The Silmarillion - A solution for those that found it hard to read

I read The Lord of the Rings when I was 11 years old, devouring the lot (including appendices) in 5 days. I’m probably not out of line by saying that he first book (The Fellowship) can be a little arduous at times however without that grounding in the lifestyles and personalities of the Hobbits the rest of the story would not be the amazing tale of courage and friendship that it is!

Scroll forward 22 years and I finally decided to read The Silmarillion whilst travelling the world with my wife in 2007. Although a compilation of history and creation myths from Tolkien’s world it did feel a little like The Lord of the Rings, rather difficult to get into a bit of trial at first. However I persevered and in the end it has become one of my all time favourite books.

So why the title of the post, is it advice on how to read the book; upside down, whilst in the bath, drunk……..

Nope.

It’s a link to The Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation that was founded to build an Internet library and is based in the US. I occasionally use the database to find podcasts that I can listen to whilst painting and out of interest I did a search for “Tolkien” hoping to find some interesting discussions. I did indeed find many podcasts however was excited to also find the entire audio file of Martin Shaw’s reading of The Silmarillion (google him). This was originally released by Random House in 1998 and has been made available under a creative commons licence (details below).

I find it quite unusual that the Tolkien estate would allow this however I’m not going to grumble. So if you struggled to read the book here’s an alternative solution.

https://archive.org/details/J.r.r.Tolkien-TheSilmarillion

The legal bit for those of you that are interested:

CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
Public Domain Dedication

The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. See Other Information below.