, 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,

(1937) and

(1954-5). The imaginary history set out in

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 entire work, however, is barely a third of the length of

.

surveys much of its history from a great height: the…

1716 words

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 19 April 2024.]