Maeglin: I agree with you! My point was that I read/like stories for different reasons. Like I’m reading Ellison’s Invisible Man right now, and I’m really enjoying it, but I can’t ever imagine writing a story based on it. It’s a story to get lost in a world that another writer has created without having to do the imaginative work of filling in the holes s/he’s left or aligning the incongruous details so that they make sense.

Now I have to do the latter with the Silm, which is why I suspect a lot of people don’t like the book but, for me, those gaps and inconsistencies seem an invitation to creativity. But it’s not a book I’d snuggle in with on a rainy day with the expectation of being wholly transported into the author’s vision. I have to supplement JRRT’s vision with a lot of my own, which has a different kind of appeal for me.

So, yes, both move my heart and mind, just for different reasons is all.

Aranel: A second try might not be a bad idea! And, no, I’m really not trying to recruit more Silm authors. But I do think that it’s a hard book to “get” much less like on a first reading, especially if you go into it expecting another LotR or TH.

Given both of our proclivities for writing Tolkien-based stories that take on whole swatches of unwritten history, then the degree of our agreeance on why we write in M-e really shouldn’t surprise me. But I found myself nodding along with your second paragraph and can only say, “Me too.”

Spiced Wine: I definitely agree on the pagan feel to the Silm and think that is perhaps part of the appeal to me too. Or, at least, why I am so drawn to the Elves. (That and the ears. I love the leaf-shaped ears! … and before anyone jumps on me, yes, I know leaf-shaped ears are not “canon.” But even if people write Elves with rounded ears, I give them leaf-shaped ears in my mind. )

Part of the joy of fandom for me is getting to see how we all start with the same details from the texts and each construct our own world from that. As much as I have, at times also, lamented that there isn’t more (I could tear my hair out over the fact that JRRT stopped writing Shibboleth when he got to the Feanorians, for example!), the imaginative playground that his world has become because of its lack of detail, completion, and consistency is not something that I’d want to give up either. Quite a conundrum!

It’s very insightful to see your views on the book, coming from that same place as I did but then having it become so important to you. I have a lack of patience to begin with, so haven’t given it another chance. But now you’ve got me wondering if I should give it another go.

“Unknown realms” is probably my number one reason for loving Middle-Earth as a fanfic writer. Tolkien left so many holes everywhere along with the complex backstory and it just begs to be explored. My Epic Hobbit Soap Opera has even moved into Khand and Harad in my sadly unfinished third novel, and the Easterlings, Corsairs, and Dwarves keep poking me.

An interesting take, for sure. But if Tolkien wasn’t a great novelist, or even if he wasn’t a great writer, what of it? That argument seems to miss the point completely. The point of a ’serious’ story or story-collection is not to be well-written or even necessarily ‘pleasing’, but to capture hearts and minds. In that respect (at least for me, and apparently you as well), the Silmarillion surpasses LOTR. When I think of the Silm, the work which seems most comparable is the Bible. No one would argue that the latter is well-written – but it certainly is influential! And, like the Silm, for many the Bible stops short of satisfaction and raises more questions than it answers. Yet both books contain much truth, and (imo) the SIlm contains more truth than LOTR.

(I, of course, like the Sil because of the same personality quirk that leads me to wax rhapsodic over a treatise on the history of optics or a lengthy examination of the mbira dzavadzimu, but that’s just me, and it’s why I wound up safely tucked away in grad school.)