SarahTheCoat

This German art student, Benjamin Harff, decided, for his exam at the Academy of Arts, to do something only slightly ambitious — to hand-illuminate and bind a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. It took him six months of work. He hand-illuminated the text which had been printed on his home Canon inkjet printer. He worked with a binder to assemble the resulting book.

More pictures HERE

(Fact Source)

Trying to decide if this is harder or easier than my doctoral thesis in cell biology.

@blackkatmagic

Rereading the hobbit after reading Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion for the first time is unlocking special new emotions that I cannot describe. They’re close to EXU Calamity emotions, but so much stronger.

The Hobbit introduces Elrond like this. “The master of the house was an elf-friend—one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories before the beginning of History, the wars of the evil goblins and the elves and the first men in the North. In those days of our tale there were still some people who had both elves and heroes of the North for ancestors, and Elrond the master of the house was their chief.”

It’s vague and it sets the scene. It’s enough.

But like, that’s the Silmarillion right there! “wars of the evil goblins”, you mean the war against Morgoth? The battle of sudden flame, the fall of Gondolin, Fingolfin’s duel, every high king and kinslaying and death contained in a line. Elrond’s ancestors aren’t just some “elves and heroes of the north”, they are Beren and Luthien and Melian and Earendil! No one but Tolkien knew back then, but they did happen and they did matter!

The Silmarillion is out there now though, and so many people have read it. I read it. Maedhros and Maglor’s kidnap family mattered. Elros and Numenor mattered. There used to be a continent called Beleriand and a dog that talked three times and entirely too many grandchildren of Finwe. And it’s all gone now.

What’s left? Well, there’s two swords in a troll cave. There’s a wandering Maia with a fun hat. There’s a shiny stone that feels suspicious now, even though I know Tolkien wouldn’t have put a silmaril into a story so casually. Lastly, there’s Elrond, and he’s as kind as summer.

Elrond is as kind as summer.

Someone point where it says making the choice of the Peredhel changes your body, senses or physiology, in any way.

So I encounter the opinion that there is an inherent physical difference between half-elves who choose the doom of elves, and those who choose the doom of men.

And I am here to say: Why do we think that?

Happy #TolkienReadingDay

Here’s a selection of my Tolkien inspired art from The Silmarillion (or rather The Lays of Beleriand, as the first two paintings are based on the “Lay of Leithian” for which I created a series of watercolours) and The Lord of the Rings. All (and more) are available as prints at my storenvy.

An old interview with Christopher Tolkien from the 1996 documentary “J.R.R.T.: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien" where he discusses the history of The Silmarillion, the change in his father’s prose style across the various iterations of “the silmarillion,” the initial separation between the Mythology and the world of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, how the integration of the latter two into the former created new problems of coherency, and the change in his father’s relationship to the Mythology over the course of his life, particularly in how his later writing was more metaphysical commentary on his Secondary World than the work of tale-telling, itself.

I think the initial relationship between The Hobbit and The Silmarillion can be overstated both ways, particularly in light of the contents of the earliest drafts of The Hobbit. It appears to me that it makes most sense to phrase the relationship this way: it’s not that Tolkien intended The Hobbit to be an official part of the Mythology, nor that he conceived it being wholly unrelated. It’s almost like a children’s story told within the framework of the Mythology, without intending to say anything serious about the Mythology, itself. The Mythology was a box of set dressing he pulled from, like one might pull from real world myth to riff on—which makes sense considering Tolkien’s early desire to create his Mythology as “a mythology for England.”

But the thing it wasn’t meant to do—flow backwards and alter the well it was drawing water from—is the thing it did, whether he wanted it to or not, when The Lord of the Rings started getting “out of hand.” And this alteration meant none of “the silmarillions” that existed thus far really worked coherently with what became new Ages of the World.

I wonder if the same might be said for “The Lost Road” and the tales that would become “The Akallabeth.” Suddenly, Tolkien had to contend with the fact of a Second and Third Age.

