Let’s not be coy about this. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is not in any way a light read. It has a complex narrative, filled with staggering amounts of lore to digest. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as their first point of entry into the Tolkien Legendarium. I think this is a book that you tackle after The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, if you are sufficiently enamoured with the threads of a wider backstory that are alluded to in both those volumes. If that is the case then brace yourself. However, despite its sprawling histories and dense genealogies, The Silmarillion is an incredibly rewarding book. There is an air of majesty surrounding the epic stories it contains and its themes about the eternal struggle between the dark and the light are timeless. Due to the immense detail that Tolkien lavishes upon the text, Middle-earth feels like a genuine living, breathing world. A world of languages, culture, geography and history. To date it has never been equalled.