The Muslim community in the West loves the Lord of the Rings movies. It does not conflict with the values of Islam on a basic level. It is more chaste than what popular fantasy fiction would become. It is a battle of good and evil. The Lord of the Rings’ reception in the Muslim community can be seen in the r/Izlam subreddit where it is often referenced.
I love the movies. They represent a bond I share with family and friends. I am also a fan of fantasy fiction, and I am an aspiring author. For decades, the genre struggled to get out from under Tolkien’s massive shadow. Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit will be the only fantasy fiction allowed to sit at the big boy table of canonical Western literary fiction. Thanks to the Dungeons and Dragons table-top role-playing game, fantasy tropes Tolkien reinvented such as Orcs, Elves, and Dwarves (although Tolkien insists on spelling it Dwarfs) became stock fantasy races. There was even a while when emulating Lord of the Rings got you published and widely read.[1]
If you made it this far, I assume you are fond of the movies, possibly even the books; and you are academically-minded to be reading this magazine. Meaning, you think deeply about Islam, and you enjoy when media tickles those parts of the brain. You are the perfect person to enjoy The Silmarillion.
The Silmarillion is a collection of texts meant to tell the history of the first to third ages of Middle-earth. For reference, Lord of the Rings is the closing of the third age. Yes, Tolkien intends for Lord of the Rings and other stories in his legendarium to tell the story of Britain’s pre-history the way Joseph Smith claimed the Book of Mormon tells about the Pre-history of America. In this regard, the Lord of the Rings is presented as a lost manuscript from the third age that Tolkien edited and translated rather than wrote. While Tolkien never intended to base a religion around The Silmarillion, he was up to forging an ancient pre-history.[2] As a philologist and linguist, he knew enough ancient myths and languages to believably accomplish this task as fiction.
Tolkien was also a deeply spiritual Catholic, and he described the Lord of the Rings as a Christian story.[3] His intent was to combine classical and Christian theology into a mix that did not conflict with his Catholic beliefs. He starts this by introducing Eru Iluvatar or God. When speaking about Lord of the Rings, Tolkien expressed that this is our world, and Eru Iluvatar is “The One… The book is about the world that God created-the actual world of this planet.”[4] The “Children of his thought” are the Ainur, his remarkable solution to combining Christian angelology with classical gods. The Valar are “…Angelic powers whose function is to exercise delegated authority in their spheres… meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can be accepted… by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity.”[5] The Ainur are split between 14 Valar and countless Maia. The Maia are also a mix of classical gods and angels, but of a lower order than the Valar. For reference, we never meet the Valar in the movies, but we meet many Maia, including Sauron, Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast the Brown, and the Balrog at the mines of Moria. Sauron is not an Elf and neither are Radagast, Gandalf, nor Saruman human. The Iblis-like antagonist of the story, Melkor Morgoth, was a fallen Valar who rebelled against Eru Iluvatar and his fellow Valar.
Melkor Morgoth is a fascinating villain. He reflects more a Christian understanding of Satan, but he is not just an ephemeral presence in the story, whispering into the hearts of the protagonist. He is an active physical threat. He builds fortresses, corrupts the living creatures of Middle Earth into Orcs and dragons, recruits Maia such as the Balrogs and Sauron (originally the servant of a rival Valar), and combats several of the narrative’s protagonists. He still spreads evil in a very different way than Iblis that reflects themes of cosmic horror. Melkor Morgoth literally corrupts Middle-earth on an ontological level by diffusing most of his being right into the Earth so that any creation borne of it is corruptible.[6]
As a Catholic, Tolkien believed in the Trinity. It is not present in the text, although if you look, you can make out a few hints in the subtext, as in-world the events lie far before Christ. Eru Iluvatar withholds the fate of men after death from the Ainur, whereas the immortal Elves and Dwarfs knew they were to fade away once the world ends, while men go on to another realm. The reason Tolkien gives to this decision is that “Since the point of view of this whole cycle is Elvish, mortality is not explained mythically: it is a mystery of God of which no more is known than that ‘what God purports for Men is hidden.’ A grief and an envy to the immortal Elves.”[7] Details of man’s salvation Tolkien would leave to the New Testament. The absence of the Trinity brings the story theologically more in tune with Muslim readers.
Reading through The Silmarillion he can sometimes give you the name of a location in two or more languages. For readers, this makes the world feel richer. Tolkien went about this linguistic task on purpose as the multiplicity of languages “…gives a certain character (a cohesion, a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity)”[8] While the average monolingual reader might not appreciate this, living in Muslim cultures where we deal with multiple languages and live in countries with long and complex histories, this experience is quite normal to us.
The Silmarillion is written like a collection of classical texts. These texts are:
- The Ainulindalë, the creation of the world through Eru Iluvatar’s music.
- The Valaquenta which introduces the Valar pantheon, and the Maia.
- The Quenta Silmarillion is the main meat of the book. It tells the story of the first age, with the focus largely following the creation, theft, and loss of the Silmarils. Here we see the Valar accomplishing Eru iluvatar’s making of the world, the rebellion of Melkor Morgoth, his corruption of Middle Earth and attacks against the Valar, the waking of the Elves and men, and ends with the capture and imprisonment of Morgoth in the void. Several of Tolkien’s legendarium stories happen in this section of the book including the beautiful Beren and Luthien, the tragic Children of Hurin, and the Fall of Gondolin.