Thank you so much for posting this! It’s such a joy to listen to him speak about his father’s work! This is is just wonderful. Out of a million moments that I loved in this interview, I really loved when he made that little aside: “Arda being the Elvish word for the world—our world—of which Middle-earth is a part.” Our world! Our world! I’m not at all surprised that he would talk about it this way—it just makes me so happy. It reminds me of another thing that he said: “As strange as it may seem, I grew up in the world he created. For me, the cities of The Silmarillion are more real than Babylon.” These stories meant to much to J.R.R. Tolkien, and to Christopher Tolkien, and they mean so much to us as readers, that they really have taken on a life of their own. 

Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endure. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lurhien 

reblog if you've read the silmarillion

Ohhhh yeah, this is one of my secret powers. The trick is to first read it when you're like 11. You won't understand it then but it'll get into your brain.

yes. This is it. Also you read it like you would read The Bible or The Odyssey or Egyptian or Greek or any other ancient mythology (which I also all did by when I was like 12…). You may not understand it completely but you feel it and it gets into your brain, exactly!

yes! once i twigged that it was a Collection of stories, not one story like LOTR, i LOVED it.

— The Silmarillion

Paintings by Alan Lee

Thoughts on Beren, grief and depression

(This post includes a discussion of suicide/suicidal tendencies.)

One of the things that strikes me about Beren is that his early life was so full of suffering. Dorthonion was overrun by the forces of Morgoth when Beren was still very young, only in his early twenties. His mother left with the remnant of their people and it is implied that he never saw her again. After five years of defending Dorthonion with a small band of men, he lost his father under terrible circumstances, when Gorlim betrayed them, and Barahir and the other men were killed. Not only was Beren’s father killed by the treachery of one of his own men, his body was mutilated; Beren had to win back the ring of Barahir from the Orcs, who had taken his severed hand. Beren swore an oath of vengeance upon his father’s grave and defended Dorthonion alone as an outlaw until he was finally forced to escape to the south.

What it says in the Lays of Beleriand about Beren during this part of the story is really heartbreaking. When he buried his father, he ‘wept not, for his heart was ice,’ and because Barahir was dead, ‘sorrow now his soul had wrought to dark despair, and robbed his life of sweetness, that he longed for knife, or shaft, or sword, to end his pain.’ And afterwards, ‘danger he sought and death pursued.’ This is painful to read, but it also makes sense to me that Beren would feel this way: he has experienced so much trauma and loss. Even though it doesn’t say that he was planning to kill himself, pursuing death in battle seems to be so similar to suicidal ideation that it is almost indistinguishable from it, and that’s what these lines suggest to me.

I kept thinking about this part of the Lays of Beleriand, and why I found it so moving, and I think the reason is because in a lot of stories, heroic male characters like Beren aren’t usually shown to be depressed. If they’re portrayed feeling something after the death of a loved one, it’s usually anger, not deep sadness, grief and depression. And it’s comforting to see a heroic character like Beren portrayed as someone who went through all this—the grief, the depression, and wanting to die—and still had a happy ending. In many ways, it reminds me of Éowyn’s struggle with depression in LOTR.

I also think that Beren’s time in Dorthonion seems to reflect aspects of Tolkien’s own life. We all know that the tale of Beren and Lúthien was based on Tolkien’s relationship with Edith, but I think there are other aspects of his life reflected in Beren’s story: losing his parents at a young age, losing all of his closest friends, and the depression that would come with that. When I read about Beren living in Dorthonion, after his father and all his companions are dead, I think about how Tolkien lost all his friends in the war and was the only survivor. Along with characters like Frodo and Éowyn, Beren strikes me as another character where Tolkien’s own experiences of grief and loss really come through.

Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima by Aglargon

Now when first Vingilot was set to sail in the seas of heaven, it rose unlocked for, glittering and bright; and the people of Middle-earth beheld it from afar and wondered, and they took it for a sign, and called it Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope.

JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath

The cover is beautiful!

Beleriand and the Lands to the North by John Howe

The Silmarillion, 1999 edition

Varda by kokiri85