The Silmarillion

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

Genre: Fantasy

Age: Upper high school and older.

Summary: This is a collection of stories about the first age of Middle Earth--from creation to the fall of Melkor.  Rather than strictly following an historical timeline, Tolkien develops the stories of a few of the significant figures of the first age in chronological order.

Review:  This book is really for the diehard Tolkien fanatic who got to the end of LOTR and now wants something even more challenging.  Perhaps it is because the stories have their origin earlier in Tolkien's writing career than both The Hobbit and LOTR, but the style and diction are even more complex than those latter works.  Expect lots of flowery prose with little relief offered in the form of dialog.  You may also want to approach this one with both a Middle Earth timeline and a family tree in hand; there are more characters to keep track of here than in War and Peace.  (Also, if you get a decent family tree going here, it will help you immeasurably if you decide to go on to the Unfinished Tales.)

That said, I loved this book!  (Yes, I confess--I'm a bit of a Tolkien geek.)  Admittedly, I get a bit lost in some of the later stories as to who each person was and how he or she fits into the grand scheme of things; the feeling was only amplified when I began reading Unfinished Tales, and was expected to remember who some of these people were that we were revisiting.  On the other hand, it is so wonderful to get the full stories that were only hinted at in LOTR, such as the story of Beren and Luthien.  Of course, my favorite part of the book is the first section that describes creation as flowing from a song that Melkor kept trying to unsuccessfully alter.

Christian perspective: I know that there is a lot of argument over the worthiness of Tolkien's works, both in a literary and religious sense.  Obviously, I'm of the camp that would argue that his Christian themes alone make the works worth reading and that Christians should not exclude fantasy from their literary diet.  I may go into all this in more depth in my LOTR reviews, but I don't want to neglect what I see as a more important issue in this particular novel.  While The Hobbit is very accessible to children and LOTR can still pass for a family reading time book for younger children, the content in The Silmarillion does not recommend itself to young ones (just as there are some parts of the Bible that are inappropriate for very young children).