Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Personally, I found Silmarillion to be very difficult to read (I admit to having never been able to finish it) compared to LOTR books. I know plenty of people who share that opinion (even native speakers, giving lie to my original thought that it was because of my ESL).
Was this difference in ease of reading ever acknowledged by Tolkien (either as a "design feature", or simply as a fact that he agrees with, or at least as a commonly held opinion that he disagreed with or was surprised about)?
In 1956 JRRT wrote the following (quoted by CT in the intro to Lost Tales 1):
...I do not think it would have the appeal of L.R. - no hobbits! Full of mythology and elvishness, and all that 'heigh stile' (as Chaucer might say), which has been so little to the taste of many reviewers.
So the answer is quite obviously a resounding "yes" - but with the caveat that what Tolkien was describing was the unpublished Silmarillion as it existed at that time.
The published Silmarillion is a combination of sources ranging from the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (with the ending chapters taken from the earlier Quenta Noldorinwa), subsequent revisions, the last versions of the Annals of Aman and of Beleriand (both of which a surprisingly large amount of text comes from), the independent "mini-works" (Ainulindale, Valaquenta, Akallabeth, Rings of Power) and some later essays, together with some editorial work and independent invention by CT.
Given that so much of this material already existed at the time JRRT wrote that letter (a lot of it dates to the period between the completion and publication of LotR), and that so much of it was intended for inclusion in the Silmarillion (e.g. the Annals as appendices), it can be reasonably argued that the comments made in the letter are valid for that too.
So it's a "yes".
The short answer is probably no, because The Silmarillion was published only after JRR Tolkien's death. More background info here.
JRR's son, Christopher Tolkien, took to editing and compiling all the unfinished letters, essays, and manuscripts left behind into publishable volumes after his father's death. The Silmarillion was the most novel-like of these. Others include Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle Earth.
I don't remember having problems reading the Silmarillion because of it's style or subject matter any more than reading the Worm Ouroboros because of its style or a Shakespeare play.
If it seemed like a history book or a book of myths, well I like reading those. So I don't really think that the Silmarillion is harder to read or less fun than The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings.
If the original question assumes that "Silmarillion is harder to read than LOTR", perhaps the question should be deleted, because (at least from my point of view) there is no greater difficulty reading the Silmarillion than Lord of the Rings and thus it is impossible for Tolkien to acknowledge that untruth.
If the actual meaning of the question is if Tolkien acknowledged that "Silmarillion is harder to read than LOTR" for MANY readers, and not in any objective sense, then the question would not assume a false and incorrect fact.
