The Silmarillion: A Brief Account of its Making

Discussions in Middle-earth lore, language and books.
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Scholar of Gondor
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This was the title of a pamphlet which was issued in 1977 by Houghton Mifflin, at the time of the publication of The Silmarillion. The text was reprinted in Mallorn no. 14 (1980, pp. 3-5, 7-8)

The text is also available at the website of the Tolkien Estate - well worth reading, I think. :smiley24:

https://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writin ... ?mode=full

Christopher's text begins:

''To a majority, perhaps, of those who are familiar with his name, J.R.R. Tolkien means “Hobbits.” But many would say rather “Middle-earth,” and by this they refer to that great imagined country, peopled by Elves, by Dwarves, by Ents, by men of different cultures, and by Orcs, through which the Fellowship of the Ring passed on its quest; peopled also indeed by Hobbits, in one small region called the Shire.

It is a rich landscape, of mountain ranges, plains, forests, rivers, but richest of all in its past: its ancient roads and ruined cities, old battlefields and vast works of stone, named in many different languages. Yet there are frequent suggestions in The Lord of the Rings of an ever deeper past, of lands and cities that cannot be found on the map that accompanies the book: a past nonetheless that some of the persons in the story speak of as having known and seen with their own eyes.

Thus Elrond, whose memory reaches back so far as to astound Frodo the Hobbit, speaks to him of “the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand”; and Treebeard the old Ent sings of ancient forests where he once walked – “but now all those lands lie under the wave.”


They speak of the lands, cities, and stories of The Silmarillion. For The Silmarillion is the history of the Elder Days, the First Age of the world, as The Lord of the Rings is the history of the ending of the Third; and the greater part of it takes place in that region of Middle-earth that was called Beleriand.
Beleriand lay beyond the Blue Mountains, which appear in the extreme northwest of the map to The Lord of the Rings; but it was drowned by the sea in the cataclysmic battle in which the First Age came to an end.''
It's all in the books.

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