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Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Ah, I see-- Primary versus Secondary Bibliography! Is our reading canonical or not?

Don't even go there...I have no clue what that all even means and I think that that's due to my mind retreating from some horror in the past .

Actually, I'm not sure I would accept that statement I would have read less.

Um, I'm not exactly how else one would read the following words:

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

And, then, it was this forum which prompted me to read on, read on. Had I not seen the enthusiasm for the Legendarium and the intense curiosity for The Silm which many of you Downers passionately declare, I might never have bothered to finish The Silm, which I treat as an encyclopedia rather than a story.

Then again, as I'm not able to recreate you nor your history sans the Downs, I'll never to be able to know for sure, so my observation is purely conjecture. Still, I would say that there's a high probability that in some parallel universe where the Downs doesn't exist that there's one Bêthberry that never finished the Sil.

After all, for quite some time, all readers had were just TH and LotR. I half suspect that it is the rise of all the secondary material that stimulates much rereading.

Weren't the LotR and TH the books that got the craze started for more? I reread these two, and the Sil not as much - as you say, it's more of a reference book that, if I could ever find it, would be pulled out when conversing in a thread with davem. Anyway, the rereading, the magic that I'm trying to recapture, is from the LotR text. The other material just adds volume to the siren's song.

Does Aragorn the character make more sense after reading The Silm?

No. That took the Peter Jackson's movies ("If it weren't for Brego the Horse...").

Do Tolkien's books turn one inward, so that one ritually rereads Tolkien, as a kind of mantra?

Don't think that I reread LotR as a mantra. It's more like a vacation from Real Earth.

Or do his books turn one to reading other books? His OFS, for example, makes a fascinating template against which to consider other writers of fantasy and earlier fantasy/mythology. His hints of other mythologies lead out to a variety of myths, legends and folklore while his rhythms turn towards other writers-- W.H. Auden, for instance -- who sought to recover the old forms of Old English for modern times. To say nothing of the utterly fascinating way that Tolkien has influenced SF writers who have come after him.

I've looked elsewhere for the same fix, and have yet to find it (Frank Herbert is a whole other drug). Jordan's WoT books, I was told, were comparable, but I never got the initial rush and so have never had the urge to pick one of those books up ever again (despite the plethora of external material).