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Questions tagged [the-silmarillion]

For questions related to The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. Use this tag with the [j-r-r-tolkien] tag.

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37 votes
11 answers
26k views

Should I read The Silmarillion before or after reading The Lord of the Rings?

I spent an extensive amount of time as an undergrad writing about and researching The Hobbit, especially in terms of Tolkien's famous essay on Beowulf. Getting a sense of what inspired Tolkien greatly ...
Peter's user avatar
  • 1,415
14 votes
1 answer
1k views

Have any Elves explored Rhûn or the lands to the east?

According to The Silmarillion and Tolkien's legendarium as a whole, the Elves first awoke in Cuiviénen, by a gulf in the Sea of Helcar. We learn that in The War of Wrath (Chapter 3, Quenta ...
HDE 226868's user avatar
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8 votes
1 answer
370 views

How do the Silmarils solve the puzzle of the Sampo?

It is well established that Tolkien used his fiction as a means of filling gaps and solving riddles in the extant studies of mythology and linguistics. Most of the time, he chose to do this by ...
Matt Thrower's user avatar
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5 votes
2 answers
2k views

What essentially does Tolkien mean by "Fall, Mortality and The Machine"?

I recently started reading The Silmarillion, and came across the below passage in a letter Tolkien sent to Milton Waldman. Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the ...
Sat's user avatar
  • 53
1 vote
2 answers
514 views

If Sauron made The One ring, why couldn't he just make another, even better, instead of searching for the first?

As all of us who have read Silmarillion know, Sauron wasn't the original "Lord of Darkness". In fact, he is a much lesser, and later, one. Melkor (AKA "Morgoth") was the original. ...
Morgoth's user avatar
  • 35