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Originally Posted by Dark Lord
Sorry, but I do not really understand. I have only just gotten into this 'thing'. I have heard of the music and Eru, but not much else, can you explain in an easier way please?
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Hi this may be hard since Tolkien wrote masses on Middle Earth but only the Hobbit and the Lord ofvthe Rings were published in his lifetime. Tolkien loved language. He said that words were his music and aswell as learning languages from an early age he made up his own. At one level he created Middle Earth as a world for his invented langiages to live in. He had his own creationmyth and tried to maje sure that his myth was plausible..as if it could have been a real mythology for our own world. While the detail is something that attracts many of us it means it is terribly complex and it means that there isn't a definitive version of a lot of it. Tolkien worked on it pretty much all his life, would have a new idea but maybe not get round to revising the old stuff. And for a long time it didn't matter because Middle Earth was pretty much a private world.
Then he told his children the story that became the Hobbit and bits of his mythology came into it, and more into LOTR, but publishers weren't so keen on the Silmarillion as a prospect and by the timethe LOTR was published and popular Tolkien had about forty years worth of drafts which had to be made coherent with the aspects of the mythology that were in the published works. Ultimately he wasn't able to finish the job and left it to his son. So as well as the version of the mythology published as The Silmarillion a few years after Tolkien died, his son published twelve volumes of drafts with notes History of Middle Earth as well as Unfinished Tales which contains fragments closely connected with the published stories. Sauron features in a lot of it. so basically there is a huge amount of information much of which was revised and developed and can't be claimed to be Tolkien's final word on it. So you may have to do some reading and make up your own mind. There may be essays that eill give a precis but they may not be helpful if you aren't familiar with the context of the books.