The Silmarillion, the volume of writings edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1977 four years after his father's death, is the most orderly and most nearly complete version of J.R.R.Tolkien's mythical and legendary “history”, the backcloth to his more novelistic narratives, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-5). The imaginary history set out in The Silmarillion begins with the creation of the world; it concludes, after many thousands of years preceded by an indefinite amount of pre-historic time, at the end of the “Third Age”, with a summary of those events narrated in full in The Lord of the Rings. The entire work, however, is barely a third of the length of The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion surveys much of its history from a great height: the fast-moving narrative...
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Citation: Rosebury, Brian. "The Silmarillion". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7744, accessed 09 June 2026.]