- The Akallabeth, the story of the second age focuses on the Island of Numenor, although important happenings occur among the Elves.
- The Rings of Power tells the history of the third age including a summary of Lord of the Rings.
That summary is three pages out of my 699 page edition. That should tell you the scope of the rest of the book. If you read classical texts, in the original or translation, you are the intended audience of this book. It reads like a very fun classical text in translation. This is a major impediment for the average reader, who complains about the complexity and density of the book. To us academics, it reads like what we like about these sorts of texts. It hearkens back to that pre-modern way we used to tell stories in writing. Tolkien stated that The Silmarillion would be written in “’high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.”[9] For the average Western reader it reminds them of the Bible, and so they tend to find it intimidating. For me it reminds me most of Qisas and Sira literature, Chinese canonical histories, and the Hindu epics and Puranas.
The Silmarillion was published after Tolkien’s death. He never completed it. He intended it as a companion piece to Lord of the Rings, to be published at the same time. His publisher did not like the idea, citing that The Silmarillion was “too Celtic.”[10] Instead, Tolkien attached appendices to the end of Lord of the Rings. That is the closest we got to The Silmarillion being published during his life time. As far as screen adaptations go, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are the only texts allowed to be adapted. This means if it was not mentioned in the pages of those two books, they do not have the rights to adapt it to the screen.[11] This is why the recent Rings of Power television show adapts the appendices of Lord of the Rings rather than The Silmarillion. This has a lot to do with the Tolkien Estate’s hostility towards the film adaptations, and the complicated state of the adaptation rights to Tolkien’s works.[12] Adapting the whole book would be as pointless as adapting the whole Bible: one would have to focus on individual stories. Regardless, we will probably never see any kind of screen adaptation of The Silmarillion in our lifetimes. Your only chance to experience The Silmarillion is by reading it or listening to the audiobook read by Gollum’s actor Andy Serkis.
Other than The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s Middle Earth writings are largely edited by his son Christopher. Other than The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin, Christopher presents his father’s works in incomplete or draft forms. For the average reader, this is even more frustrating than The Silmarillion. As academics, and even as educated Muslims, we’ve been there. Before we learn our subject language, we are reliant on secondary sources to understand an untranslated text. Even if you are more advanced in your field, you might be reading the fragments of a text preserved in a later primary source. This is not a challenge to us, and we can even find it fun. I would not tackle any of these books first.
After reading The Silmarillion I suggest:
- Reading Lord of the Rings if you have not read it already. Plenty of the stories of The Silmarillion are sprinkled across the massive novel. Reading The Silmarillion with The Lord of the Rings was, after all, Tolkien’s own intention. It will enrich your reading of the novel.
- Another good read after The Silmarillion is The Fall of Numenor edited by Brian Sibley. This book is controversial because most of it is reprinted material from Christopher Tolkien’s previous projects. If you consider Christopher Tolkien edited more than 20 volumes, and that Sibley is a very storyteller, then you can see why this is a valuable edition. The Fall of Numenor brings all of Tolkien’s surviving writings on the second age into a cohesive narrative. It tells the story of the second age well beyond the Akallabeth section of the Silmarillion. Some of these events are seen in the television show Rings of Power, including the stories of Galadriel and Elrond, and Sauron’s manipulation of Celebrimbor into forging the rings.
- Finally, I recommend the works of Christopher Tolkien’s co-editor on The Silmarillion, the Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay. The Lions of Al-Rassan deals with a fantasy retelling of the end of Andalus, while The Sarantine Mosaic series tells of the late Roman and Byzantine empire set in the same world. Guy Gavriel Kay writes historical fantasy that reimagines historical events in the Mediterranean world and in China that I feel are very good introductions to fantasy literature beyond Tolkien to an audience like ours.
No work of fiction engaged me as much as The Silmarillion. It was my most rewarding read in the fantasy genre. I constantly revisit it and Christopher Tolkien’s collected material about its background. I don’t think I am the only one who would appreciate Tolkien’s attempt to create a world that engages him spiritually and intellectually with the subjects of his study and object of his faith. If the Lord of the Rings means anything to you, and you love the challenge of classical texts, The Silmarillion is for you.
[1] Much of this legacy is due to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series edited by Lin Carter, which introduced Tolkien to a new audience and reprinted fantasy novels older than Tolkien. The brand solidified fantasy literature written for adults, and thus Tolkien became embedded in the genre. Published by Ballantine under Del Rey Books, Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara is cited as being the first popular “repackaging” of Tolkien. Robert Jordan’s early Wheel of Time books are also criticized for following the Tolkien blueprint closely. The impact of Tolkien on fantasy and fantasy publishing is its own vast topic.
[2] Holly Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography (Word on Fire Academics, 2023),15.
[3] Ordway, Tolkien’s Faith, 1.
[4] Ibid, 15
[5] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of JRR Tolkien (HarperCollins, 2023), ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien, 205.
[6] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Numenor (HarperCollins, 2024), ed. Brian Sibley, 48.
[7] Tolkien, Letters, 206.
[8] Tolkien, Letters, 202.
[9] Ibid, 203.
[10] Ibid, 35.
[11] https://screenrant.com/lord-rings-tolkien-rights-sell-new-movie-explained/
[12] Ibid.
