Kicking the Hobbit

The Silmarillion By J. R. R. Tolkien Houghton Mifflin, 365 pp., $10.95 J. R. R. Tolkien was, to all appearances, a normal Oxford don. He wore rumpled suits and smoked a pipe; hated French cooking and the Industrial Revolution; loved philology and English literature (up to Chaucer); and even had, in the best donnish tradition, an eccentricity—a private universe named Middle-earth (“our world … in a purely imaginary period of antiquity”), with whose languages and histories he tinkered, off and on, for 56 years. All of which might have gone unremarked had he not one day scrawled on the back of a dull exam, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” This chance sentence grew into a bedtime story for his children; the bedtime story found its way into Middle-earth; and the result—two decades and half a million words later—was The Lord of the Rings.

The Silmarillion (begun in 1917, but never quite completed—this edition is posthumous, assembled by Tolkien’s son Christopher) deals with the same universe; it recounts the creation and early history of Middle-earth, and sets the stage for much of The Lord of the Rings’ action. But there the resemblance ends; and some reviewers (and, I suspect, not a few readers) are feeling cheated. The New Republic sourly compared The Silmarillion to the Godzilla epics: “All the characters are 37 feet tall and live for a million years.”

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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The Silmarillion By J. R. R. Tolkien Houghton Mifflin, 365 pp., $10.95 J. R. R. Tolkien was, to all appearances, a normal Oxford don. He wore rumpled suits and smoked a pipe; hated French cooking and the Industrial Revolution; loved philology and English literature (up to Chaucer); and even had, in the best donnish tradition, an eccentricity—a private universe named Middle-earth (“our world … in a purely imaginary period of antiquity”), with whose languages and histories he tinkered, off and on, for 56 years. All of which might have gone unremarked had he not one day scrawled on the back of a dull exam, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” This chance sentence grew into a bedtime story for his children; the bedtime story found its way into Middle-earth; and the result—two decades and half a million words later—was The Lord of the Rings.

The Silmarillion (begun in 1917, but never quite completed—this edition is posthumous, assembled by Tolkien’s son Christopher) deals with the same universe; it recounts the creation and early history of Middle-earth, and sets the stage for much of The Lord of the Rings’ action. But there the resemblance ends; and some reviewers (and, I suspect, not a few readers) are feeling cheated. The New Republic sourly compared The Silmarillion to the Godzilla epics: “All the characters are 37 feet tall and live for a million years.”