MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION!!!!

[MajahTR]

thanks Vanye...i need the kick in the....pants!
i have not picked up the book since a few weeks before the anniversary weekend!
maybe tomorrow?
Majah

[Stormrider]

Yes, we all need a kick in the behinder! While on my business trip this week, I was able to get some reading done! I am now into Chapter 13, The Return of the Noldor.

[Vanye]

Googled "The Silmarillion" today--found 2 sites I thought were fun. One is a blog site called livejournal has piece named 'The Silmarillion in one thousand words'-(funny!)
The other is a Silmarillion Quiz Page on The Valar Guild's web site--enough to make me OD on the Sil! Vanye

[Stormrider]

Vanye:

The funny Sil site in one thousand words sounds really familiar! Didn't someone post the link to that once...probably on the old MSN forum?

What is the site address for the Sil Quiz. I would like to check out that site!

[Vanye]

Stormrider: valarguild.org or
members.tripod.com/~Tilion/silmquiz.html
If you 'Google' Valar Guild these are what you get...
It is confession time for me! I do not know how to cut, paste & what have you--to get this info into my postings!! Can someone cure my ignorance in this area, Pretty Please??(w/cream & sugar on it) ;D Vanye

[Vanye]

Well, I have ultimately finished reading "The Silmarillion"! This,however, should not be taken to mean that I now understand it all; just that I have read it & now I am going to read it again (at least parts of it) Most especially the parts about Feanor & his family, all of whom have names beginning w/F,a most contentious & confusing bunch if ever there was one! Vanye

[Vanye]

Since finishing the Sil I've been thinking a lot about it but: so much of what I've come up w/has been said before. I have not really got a new or original slant on it. It is, at certain points especially, hard going. It can be difficullt to sort out the characters, relationships, alliances, & motives. Not to mention trying to fit the events into their proper time period. I did enjoy the articles which featured the characters that form a link to events in LoTR i.e. Galadriel, Celeborn, Gandalf, Elrond & even Gil-Galad. To know something of their backstory lends, in a very real sense, the 'weight of history' to the entire legendarium-making it feel like an oral as well as written tradition. At times it can even begin to feel like 'real' history. WHen you think about how Elrond fought at Gladden Fields & was w/Isildur in the 'cracks of Doom' when he (Isildur) chose to keep the Ring & even further back in time Galadriel was at the 'Flight of the Noldor' when the Kinslaying occured & all of the others including Gandalf were at the White Councils where they tried to solve their 'pesky problem' i.e. Sauron. That is continuity, something which is very important to me personally, & perhaps the reason that history is one of my big interests not to mention my college co-major. Working on my family history & Genealogy provides that sense of continuity in my own life. The Silmarillion imparts that feeling of continuity to the Legendarium for those of us who love Middle-earth. I am now reading Unfinished Tales which is further deepening that sense of continuity as, I am sure, HoMe which is next on my reading list, will also.
???Of course, there is some confusion to be found in all of this too since JRRT had made lots of changes & Christopher had to try to reconcile those discrepancies or just present them w/the differences noted. When you study the Family trees you may start to think that all of them are relatred to everyone else> Sort of reminds me of the Country song"I'm My Own Grandpa"!

As to the perennial complaint that there are,Gasp! NO HOBBITS!! I knew that ahead of time & know that they do not even come onto the scene till much later. I can live w/that!! What I have a problem w/is that nobody thought sooner of putting M-e's light source 'up high' & out of reach of that spoiled brat Melkor/Mogoth. would have saved them all a lot of trouble! Also I wonder why that other 'sociopath' Feanor did not apply his considerable talents to more worthy projects. Of course, I know why; it would have been a very dull story. Logic & common-sense aren't the sort of plot devices that lead to great drama. Sorry about that, my suspended disbelief slipped momentarily!

Altogether I have enjoyed reading 'The Silmarillion' & I am going to reread it in hopes of filling in the numerous gaps in my comprehension of said volume. I figure I can peel back another layer or two w/each subsequent reading. I hope to do so before the end of this year so that I won't have forgotten too much.

I have been reading a lot of what others have written about the Sil, M-e & JRRT.Some of the most interesting stuff I have just discovered in the last 24 hrs. On the website The One Ring.net there is a column called 'Tehanu's notes' & she has some very interesting points. I have also perused many of the sites that Magpie put in a post awhile back. There is no shortage of opinions on this subject. So I'm going to keep on reading & mulling it all over. For right now I'm into brain drain! Vanye

[Stormrider]

Good for you, Vanye!

I agree that The Silmarillion (and even Unfinished Tales, fills in many of the gaps of history. When I read LOTR in the past, I remember wondering about Elbereth and why the Elves seemed to love her so much.

LOTR is the "history" of Men and their future in Middle-earth and the fading of the Elves as they return to Valinor. The background history of the Elves and the earlier Ages in The Silmarillion at least explain why the Elves had the "calling" of the sea and the desire to return to Valinor. I always wondered why they wanted to leave Middle-earth!

Anyway, I am only to Chapter 18 The Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of Fingolfin in my reading. I am also alternating reading Homer's Iliad after watching the movie "Troy" AND painting Valar pictures for our art contests.

