For the last decade or so, I have engulfed myself in the mythos of Middle Earth. The movies are awesome, to be sure, and the LOTR published trilogy is a laudable piece of artwork that will forever shine in the hearts and minds of nerds around the world; but that’s not all there is to it, people.
Beginning with the Silmarillion. Often referred to as the “bible” of middle earth, it’s the gateway drug into this fascinating web of mythical history. Understandably, however, there is a high level of complexity to a story that stretches far beyond the simplistic tale of some short people finding creative ways to try and get dead.
The biggest hurdle for most people I’ve spoken with is that they simply do not care what happened in the first and second ages, before the sun and moon and all of that. The Silmarillion and subsequent compilations are viewed as dense, dry, and most commonly “fucking boring, dude”. I would attribute that to the lack of superfluous dialogue and endless description of walking.
And to that point, who amongst you did not whine about all the walking in the Return of the King (and also the Fellowship of the Ring, and there was a lot of walking in the Two Towers as well. You would really think Samwise would have lost some weight by the end of that, I mean with no food and all that walking. He’s probably got a glandular issue.)? The Silmarillion may be dense, but boring it is not. There are curses, tragedies, love stories, and more epic sagas that you can shake an unreasonably long pipe at.
Perhaps the issue here is that I actually find LOTR tedious in its expansiveness. I don’t care about Aragorn and Arwen (boring!), and after a while I really just start rooting for Sauron the way the protagonists keep going full defeatist. The story of the Fall of Gondolin, on the other hand, tells a tale of a solitary man who had brief companions over a long journey that led him to encounter the lord of the Sea, and an Elf Lord with a hot daughter. I don’t care how much his back hurt (the reader may never know if he got a foot cramp!), I’m more interested in the nuance. It’s infinitely easier to grasp the point of a story and apply it to your own perspective when that story isn’t distracting you with hairy feet and internal debates.
TL,DR: Purchase the following. Then consume.