01.FW Foreword

The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read

01.FW.002 → Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth, Chapter 7, p.201.

Bilbo acts as the link between modern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons

01.FW.002 → Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth, p.185.

Where The Silmarillion differs from Tolkien’s earlier works is in its refusal to accept novelistic convention. Most novels (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) pick a character to put in the foreground, like Frodo and Bilbo, and then tell the story as it happens to him. The novelist of course is inventing the story, and so retains omniscience: he can explain, or show, what is ‘really’ happening and contrast it with the limited perception of his character.

01.FW.008 → Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth.

disappointment in those who wanted a second Lord of the Rings

01.FW.009 → Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth.

It’s like the Old Testament!

01.FW.009 → personal communication to Christopher

One quality which [The Lord of the Rings] has in abundance is the Beowulfian ‘impression of depth’, created just as in the old epic by songs and digressions like Aragorn’s lay of Tinúviel, Sam Gamgee’s allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron Crown, Elrond’s account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more. This, however, is a quality of The Lord of the Rings, not of the inset stories. To tell these in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error, an error to which Tolkien would be more sensitive than any man alive. As he wrote in a revealing letter dated 20 September 1963:

[see below under U-text for letter quoted as 01.FW.012]

To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of ‘new unattainable vistas’, the problem there—as Tolkien must have thought many times—was that in The Lord of the Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form, was bound to begin at the beginning. How could ‘depth’ be created when you had nothing to reach further back to?

01.FW.011-013 → Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth.

to tell [the stories that are only alluded to in The Lord of the Rings] in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error

01.FW.023 → Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-earth.

Quenta Silmarillion was no doubt one of Bilbo’s Translations from the Elvish preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch.

01.FW.033 → Foster, Robert. The Complete Guide to Middle-earth.

Anyone interested, as I am, in the growth of The Silmarillion will want to study Unfinished Tales, not only for its intrinsic value but also because its relationship to the former provides what will become a classic example of a long-standing problem in literary criticism: what, really, is a literary work? Is it what the author intended (or may have intended) it to be, or is it what a later editor makes of it? The problem becomes especially intense for the practising critic when, as happened with The Silmarillion, a writer dies before finishing his work and leaves more than one version of some of its parts, which then find publication elsewhere. Which version will the critic approach as the ‘real’ story?

01.FW.036 → Helms, Randel. Tolkien and the Silmarils, p.93.

Christopher Tolkien has helped us in this instance by honestly pointing out that The Silmarillion in the shape that we have it is the invention of the son not the father

01.FW.037 → Helms, Randel. Tolkien and the Silmarils.

it is very clear indeed that we shall never be able to see the progressive steps of authorial thinking behind The Silmarillion

01.FW.038 → Hieatt, Constance B. ‘The Text of The Hobbit: Putting Tolkien’s Notes in Order’.
English Studies in Canada, VII, 2, Summer 1981.