed been edited actually realises Tolkien's intention.