of Deckard and the Book of the Obtuse

I finished the Lord of the Rings and now I'm perusing chapters out of The Silmarillion. Now, there's a hard nut to crack. It wasn't until last summer that I was finally able to slog through The Silmarillion - the bible of Middle Earth. It reads like the Bible too. Even as a longtime Tolkien fan I found the first few chapters impassable the first couple of times I attempted it. It's like reading those sections in The Iliad where Homer's describing so-and-so, son of such-and-such, who lived in Nowhereville slayed whazizname from those folks who ran the olive oil business in Eastern Nowhereville.

For those of you who have read the Lord of the Rings and want to read The Silmarillion, or at least get past the first couple chapters, it's important to get a good map. The one provided for the contemporary hardback editions is a little sketchy. It'll get you through the early chapters fine. The one for the paperback is a complete joke. I Googled up one on the net that must have come from a Tolkien companion book somewhere. Trust me, when you're following Turin through one marsh, across an obscure mountain range and into some lake at the east end of the forest where Barahir once hid out, you're gonna want to know where the hell you are. When Christopher Tolkien wrote this one, he wasn't exactly in full command of his father's evocative prose so it's probably best to think of it as more of a history textbook type of thing. Actually, Chris pieced this together from J.R.R.'s notes so I guess that I can forgive him after trying to decipher the hieroglyphics I write on Post-It notes.

With map in hand, your primary goal should be to remember names. They come fast and furious in the middle-to-late stages so if you're thumbing to the back every other sentence to figure out what the Valar are, who Morgoth is, or what was the name of the splinter group of elves made it over the Blue Mountains but didn't make it to the Sirion River during the first migration to the West, then you're gonna be in some serious trouble. Fortunately, there are some pretty cool details that you will discover if you can wade through it. Sauron has a pretty cool history, Galadriel puts in a few good appearances and Morgoth makes Sauron look like a total pansy in villain category. It was nice to get a few stories about dwarves and a killer elf named Turin and the whole book just underscores what an impressive and, thankfully, anal-retentive philologist Tolkien really was.

As for me, I'm going to re-read the Beren and Luthien chapter because I'd just recently saw that Tolkien had Beren written on his tombstone and Luthien on his wife's so maybe there's something a little special there in that story. Then, it's off to a little John Updike and Rabbit is Rich. I think I need a little dose of reality, albeit retro-reality.