Introducing The Silmarillion Reader’s Guide: a Free Resource from Tea with Tolkien
The Silmarillion is one of Tolkien’s most challenging works and yet also the most beautiful and important in my opinion. Many Tolkien fans new and old often feel intimidated by its depth and bewildered by its vocabulary, but it’s become my goal to encourage, equip, and inspire Tolkien fans to not only pick up The Silmarillion — but to finish it as well!
Like many new Tolkien readers, I struggled through several attempts to read The Silmarillion for the first time. I had been captivated by The Lord of the Rings and read it many times in high school, but I couldn't seem to make it past the first few pages of The Silmarillion and eventually every attempt ended right around the Valaquenta. It gathered dust on my bookshelf for years until I finally picked it up again about five years ago. But this time, I took a different approach.
Rather than attempting to understand the complexities of Tolkien’s mythology on my own, I surrounded myself with as many resources as I could find. And approaching it with this mindset made all the difference. Thanks to a handful of Tolkien podcasts, the audiobook narrated by Martin Shaw, pages of handwritten notes, and many, many visits to Tolkien Gateway, I was able to finish The Silmarillion for the first time!
It was also around this time that I created Tea with Tolkien, an online community inspired by the works and faith of JRR Tolkien. At the heart of Tea with Tolkien is our free book club: every year we choose one or two of Tolkien's works to read over the course of a few months, and then we'll discuss it along the way in our Discord server.
Together we've read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion multiple times as a community (as well as some of Tolkien's shorter works), and I've found that having a group to ask questions to and hear different interpretations from makes the experience of reading Tolkien all the more enriching. For each of our book clubs, I share my chapter notes with the group to help participants keep track of key events, character names, and so forth. Last year was our second time reading The Silmarillion as a group and my fourth or fifth re-read personally!
After years of drafting and refining my notes on The Silmarillion, I finally felt ready to publish them all together as The Silmarillion Reader's Guide earlier this year. Since then, over a thousand people have downloaded this free resource!
The Silmarillion Reader's Guide is a chapter-by-chapter reference, meant to serve as a faithful companion along your journey. For each chapter, you’ll find a bulleted list of key events to help you keep track of new characters and locations, major plot developments, and more. There are also a few visual aids included throughout the guide such as a quick reference sheet on the Valar, the Sundering of the Elves, the Sun and Moon, and a list of the rulers of Númenor.
The guide also includes links to my twenty-part Silmarillion podcast series that accompanied our 2020 book club. In this series, I covered a few chapters each week in short, 10-20 minute episodes. At eighty-six pages long, this free guide has a lot to offer without overwhelming first and second-time readers of The Silmarillion. Most chapters are covered in one to two pages as I’ve tried to be as concise as possible.
With Amazon’s The Rings of Power series premiering in September, these next few months are the opportune time to pick up The Silmarillion and experience the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth before seeing bits of pieces of this lore adapted onto the screen. With the help of our Silmarillion Reader’s Guide and the encouragement of the Tea with Tolkien community, I know you can do it!
You can find the free Silmarillion Reader’s Guide here.
