The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion was published posthumously in 1977, four years after J. R. R. Tolkien died. He had been writing the material since the First World War and regarded it as his central work, but he never finished arranging it for publication. His son Christopher Tolkien edited the collection, selected among the versions and provided the connective text, with Guy Gavriel Kay assisting him; Kay went on to become a fantasy novelist himself. Later volumes of the History of Middle-earth series show the drafts that this edition was built from.

The book is organised as a chronicle rather than a novel, with a creation myth, a pantheon, a geography and several long stories inside it. The most substantial of those stories follows the human hero Turin Turambar through a life shaped by a curse, and the tale of Beren and Luthien is the one that most directly prefigures the relationship between Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings. The style is deliberately archaic, closer to the Eddas and to the Bible than to modern fiction, and readers who come to it expecting another adventure story usually find it heavy going.

The Silmarillion was a bestseller on publication and reached the top of the New York Times list. Its material has since been published in several expanded forms, including Beren and Luthien, The Fall of Gondolin and The Children of Hurin, the last of which Christopher Tolkien assembled as a continuous narrative. It is the place where the seriousness of Tolkien's invented world becomes visible.

Readers who come to it after the trilogy often find that it changes how they read the earlier books, because the wars and the old griefs the characters mention are told here in full, under the same names and bound by the same oaths.