What you'd have to do is release Beren and Luthien FIRST. Everyone likes a love story. And it comes first chronologically, so it would act as the one that get's everyone's attention. Then people would go see Turin since B&L was so good, and they may not like it as much. But then Gondolin comes out, and it's absolutely amazing. So Turin would be the weak one of the three, but it would be standing in between two huge pillars, so it wouldn't be a big prob. That's how I see it anyways.

That actually makes alot of sense. Never thought of it that way before!

So, Beren, you said in your member introduction that you are most familiar with/conversant with the Silmarillion and less so with the trilogy. That just amazes me. I think that the Silmarillion is SO much harder to read, because it is so general and abstract, especially in the beginning. The reader needs to put so much more into it, making connections, filling in the colors and details, imagining what the sketchy descriptions of this or that culture would imply (what would an elf be like, what would a dwarf be like, what would a man be like, what would a balrog or a Shelob thingie be like).

I am about halfway through reading it, for the first time in earnest, right now (and I don't want to say how old I am). And I have to force myself to SIT and be QUIET and CONCENTRATE, and there can't be any other people around making noise or poking me or asking me for stuff. I bought myself the newish hardcover edition of it, illustrated by Ted Nasmith, as a motivator and a help to reading it, because it has been a goal for so long. It's really awesome now, but this comes after years of trying, and reading a few pages, and flipping through and trying to get a toe-hold and failing.

I read the Hobbit first, and then the Lord of the Rings, and so I have come to know about these higher things (like Numinor) the way the hobbits did: first through hints and tales and brief bits of history gained by meeting and talking to different people on the journeys with Bilbo and Frodo. And I pretty much take the approach of Pippin, who could have gotten the information before, if he had listened more closely to Uncle Bilbo's stories, but he didn't. The DEPTH (as Tolkien calls it) of knowing that there is history behind this world and this current story (that the hobbits are in) is one thing that makes it so magical. That the hobbits stumble upon some bit of ruin and wonder "What happened here?" or "Who built this? and What was it for?" You know, and then Aragorn or Gandalf will get a far-off look and say a few sentences about it, and maybe they will remember that Bilbo made a rhyme about it or they remember seeing it somewhere on a map in Uncle Bilbo's hobbit hole, but they hadn't paid attention at the time. That's just wonderful, and I don't know of any other stories that have quite that masterful of a level of depth and reality to them. Harry Potter does a pretty good job with Harry being raised in total ignorance by muggles and having to learn things, and having the Hogwarts teachers sometimes be quite stingey with information, and then Harry has to get a lot of his information from Ron or the Weasley twins or from some other less-than-totally reliable or knowledgeable source. And Harry doesn't have the patience to go look things up or devour his history books like Hermione, so we don't get to know about things through those means either. But to get that level of depth, and then to pull off the conceit of having main characters (and hence the reader) learn things gradually and in pieces and often in muddled versions, is very rare.

But I guess Tolkien himself started by writing the Silmarillion material, so it is possible to begin with just that. So what did you do, Beren, read all of the books and then read the SIlmarillion in more depth? I would imagine that this would require a lot of imagination on your part. One thing I do NOT like about the Silmarillion is that it does not have that same sense of mystery and depth, because we get the omniscient view of the big picture. And when the Peter Jackson team made the movies, they sacrificed a lot of this sense of depth by putting everything in correct chronological order and telling us the background story of the ring in the opening sequence.

I can't imagine the Silmarillion stories standing alone very well in a film because they are supposed to feel so remote. And they don't have the depth because you get the Valar's-eye view and you get to start from the beginning. So you miss out on the sense of mystery and depth. How are you able to relate to those stories more than the material in the trilogy??!! Hmm...well, okay, really most Bible stories and myths are about like the Silmarillion, and people have made movies and musicals about them, taking very short sketchy original material and filling in gobs, putting flesh and dressing on the bones. But, whew! what a lot of interpretation is required. The reader has to be a writer. Maybe Tolkien would say a sub-sub-creator, having to create in his imagination what the sub-creator only hinted at in the story.

Wow, there's a lot to respond to. I'll just go through paragraph by paragraph.

1. I think I like the Silmarillion better because it is the origin. I absolutely love the first chapter, and sometimes will just get it out and read it to myself. It is utterly beautiful. I am very interested in beginnings and histories. I am 17, and homeschooled, and take pleasure from reading the hardest stuff possible

2. Congrats!! I wish you well. One thing that helped me a LOT when I read the Silmarillion is this: I got the tape version from my library and read it along with the tapes. Make sure you don't get an abridged one. It makes it go so much faster and easier. You don't have to spend 2 hours on a half-page because of pronunciations and figuring out who is who. The narrator doesn't stumble on names, so you can learn to say them like he says them. Because of this, I can fluently speak everyone's name in the Silmarillion. Then you can also spend more energy on paying attention to the actual story. It makes it a lot more enjoyable.

