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Silmarillion

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[edit] Introduction

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion is a history of the fictional world Arda, including Middle-earth, prior to The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion represents a lifetime of work, begun when Tolkien was in his 20s and still in progress at the end of his life. A compiled version was first published posthumously in 1977 as The Silmarillion by Tolkien's son and intellectual heir Christopher Tolkien (Silmarillion vii).

The Silmarillion fandom is often considered to be a part of the larger Lord of the Rings fandom. Archives, awards, and discussion lists geared toward The Lord of the Rings often also accept material based on The Silmarillion, and, because the books are based in the same world and are part of the same history (cf. Tolkien's legendarium), there can be a good deal of overlap. However, fans who almost exclusively write Silmarillion-based fan fiction or engage in Silmarillion-based discussion and meta do exist and, while not as not as numerous as their counterparts in the Lord of the Rings fandom, nonetheless represent a moderately large fandom on their own.

[edit] The Author

Main article: J. R. R. Tolkien

Silmarillion authors tend to be older compared to authors in the larger Lord of the Rings fandom. As with many fandoms, most Silmarillion authors are women. [citation needed]

[edit] Canon

Original research
This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.

Please improve the article by adding references.


Silmarillion canon is complicated because the book was compiled and edited by the author's son and published posthumously. As such, fans often question what aspects of The Silmarillion were Tolkien's own words or question why Christopher Tolkien made the decisions that he did in choosing which versions of the story from his father's notes to publish.

The canon of the Silmarillion fandom is heavily supplemented by Tolkien's other Arda-based writings, including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Children of Húrin, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth series. The latter, particularly, gives insight into Tolkien's line of thought and how his son selected--and sometimes erred--in what he included in The Silmarillion.

Fans vary in how they define canon in this fandom, generating a variety of interpretations of the same information and stories on the same subject that may, nonetheless, deviate widely from each other. For example, some fans count only those works published before Tolkien's death to be canon, as these books would have been considered by Tolkien to be correct enough to publish. Other authors also consider The Silmarillion to be canon, as it is a complete and internally consistent work. Finally, other authors attempt from the History of Middle-earth books and others to determine what Tolkien's final thoughts on various canon subjects would have been and use that as their canon.

To complicate Silmarillion canon further is the fact that Tolkien designed his works to be treated as historical sources: that is, observed, compiled, and written by loremasters of that age and later translated by the Hobbit Bilbo and passed on from there, becoming part of our modern mythology. In The Book of Lost Tales 1, Christopher Tolkien writes: "In The Complete Guide to Middle-earth Robert Foster says: 'Quenta Silmarillion was no doubt one of Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish preserved in the Red Book of Westmarch.' So also I have assumed: the 'books of lore' that Bilbo gave to Frodo provided in the end the solution: they were 'The Silmarillion.' But apart from the evidence cited here, there is, so far as I know, no other statement on this matter anywhere in my father's writings; and (wrongly, as I think now) I was reluctant to step into the breach and make definite what I only surmised" (BoLT1 xiii).

As such, a good number of Silmarillion fans discuss and write about the book with this perspective in mind and attempt to address biases and errors that might have occurred due to the limited and skewed information available to the loremasters of the time.

[edit] Fanworks policy and history

This section needs more information.


[edit] Terminology

Below is a list of terms and their definitions that are used in this fan community.

This section needs more information.

[edit] Timeline

Below is a partial timeline of events that took place in this fan community.

This section needs more information.

[edit] Kerfluffles

The Silmarillion fandom tends, as a general rule, to be rather quiet and diplomatic when compared to other large book-based fandoms such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion Writers' Guild, currently the fandom's largest archive, explicitly forbids the sorts of behavior that often generates drama and wank [4].

Perhaps also because Silmarillion canon tends to be nebulous to start, most authors tend to accept that their ideas and interpretations are not guaranteed to be the only ones present in the fandom and tend to remain open-minded about alternative views of canon that might cause fractures and conflict in other fandoms.

[edit] Fandom size

Because the Silmarillion fandom is often regarded as a component of the general Tolkien--or Lord of the Rings--fandom, it is hard to gauge how many people count themselves as part of the Silmarillion fandom. For example, Lord of the Rings fans will often read and occasionally write Silmarillion fan fiction without necessarily considering themselves part of the specific Silmarillion fandom.

Following are the membership totals for various Silmarillion groups and lists as of April 15, 2008:

Compare these totals to the membership totals of just a handful of general Tolkien groups and archives:

[edit] External links

[edit] Sources

  • Tolkien, J.R.R. The Book of Lost Tales 1. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. New York: Ballantine, 1983.
  • Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. 2nd edition. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. New York: Ballantine, 2001.
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