I am aware that canon as presented in the Silmarillion is not always the same as how it ended up in the final version of the legendarium, but I think we can deal with that as it comes up and the Silmarillion is the most accessible place to start (and is what I'm rereading now).
So, my proposal is that we talk this pretty slowly and take our time to digest and discuss things as they come up. I'm imagining something like a chapter/section every few days.
Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the first chunk of the text. The intent, if it isn't clear, is to start a discussion: you're supposed to bring up other things you found interesting in the reading as well as respond to what I'm saying. I'm trying to be fairly comprehensive in this first post to suggest as many topics for discussion as possible, but obviously you can/should bring up one thing at a time if you want.
Week One: Front Matter, Part One
I'm using the ebook I bought off Amazon, which corresponds to the second edition (with a Preface by Christopher Tolkien from 1999). In particular, this edition has a section titled "From a Letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, 1951" which starts "My dear Milton". As I'll explain in a moment, I think for our purposes it's important to start with this instead of just jumping into the Ainulindale. If we want to spend roughly a week on each chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion, the front matter is way too long and we should spend a while on it. Luckily, the letter is divided into several parts so this should work fine. So, I suggest you read the Foreward, Preface to the Second Edition, and "From a Letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, 1951", until you get to the first break (stopping before the paragraph starting "The cycles begin with a cosmogonical myth..."). This is around 3000 words so should be manageable.
(In case it wasn't obvious, you're supposed to go read this, think about it for a few minutes, then come back here.)
So, what are we looking at? First off, the Foreword--not written by JRR Tolkien himself but by his son Christopher. Quick timeline recap: The Hobbit was published in 1937, Lord of the Rings in 1954-5. Tolkien died in 1973, and this was published in 1977. So it was published posthumously, but more than that it was assembled from many different versions and different parts of it were more or less incomplete. This means, I think, that we should, or at least can, think about the structure of the Silmarillion in addition to just its content. Not only will it transpire that the different parts of the Silmarillion were written in-universe at different times and for different authors, they were also written in reality (Primary Reality, to use JRR Tolkien's term) at different times and in different modes of writing, and then they were assembled by Christopher Tolkien (for the gory details, see the 10-volume History of Middle-earth, which I intend to get around to one of these days).
As a relative outsider to the Tolkien fandom, it seems to me like these different levels (a whole fictional history with multiple fictional authors with differing motives and levels of knowledge, written over many years by Tolkien even as his conceptions of Middle-earth kept changing) are a big part of why people can get so into the whole thing. (Plus how seriously everyone involved takes themselves is just really endearing. How can you not love someone who can write a sentence like this with a straight face: "Moreover the old legends (‘old’ now not only in their derivation from the remote First Age, but also in terms of my father’s life) became the vehicle and depository of his profoundest reflections.")
Besides this, there are a few things that jump out at me in terms of how we should treat the text to follow:
In his later writing mythology and poetry sank down behind his theological and philosophical preoccupations: from which arose incompatibilities of tone.
Christopher is making a value judgement here, which we're free to ignore or not. But this is already telling us that Tolkien meant for us to take the text seriously: it has theological and philosophical content. Obviously we can do close readings of whatever we want, but we should expect them to yield results here.
A complete consistency (either within the compass of The Silmarillion itself or between The Silmarillion and other published writings of my father’s) is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all, at heavy and needless cost.
[...]
In the case of the Valaquenta, for instance, we have to assume that while it contains much that must go back to the earliest days of the Eldar in Valinor, it was remodelled in later times; and thus explain its continual shifting of tense and viewpoint, so that the divine powers seem now present and active in the world, now remote, a vanished order known only to memory.
Do you see the move Christopher is making here? He just conflated inconsistencies resulting from JRR's writing different versions at different times with inconsistencies in the text themselves, which seems fine, but then he attributed those latter inconsistencies to in-universe sources. I guess could read this really skeptically as Christopher just making excuses for his sloppy job in reconciling his source material. But I think this whole concept is really cool, so I'm inclined to give him a pass. Christopher is encouraging us to be proactively Watsonian!
Next up is the Preface to the Second Edition. I don't have much to say about this, except that, as an academic myself, this sort of faux-academic seriousness is total catnip for me. I mean, seriously: "Chief among these are those that concern the numbering in sequence of certain of the rulers of Númenor (for these errors and an explanation of how they arose see Unfinished Tales (1980), p.226, note 11, and The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996), p.154, §31)." This is not the sort of thing someone would say about a Stephen King novel!
Finally, the letter. The first time I read the Silmarillion I found this really boring. But now I think it's fascinating and incredibly important. Why? A couple of reasons. First off, the foreword has problematized the rest of the text: we're supposed to treat it as written by a number of different authors with varying motives, and so we need to take it all with a grain of salt. But in the letter Tolkien is giving a recap as an omniscient narrator/author (he'd use the term Sub-Creator, I guess). Second, and more importantly, he repeatedly sets up theoretical frameworks through which we can read the text. In this section alone there I identified at least three: myth vs allegory vs fairy-story vs heroic legend, and "Fall, Mortality, and the Machine", and Art/subcreation vs. Power/domination.
