The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was much better the second time through, now that I had a basic familiarity with the world Tolkien has created.

The Silmarillion consists of the entire history of the Elves of Tolkien’s world. It shows the vastness of Tolkien’s imagination. The stories are varied: Some are glorious, some are heroic, many are sad . . . I really wish he would have developed them in more detail.

Beyond the stories, the book makes me reflect on the concepts of creation, fall, and redemption.

At first, the world Tolkien has created is beautiful and good in its unfallen glory. Actually, it’s probably similar to what this world would have been had it been developed for hundreds of years. Before the Elves leave Valinor, they have developed a beautiful culture of cities, light, and song. Ages pass, during which the Elves thrive, creating a glorious, peaceful world. Overall, in the first part of The Silmarillion, Tolkien incites our imagination to think of the world we could have had—more glorious than we can comprehend.

But in Tolkien’s world, like ours, there is a Fall. A fallen Vala (the Valar are essentially archangels who are entrusted with the rule of the world) seduces Feanor, an Adam figure, to rebel against the other Valar. Once Feanor rebels, evil begets evil, and it spreads until the whole world is infected. The whole book is really the working out of this Fall. Eventually, most of the Elves leave Valinor, and they build hidden kingdoms in Middle Earth, such as Gondolin and Rivendell. Over the ages, these hidden kingdoms fall or fade away.

The redemption of Tolkien’s world is really unfinished, but it’s interesting that Tolkien emphasizes the working out of Providence in the world’s affairs. In The Silmarillion, it is the will of Providence for the Elves to go back into the West so that the Age of Man will commence. Although the book ends with the same scene as The Lord of the Rings—the White Ship leaving from the Grey Havens—the emphasis is on the fact that this ship is leaving with the last of the Elves. This is because the Elves’ work is finished in Middle Earth, and now the Age of Man has fully come—and again, this is by the will of Providence.

Finally, I enjoyed Tolkien’s clever links to other legends. The Elvish haven of Avollone is a reference to Avalon of the Arthurian tales. Another reference to other myths is Atalante, or the island (continent?) of Numenor. Like Atlantis, Numenor is destroyed in cataclysm and swallowed up by the ocean. And finally, the character of Earendil (Elrond’s father) is an Odysseus figure—a wandering mariner about whom there are many tales.



View all my reviews

Christians take a very big view of redemption because they take a very big view of fallenness. If all has been created good and all has been corrupted, then all must be redeemed. God isn't content to save souls; God wants to save bodies too. God isn't content to save human beings in their individual activities; God wants to save social systems and economic structures too. If the management/labor structure contains built-in antagonism, then it needs to be redeemed. If the health care delivery system reaches only the well-to-do, then it needs to be reformed. The same goes for hostile relationships of race, gender, or class. . . .

Everything corrupt needs to be redeemed, and that includes the whole natural world, which both sings and groans. The whole natural world, in all its glory and pain, needs the redemption that will bring shalom. The world isn't divided into a sacred realm and a secular realm, with redemptive activity confined to the sacred zone. The whole world belongs to God, the whole world has fallen, and so the whole world needs to be redeemed--every last person, place, organization, and program; all "rocks and trees and skies and seas"; in fact, "every square inch," as Abraham Kuyper said. The whole creation is "a theater for the mighty works of God," first in creation and then in re-creation.

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living 

In his essay "Myth: Flight to Reality," Thomas Howard shows that we do almost everything we do out of a deep-down desire for what he calls "perfection." We want to make this world what it ought to be.

It's amazing to me in this passage how closely this desire aligns with the Christian view of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. There's something deep down in all of us, including non-believers, that understands that this world is damaged and in need of redemption, and we do what we do out of a desire for that redemption. In this passage, Howard shows that this desire drives everything we do, from politics to healthcare to law, and even to the creation of stories.