With that said, thank you for stimulating me to pick up The Silmarillion again and get another couple of chapters read!

[Vanye]

Have been doing a lot of reading on the net at other sites & one article on TORn especially has triggered memories of 18 May 1980! Anyone not from this area may not attach special significance to that date. For those of us in the Mt. St. Helens ashfall zone it is a red letter day. We think of events as either before or after Mt. St. Helens. That will be 25 years ago this May & she (the mountain) has been rumbling again.. perhaps to mark the anniversary? Dum de dum dum!
Well, to get on w/this saga--on the day of the "big one" we knew as soon as we felt ash falling on our heads what had happened. It blew up at 8:30 AM & by noon it was dark, the street lights came on in town & the radio was telling us to get our animals under shelter-out of the ash! Even the experts could not tell us how long it would be before we saw the sun again--it was 3 days! It was scary. It was a situation where you had no control: you could only wait & see what happened next! We got only one-half inch of ash but it had been blasted 6 miles into the air and it took along time for it to come back down.
Now for the point of this tome. In LoTR as Sam & Frodo get into Mordor but it becomes dark & stays dark for days due to--you guessed it--the eruption of Mt. Doom. So, even though I did not go through any thing like the privations sufffered by our heroes, I do have some inkling of what it is like to have no idea when or if you will see the sun again. It most certainly takes your mind off of almost anything else you may have considered important up to then! Anyway that's my story. I can relate to what they were going through at least in that one small way Vanye

[MajahTR]

Hi Gang!
i apologise that i dropped the Sil ball when i got sick.

you would have thought i could have at least read during that time...and i did but nothing heavier than Harry Potter i have to admit!!!
i appreciate your summary Vanye and i know i will resume soon because i got pretty involved with what i have read so far.

my problem with studying Tolkien is that i don't have enough time to read and formulate my own thoughts, let alone read all the "back history" materials and then also read up on others and their opinions. ( i almost wish to be back to when i first found JRRT and i only had the Hobbit and the Trilogy and myself...life was so much simpler then... )

and i too commemorate the 18th of May (it is a date marked on my calendar every year) since most of Montana was also covered in ash from St. Helens. during the several days we stayed home from work and school (i was in college), was the wierdest time i think i have been thru. i was reading a book for school (that i can't remember now what it was) it was about a nuclear attack that took out all the main cities of the US like Wash DC, etc. but the smaller rural areas survived the attack but had to deal with cut off communication, contaminated water and food and fighting with each other over it for survival!
was not a good time to read THAT!!!
on the positive side...some of my friends celebrated that day with Michalobe (beer) and Oreos! ;D i unfortunately couldn't share with them because i lived out in the country and wasn't supposed to drive anywhere...poor me!
thanks for that trip down memory lane...he he
Majah

[Vanye]

Well it's nearly 2 years later & here I am w/another resolution!!!!
This time I'm doing the Chronological Tolkien starting w/the audio book version of the Sil. All this discussion we've had recently about the stuff in HoMe has got me in a frame of mind this project. Will keep you posted as to my progress or lack thereof. Vanye

[Andorinha]

Good for you, Vanye! Does the audio version make it easier than reading? I was thinking about picking an audio version of LotR.

The Silmarillion is tough slogging, I remember getting through it pretty quickly back around 1978 only because we had a college group that met in a seminar room to discuss how our analyses of LotR had now to be changed, so Tom Bombadil was NOT Iluvatar, or a Maia, or a Valar; and Galadriel was a sort of rebel after all!

I re-read some of your earlier comments here, and I really like your statements on "continuity."

Re -- Vanye: " That is continuity, something which is very important to me personally, & perhaps the reason that history is one of my big interests not to mention my college co-major. Working on my family history & Genealogy provides that sense of continuity in my own life. The Silmarillion imparts that feeling of continuity to the Legendarium for those of us who love Middle-earth."

Well put!

[Androga Erindalant]

I think I should make a New Year's resolution too, from time to time. I have read the Silmarillion already by now, and even finished Unfinished Tales. I haven't read anything of the HoME series though. And I still have that summary business I was working on. I just posted another chapter now! I had already written that out a while ago, and I had already been working on the fourteenth as well. I don't think I can finish the summaries this year (considering the slow speed I'm working on them lol). It would be nice though to reach to chapter 18, at least. Then we got 3/4 of the actual "Silmarillion", if ignoring the other parts. Hey, I think I've been working on it since somewhere (summer/autumn?) 2004 lol.

[Andorinha]

Androga, thanks again for all the work on The Silmarillion study! It helps to have the summaries, and the questions are great as a mechanism for focusing the mind on some of the main themes of each chapter. It makes for a good discussion format, and since I dragged out my copy for some other research, I have it at hand so I'm going to get back to the study there -- soon, MY RESOLUTION!

Wow, 2004, yep, time seems to be flying past...

[Desi Baggins]

We aren't in a hurry to get them doen cuz we hope that TR stays active for several years to come so if you are not done we still have something to look forward to! You are doing a wonderful job at it too!