LOTR: What Inspired Tolkien To Write The Silmarillion?
For those who haven’t read the vast works of J.R.R. Tolkien, his stories are alive and enriched far beyond the world of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Middle Earth is made richer by great tomes like The Children of Hurin and theUnfinished Tales, as well as shorter delights like The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and Leaf by Niggle. But probably the most famous of his stories outside the two most well known tales in Middle Earth is The Silmarillion, which exists as a kind of lore or history of what happened in the early ages of the world, before the One Ring was ever made.
The Silmarillion is, in essence, an origin story of the world and the ancient beings of Middle Earth, and how they were created. It is a detailed and poetic introduction to the landscape and the great seas and how they came to be, and of the people who shaped them and the other treasures of Middle Earth, before the Elves and Men were awoken. Every great Fantasy story needs an epic world as its back-drop, but The Silmarillion goes one step further than that. So what inspired Tolkien to write this amazing legend in the first place?
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The answer is a combination of his English heritage, his literary studies at university, and his love of myths and lore from around the world. Tolkien and his brother grew up on stories of great dragons and mighty beasts that came from across the seas, in Scandinavian stories and German fairytales. This love only grew when he attended Oxford and started studying Icelandic Sagas and Celtic folklore. But during this time, Tolkien noticed a separation between the Cosmology of religion and their creation myths, and the seemingly «lesser fairy stories that
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