3. You have an interesting point here. You like having backstory in a story, and the reader not necessarily knowing what the backstory is. But just the fact of it being there helps. With me, I also love backstory, but I want to KNOW the backstory. I cannot sit by and just let the little references pass by. I have to know every bit that exists in the history of the world I'm in when I read a story.

4. Let me see...what DID I do? lol...If I remember right, my mom read me The Hobbit when I was little, but I never went beyond that for a while. When FOTR came out in theaters, I was too young to go see it. My dad and bro told me it was based on a book written by the same guy who wrote the Hobbit. So, since I couldn't see the movie, I decided to read the book in the meantime. Haha, that took a LONG time. I think it took about a year (me being about 9 or 10). Of course, much of it went over my head, and I remember skipping a lot of the chapter "Elrond's Council." When I finished that, I was kinda overwhelmed. I didn't want to read any for a while. Then, I asked my mom if I could see the movie. She said no, and so I looked on our bookshelf for more books by Tolkien. I found the Silmarillion, and my bro said it was very hard to get through. So I decided not to read it just then. After that, I just waited a few years until I was 14, and I saw FOTR. In the year after that, I saw TTT and ROTK, and also read the Silmarillion (with the tapes). The movies kind of spurred a new longing for Tolkien in me, so I began looking for Tolkien books at the library. I found a book called "The War of the Jewels." It looked really cool, so I got it. I then looked inside of it, and realized it was 11th in a 12-part series. I was like, "woah. This is huge. It'll take me forever." (I imagine Christopher Tolkien said the same thing when he started out on his journey of writing the beast.) But I set myself to reading the whole series. I began looking up the books at the library, and it only had two others. So I decided to buy them. Here is the full list:
I. The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1
II. The Book of Lost Tales, Part 2
III. The Lays of Beleriand
IV. The Shaping of Middle-Earth
V. The Lost Road and Other Writings
VI. The Return of the Shadow
VII. The Treason of Isengard
VIII. The War of the Ring
IX. Sauron Defeated
X. Morgoth's Ring
XI. The War of the Jewels
XII. The Peoples of Middle-Earth
I am currently almost done with #7 "The Treason of Isengard." I own every one of them, and have a whole shelf now devoted to Tolkien. Anyways, that's my "Tolkien testimony."

5. I see your point. But there are those out there, like me, who want to see all the backstory. They are hungry for Tolkien films. So if someone made films out of the whole Silmarillion, their hunger would be, at least temporarily, satisfied. But if someone only makes the "big three" mentioned in previous posts, then there is still a HUGE amount of "unknown" backstory and mystery. I think it would be the ideal money-maker to make the big three, and not any others. But as a Tolkien nut myself, I would go to see any movie taken from the Silmarillion.

Holy Frijoles (sp?) (Free hole ayez) You are 17?

Well, okay. I guess I was that age when I read the LOTR. But still. You have the patience to read the Silmarillion and all of Tolkien's notes and rough drafts? Well, it shows that you have good taste that you continue to look for Tolkien stuff, because there really is no one like him.

I guess I should have home schooled my kids. And I should have restricted their television and movie exposure. I would have killed them if I had tried to home school them, though. I really would have been a child abuser. But I envy when I hear about how literary a lot of home-schooled kids are. I keep poking the Tolkien and Narnia books at them, saying, "You really should try these." "Really." "Try them." It's total "I do not like green eggs and ham." "Would you like them read to you?" "Would you like them in a shoe?" "Would you like the radio play?" "Try it, kids, it's awesome...hey." It's like they think the books are poison because I like them so much. Our neighbor, who is older than our girls, refused to read the LOTR, even though her parents and I KNEW she would love it. Then one day she broke her shoulder, and was stuck being sedentary for a long time. Her dad called me and asked if she could borrow my copy of LOTR. He said, "When you give it to her, don't act excited. Just be flat. We don't want to jinx this." So I did, and I did not ask her how she was liking it or anything. Pretty soon she became a Tolkien NUT. Dressed up as Legolas for Halloween (long blonde hair...). Maybe my kids need to become disabled temporarily.

I didn't have the patience, when I was your age, to read everything you are reading. I just wanted to know about Frodo and Sam and when I got into the second two books I got really impatient and started just skimming all of the songs and poems and battle scenes. "Woop. Here's another scene with Theoden's army...blah blah blah....What is happening with Frodo???!!!" Stayed up late into the night....flashlight under the covers....went to school bleary-eyed for a week.

Gotta go. Fun hearing about your reading experience.

haha, how old did you think I was? Yes, I'm 17. I am also constantly amazed that I'm crazy enough to read all that I do. And I used to read a lot more, but new things have come up in the past year, like making movies. I am an indie movie director, and the movie I'm working on right now takes a lot of time out of my schedule. I'm seeing it as healthy not to read so much, but it also is aggravating how long it takes to get through a book.