The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think, the search for perfection. Now you can give this perfection a hundred names--truth, beauty, goodness, wholeness, bliss, repose, order, form, the eternal, and so on, depending on what you want to stress at the moment. There's no word in human language that will name it adequately. Let's call it perfection here. We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It is what stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire. We find sooner or later all the data of our experience will be faulted--our bodies, our minds, our wills, our relationships, our landscapes, our states, our institutions, our programs.

Politics, medicine, ecology, and [law] are our efforts to repair the damage. Most of what we do, starting with brushing our teeth in the morning, would be seen by the angels as a waste of time, since they don't know what it is to be almost wholly occupied with shoring things up. When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy we feel between ourselves and perfection. We want tranquility and we find tumult. We want permanence and we find decay. We want order and we find havoc. We want health and we find sickness. We want strength and we find weakness. We want beauty and we find horror.

But neither can we settle for this state of affairs. We are driven by who knows what--maybe it's the Holy Ghost--to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, to transcend it. We write about our experience, and we sing about it, and we reenact it because we think that somehow if we can stand off from it and get a look at it, we can get ahold of it once more. We signal our awareness of perfection by making something approximating perfection out of our experience--something true, beautiful, good, and incorruptible.

Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, a total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage, he sees it not as a sickness or an accident of the environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future. Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

Flannery O'Connor, "Novelist and Believer"

Today's reader, if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as Instant Uplift. . . . There is a better sense in which it can be used but seldom is--the sense of being in travail with and for creation in its subjection to vanity. This is a sense which implies a recognition of sin; this is a suffering with, but one which blunts no edges and makes no excuses. When infused into novels, it is often forbidding. Our age doesn't go for it.

Flannery O'Connor, "Novelist and Believer"

Everybody knows there is something about human life that is out of line or out of whack. We can be happy at times but not totally fulfilled. Even when we have happiness, we fear we'll lose it. Worse, every day brings us fresh news of old evils -- of nature ravaged, of God blasphemed, of people cheated, battered, terrorized. Every day brings us news of people whose misery is almost impossible to fathom.

For centuries, philosophers, theologians, novelists, and artists have described the human predicament and then prescribed a cure, or at least a salve. ... That is, they've offered a prognosis. Hope is the reach of our hearts for the cure. It's the reach of our hearts toward what we think will fulfill us, secure us, save us--and not just us, but also the whole world. To be a Christian is to participate in this very common human enterprise of diagnosis, prescription, and prognosis, but to do so from inside a Christian view of the world, a view that has been constructed from Scripture and that centers on Jesus Christ the Savior, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

Much of our theology has been so concentrated on heaven that it invalidates any concern for the earth. Some images in Scripture have even been misconstrued to perpetuate a disregard for the creation, such as the image that in the last days the world will be consumed by fire. But nearly every other time the "consumed by fire" image is evoked in Scripture, it is a fire that purifies rather than burns up, a fire that frees up life rather than destroys it. No doubt, the way we live is shaped by how we imagine the end of the world--whether we think God's final plan is for everything to go up in flames or for everything to be brought back to life.

Creation care is not just about theology. It is about having the creativity to embody our theology imaginatively . . . At its core, creation care is about loving our global neighbor, because the poor suffer the most from the degradation of the earth and the struggle for clean water. For many kids in the concrete jungle of the ghettoes and slums, there can be such a disconnection from creation that they feel disconnected from the Creator.

. . . Part of what we do as we plant urban gardens is reconnect to the beauty of the earth. Kids get to see grass pierce concrete. Their eyes light up as they pull a carrot out of the ground and digging for potatoes can feel like digging for lost treasure. At the heart of it all is a God who so loved the world and who called everything in it good. Our story began in a garden, but it ends in a city--a beautiful restored city the Scriptures describe as the New Jerusalem, coming on earth as it is in heaven.

Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, pp. 302-3

From Eliot's "Little Gidding":

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
     Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
    To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
    We only live, only suspire
    Consumed by either fire or fire.

"The Lordship of Christ over the whole of life means that there are no platonic areas in Christianity, no dichotomy or hierarchy between the body and the soul. God made the body as well as the soul, and redemption is for the whole man."

--Francis Schaeffer, Art and the Bible