bloodygranuaile

This year I decided to reread The Silmarillion! I have not read it in about… twenty years. Jesus, that makes me feel old. Anyway, I decided to break it up into chunks and read a bit each month for the first 6 months of the year. This meant reading about 60-odd pages each month, which is plenty for a book this dense.

I must admit that my first thought is indeed “Oh wow, this book is very dense.” I remember having a difficult time with it when I first read it in ninth grade–so many names! Such archaic language! So little dialogue!--but I am older and wiser now and have a whole English degree under my belt, so I figured it was largely an issue of it being Above My Reading Level when I was 15.

Alas, no, this really is a very dense and busy book. It’s actually four books, of which the Valaquenta (or Quenta Silmarillion) is the biggest one, and it covers many hundreds or possibly a few thousands of years and several generations of Elf shenanigans. Everyone has five names and is given a full genealogy of people who also have five names. All the places have five names too. In keeping with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of which Tolkien was a scholar, families frequently repeated name elements instead of having family names, so you get whole families whose names all start with Fin- or Ea- or El- or whatever. It is! So! Much!

That said, the language, while often hard to follow, has a grave and archaic regality to it, thus fitting the type of story it is exactly. And the stories, once you can get past the language and its reliance on abstractions (the thing I find most difficult as a modern reader, honestly–I’m not only used to much more concrete writing, but in many sectors of my life, that type of thing is a huge red flag for bullshit), are great–epic tales of fighting dragons and stealing gems and exploring the world, with doomed love and giant spiders and all sorts of extremely cool shit that other fantasy authors have been ripping off lo these past fifty years. We get the tale of Feanor’s bad decisions and his unfortunate family; the heroic exploits of Beren and Luthien; a short version of the Tale of Turin Turambar; and many other individual episodes that would probably each bear up a whole movie trilogy if someone with a huge budget and a sense of restraint could wrestle the rights away from the Tolkien Estate, which I’m kind of glad they won’t actually. This is not cinematic writing so you’d have to make up a whole bunch of new material and that would then annoy Tolkien purists, probably including me. But there’s a great sense of vastness here, a really impressive feeling that you’re looking at merely a sliver of a whole world long gone, and there’s something incredibly compelling about that.

Given that I have only read this book once, but in the intervening twenty years I have listened to Blind Guardian’s album Nightfall in Middle-Earth approximately infinity times, one experience I kept having was sudden tiny bursts of familiarity. I’d be reading these long dense pages trying to remember what I had read on the previous page, and suddenly a sentence or a turn of phrase would jump off the page and bonk me in the teenage nostalgia part of my brain, and I’d know exactly where in the album we were. Then I would have the relevant song stuck in my head for a bit.

Anyway, now that I’ve finished the book, I… kind of want to immediately go back and reread it again? There’s just so much going on in it that I didn’t retain; I need to do it again and maybe find a study guide this time.

I really, really wish I'd brought my copy of The Silmarillion to school with me. Oh well. If I make it to Spring Break I can hole up and read it at home.

In the meantime, I am getting as close as I can by listening to "Nightfall in Middle-earth" and reading a book I borrowed from Keen called "J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth," although at the moment I've just read the back cover and the introduction and it has served to make me rather depressed, as it has reminded me that, despite the fact that I am a very bad Catholic, some form of "noble Christian ideals" have indeed made their impact on me, probably less from Church than from reading so many things coming out of the European Christian tradition, and the fact remains that they make better stories and are so much more uplifting than anything I actually believe in, as I am agnostic and cynical. No, I don't believe in fate. I just like fate. The things I believe in, or rather my general lack of belief in anything other than people's own responsibility to not make other people's lives more hellish than necessary, makes for dreary existential stories. This is why I like fantasy. I think the only stories where I really fully agree with the worldview *and* like the piece are Ibsen's social dramas, namely "A Doll's House".

I remember reading "the Telling" and liking the idea of the Telling, but not really liking the book that much. Ursula LeGuin's carefully inclusive bits of backstory--namely that the main character is Anglo-Hindi and this isn't mentioned until halfway into the book, and the bit about her girlfriend--flat-out annoyed me. It made me feel like the book was being written about our current society instead of telling its own scifi tale, which, to be honest, was not something I wanted to read. Yes, I read fantasy largely for its escapist value, or rather a combination of sheer escapist value and its value for being able to have a standard and a model with which to try and look at the real world in a less disorganized way. There is no inherent meaning in the universe. Myths give us one. And personally, I wish there was, because I like the idea of people having something to work for greater than their own gratification, of having some sort of destiny that I will find or that will find me instead of messing around trying to assemble a coherent education and carreer path out of absolutely nothing except my own wants. And I like the idea of being tall and proud and pure and wise better than being likeable, friendly or popular anyway. I would like to think that being descended from the Celts means anything besides being pale and square-jawed.

And I realize that likely everyone who reads this is, if they didn't already, going to think I'm competely out of my mind on this one: I like reading books with no sex in them whatsoever. When I've been hanging out with one-track-minded teenagers for too long I have a tendency to shut the computer off, shut myself up at home and watch children's movies and read children's books and Victorian books and Tolkien, and get snappish and pissed off if anyone within ten years of my age level tries to talk to me because it's only possible for the conversation to go on for maybe ten minutes with my less sordid friends and ten seconds with some other people I've known before we come back to "earthy" subject matter. Sometimes, I'm not going for "earthy." I'm going for the idealized, the epic, the above-that, even if it's only that way because its intended audience was six years old, or dangerously repressed.

Despite popular opinion, I am not dangerously repressed. It's just that certain mundane things, after a while and in certain moods, make me horribly, ferociously depressed: sex, the Internet, brand names, commercials, certain political issues, vulgarity, plastic, computers, cars, sneakers, flip-flops, television, mind-altering substances, Ikea furniture. Some of these strike me as depressingly modern, others are depressingly "grown-up," some are just depressingly crude and pointless. At various times, every single one of these has made me want to barricade myself in my room and not come out until I've finished the entire History of Middle-earth series. Some of them I never, ever want to have anything to do with; others I only sometimes don't want to have anything to do with.

At any rate, I want my books to be above them. I like the idea that there is something "above" the pointless and mundane, that it can be anything other than uptight posturing to try to hold to an ideal "above" them, that the "noble Christian ideal" of behavior, even if there is no Christ, is something worth holding to in addition to something to be made fun of for.

However, I'm not sure I really believe that, and that kind of upsets me.