The Silmarillion for $2.99
I noticed that J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE SILMARILLION is $2.99 on Kindle today.
I read the Silmarillion for the first time when I was a teenager (a very long time ago), specifically a paperback edition that shows the Fall of Númenor on the cover. I have to admit that was a hard book for my teenaged self to get through, but I was agog at the scope of it. And it had so many epic moments that could have made for novels in their own right – Melkor & Ungoliant, Glaurung and Turin, Beren and Lúthien, the duel between Finrod and Sauron, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the War of Wrath, and so many others.
And at the end, after thousands of years of suffering and loss, Maedhros and Maglor finally recover the Silmarils only for the jewels to reject them for all their crimes, and so in despair Maedhros throws himself and his Silmaril into a fiery pit, and Maglor casts his Silmaril into the sea and spends the rest of time wandering Middle-earth and singing of his grief and guilt…man, that was a moment!
So definitely worth the read! A challenging book to get through, but very worth the effort.
And if Amazon wants their new LORD OF THE RINGS series to be successful, I think it should be about the War of Wrath. Imagine the scene when Eärendil and the eagles arrive to fight Ancalagon the Black!
-JM
Since you brought up LOTR, I can’t help but notice something.
You have a group of great magical weapons that were forged in the fires of a volcano. Weapons that are but traps played by a cunning and cruel lord. Because one Sword was forged to find the rest, and in the Shadows, bind them. Now to stop them, a group of brave warriors must journey together to destroy the weapons the the fires from whence they came.
But ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY WALK INTO CATHAIR ANIMUS!
Lol, did you do that on purpose or was it accidental?
In the very first synopsis of what would become SEVENFOLD SWORD, I had the idea that the Warden would happen to read THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and decide that he could do better, so he would make a hundred rings and secretly distribute them to the people of Andomhaim. I decided that was 1.) too meta, and 2.) likely to get me sued, so I abandoned that idea, and changed the Hundred Rings to the Hundred Swords, which were later edited down to Twenty Swords and then Seven Swords for simplicity.