Oh, don't worry, the first time I read LOTR, I also skipped all the poems and stuff. So now I'm kinda catching up, I guess. Ahh, how I've changed. Now I really like poetry. In fact, "The Lays of Beleriand" was one of my favorite books. It has "The Lay of The Children of Hurin" and "The Lay of Leithian" in it. Those two stories in poetry form are just beautiful. Thick, but beautiful.

Beren--
Well, I thought you were well into adulthood. Does that insult any of the younger people on this discussion? You express yourself well...you're articulate...you make good points and observations. I taught a lower-level college course for awhile and short papers were required. It was a big eye-opener for me. I thought, "Whew! All those years as an undergrad and now as a graduate student, I have sweated out my papers SO MUCH, and now finally I see a real random sampling of what the larger crowd writes. If I had known this I would have relaxed more." Also, I'm impressed as hell that you know how to put a nice little picture logo thing near your name. And it's even something that looks elf-y. Well, and you know the SILMARILLION!! I just can't believe that. But yeah, I had a Sunday school student once, middle-school-aged, who had read the Silmarillion. I couldn't believe that either. And I kept trying to get him to say brilliant things in class, because you KNOW he must be thinkig deep thoughts habitually, but he was really shy.

Beren, I, like Otto's World, am astounded by the depth of your knowledge at your age. But I really shouldn't be. At your age, I like you, was a voracious reader. I had begun with the Hobbit as a child, graduated to TLOTR in my 'tweens and was tackling the Silmarillion in High School. I have to say though, my feelings about the whole thing are a bit between Otto's World and your own. Like you, I am an Origin and History Nut, but like Otto's World I found it a bit of a slog and I am sorry to say, other than The Book of Lost Tales, I have read little else Tolkien. But I am attempting now to make up for lost time.

Happy Holidays
Gandalfs Beard

ahh, but the Books of Lost Tales are some of the best of the whole "History of Middle-Earth" series.

I guess the Silmarillion has gone age and reading style approch. To fill my part of the void, I'm 25, read the Hobbit in grade school, LOTR in High School. First year of College when the movies were starting to come out I picked up the Silmarillion.

For Otto, I like Beren's idea of reading along with the tape. I didn't get that chance but had some of the same trouble reading it. I found that the standard "skip the poems and skim a chapter or two" on your first read through is nice. Also, try to print out or xerox the family trees that Tolkien included. And make little notes about who is related to who, and who hates who. I can not begin to guess how many times I lost track of who was brothers/sons/cousins/friends/enemies.

After you're done wait a couple months, then read it all over again. Now that the skim version gave you a kind of general view of the world and timeline, you can enjoy and keep up with the story while you read it.

As for other Tolkien, Christopher recently published a novel size version of the Children of Hurien, which is the Turin Turumbar story. If you can, read the Silmarillion version first and then read the novel. It really lets you enjoy all the deeper story and detail of the full novel version.

@ Beren. Your reading list you posted. VI, VII, VIII, IX. The return of the Shadow through Sauron Defeated, Isn't that just the Lord of the Rings? That's why I never bought them. Or are they the same story from another view? The war of the Jewels I thought was the story of Fenor's sons trying to recover the Silmarils and the effects of the Doom of Mandos. I have the books of Lost Tales, never did finish them, they were sort of rough draftish and time just never allowed me to get fully going. Now I have a 7 month old baby and time is a luxuary I don't often get to enjoy anymore. What are some of the rest of that listing, I'm curious.

For Otto I think? Whoever it was that said they enjoyed the similarity and depth of Tolkien to real myths and legends. He took alot of inspiration from actual myths and legend to try and create a mythology for England, seeing as much of England's early myths perished in the Norman invasions. Sindarian (Elvish) is even based on the Finish language. Many similarities can be seen between Norse mythology and great Finish epic called Kalevallah, I think, I may have the spelling wrong, but I'm close.

As to Peter Jackson's prolouge for LOTR, I loved every second of it. My friends who saw FotR with me were excited (Midnight, opening night), but I was the only one who had actually read the book. They knew this, and knew just how much I had loved and knew the stories. I thought for certain I would be answering questions about who's who and what's what because movies just never seem to cover details well. That prolouge set up non-readers so well to start the movies that I was truley pleased. Another short story from that night is Boromirs death. A good example of how well PJ did the movie for both readers and non. When the first arrow struck him my friend next to me kind of cried out. An "Oh No!" response. While next to him you have me, I know he dies, I know he dies by orc arrows. I also know he can handle more than one. And I said as much, "Get up you son of @$#%^, I know you can take more than one!"