Let me briefly note a few things before I quote the last two paragraphs of the section in full and talk about them in detail:
-The language thing. Tolkien was a professional linguist. If you were paying attention during the foreword (or read the appendices to the Lord of the Rings) you saw some hints of this: not many books have a "list of some of the chief elements found in" their names.
-The discussion of legends. Aside from the sick burn on the Matter of Britain, note the mention of Finnish mythology, which I know literally nothing about except that it's supposed to have influenced Tolkien.
-Christianity:
For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world. (I am speaking, of course, of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, which you read.)
Remember this for the next part. The essay Tolkien is talking about is, I think, "On Fairy-Stories", which I haven't yet read but is supposed to be informative about how Tolkien approached worldbuilding.
-Tolkien on fandom:
(Speaking of music, here's an entire metal album on the Silmarillion.)The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.
-Keep in mind for later: "the high Legends of the beginnings are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds."
Okay, now for those last two paragraphs:
I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more ‘life’ a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.) Anyway all this stuff[2] is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities of ‘Fall’. It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as its own, the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality. Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, – and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.
I have not used ‘magic’ consistently, and indeed the Elven-queen Galadriel is obliged to remonstrate with the Hobbits on their confused use of the word both for the devices and operations of the Enemy, and for those of the Elves. I have not, because there is not a word for the latter (since all human stories have suffered the same confusion). But the Elves are there (in my tales) to demonstrate the difference. Their ‘magic’ is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations: more effortless, more quick, more complete (product, and vision in unflawed correspondence). And its object is Art not Power, sub-creation not domination and tyrannous reforming of Creation. The ‘Elves’ are ‘immortal’, at least as far as this world goes: and hence are concerned rather with the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death. The Enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines; but the problem: that this frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others[3] – speedily and according to the benefactors own plans – is a recurrent motive.
[2] It is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality.
[3] Not in the Beginner of Evil: his was a sub-creative Fall, and hence the Elves (the representatives of sub-creation par excellence) were peculiarly his enemies, and the special object of his desire and hate – and open to his deceits. Their Fall is into possessiveness and (to a less degree) into perversion of their art to power.
(Stop and read these paragraphs before proceeding, they're really important!)
There's a huge amount going on here! I don't think I'm really equipped to do a full reading of it; hopefully you guys can help me. Here are some things I noticed:
-That footnote 2: "the relation of Art (and Sub-creation) and Primary Reality." Sub-creation is, I think, one of the super-important concepts to take from this letter into the actual text. Note that already it's being applied both to what Tolkien himself is doing (in writing a story using allegorical language) and to the elves and to Melkor.
-Fall. To spoil the next section of the letter a little bit, Tolkien is going to drop a doozy of a statement there: "all stories are ultimately about the fall." This says more about Tolkien then stories, but consider what it says about Tolkien's legendarium. (Also consider what it means to write glowfic in Tolkien's legendarium given this statement.) In that later quote it's "the fall," as in the biblical one, but here Tolkien is, I think, talking about the same thing (at least allegorically).
-(Sub-) creative Desire. We have something Star-Wars-esque being set up here: Desire leads to love of the Primary World. Love of the Primary World leads to a lack of satisfaction with Mortality. Subcreation leads to possessiveness. Possessiveness and lack of satisfaction with Mortality lead to rebellion. Rebellion leads to the desire for Power. Desire for Power leads to the Machine (or Magic).
-Look at that definition of the Machine: "all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating." The implication here is very strong: for Tolkien, Machine (or Magic) is always and everywhere a bad thing.
(Exercise: how does this definition apply to:
-Melkor
-Sauron
-Saruman
-Feanor
-Bilbo
-Frodo
-Gandalf (and his use of a Ring)
-Galadriel?
Discuss.)
While I expect most of us will disagree with this, I think it's very important to keep in mind when reading Tolkien, because it tells us how he intended us to read things. (C.f. the dwarves in glowfic...)
-Magic vs. 'magic'. If you have access to Lord of the Rings, the relevant passage is at the end of Chapter Seven, "The Mirror of Galadriel." (Also interesting in its own right. Think of how much Artanis went through to get from her portrayal in the Silmarillion (or see, e.g., this) to "‘I pass the test,’ she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.’")
-We're also told something about the mindset of Elves: they "are concerned rather with the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change, than with death." More on this in the next section.
-The notion that Morgoth's fall was "sub-creative". This is Word of God. Do you believe it? Is it compatible with what we know about Valar or what will be said when we get to that part of the text?
