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Originally Posted by davem
I think it was with LotR that Tolkien found his voice as a writer & was where he gave us his Art in its purest form. Like Rivendell itself, in LotR there's something for everyone - TH & The Sil, Smith & Niggle, the High & the Mundane. On its own The Sil is too High & tragic, 'For God's sake let us sit upon the ground & tell sad stories of the death of kings' about sums up The Sil. Its one of those books that I'm glad to have read, but not one that I actually enjoy reading very much anymore. Oh, there re moments of grandeur I wouldn't be without, clever things, interesting things, but I'm not sure its a book (especially not in CT's redaction) that one could 'love' in the way so many of us love LotR & TH. There's no-one in there that I can truly relate to. Its rather like Morris's fantasies which inspired Tolkien.
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LOTR will
always be Tolkien's finest work for me. Of course, I love his other works, but LOTR easily outshines them all. davem is right that the book does have something for everybody both in terms of character and plot. The style even shifts throughout the book, but the one constant is that with this book, Tolkien demonstrated the power of story.
Story is most definitely there in The Hobbit, and it is also present in Smith, though the former lacks the higher tone of LotR and the latter is not as developed as LotR. The Sil, however, lacks that essential element of Story. At times it can read like extracts from a notebook giving outline plots for other novels; the stories therein are not very detailed, and the characters do not have the room to grow and develop. In reality, The Sil could have been the basis for many other novels which Tolkien did not have the time to write. Had Tolkien been for much of his adult life a professional writer I feel that he would have developed these tales into true novels, however he was an academic with a full time job, and a perfectionist too. He simply would not have had the time to really develop these tales if he had wished to. How many modern professional writers would be jealous of this wealth of stories waiting to be developed?!
I think the Silmarillion is wonderful, but also very frustrating as it offers so many tantalising glimpses of
what might have been. And it is also so different in style that it is absolutely clear to me that it was not all Tolkien's own work. It does not have his 'voice' like other works do.