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Old 05-15-2020, 06:50 AM   #15
Thinlómien
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This is pretty amazing, and I daresay it requires quite a good memory and storytelling skills from you, Huine. I'm really curious what your kids will think of the Silm when they are old enough to read it themselves.

That being said, I had rather the deep end experience with Silm as a kid and it worked too. My father (alias Nogrod) read all the major Tolkien works aloud to me and my little sister (alias A Little Green) and I don't think he ever censored a bit, and I loved it that way (and I don't think it was bad influence in any way unless you count him raising a kid who has been even more Tolkien obsessed than him ).

I don't quite recall how old we were when this all happened though. I don't remember much of The Hobbit, so we must have been very little, but I have many vivid memories of the LotR readthrough (including a story I have told here many times about how I got super mad about my dad closing the book in the middle of The Voice of Saruman and threatening to read the rest of the chapter myself if he doesn't finish ). But I think I was about 6-7 when he read LotR to us which was pretty much the perfect age, while Greenie at 5ish was perhaps a little too young (I also love recounting the story about how she found Cirith Ungol so scary she didn't want to hear more, not much before Frodo and Sam have the same exact conversation).

But we went from LotR, probably not immediately, but anyway to Silmarillion and even (parts of?) The Unfinished Tales. I very much doubt I would have such good grasp of the myriad Silm characters, places and family trees if I hadn't absorbed them back then with the wonderful memory children have. I don't think I ever found The Silmarillion too scary - or too confusing or boring or whatever - it was just a story. Children are pretty amazing, I don't think you need to shelter them too much.

Also to be fair I think The Lord of the Rings is, in some ways, a lot more mature work than The Silmarillion. Sure, Silm has suicide and incest and genocide and no happy ending, but it is mostly told from a rather detached perspective. It is, in a sense, very close to whether you would expose your children to any traditional mythology at a young age.

While LotR? Is actually super creepy and emotionally affecting at times. The descriptions can be very vivid and you get attached to the characters much easier, and therefore you as a reader are probably much more worried about Frodo's fate than you ever were for say Túrin's. If you're listening to the story as a child who doesn't know what's going on, there is a lot of scary. The Black Riders are scary (Merry as a potential Black Rider is scary too), the Old Forest is scary, the Barrow-Downs are scary, the Black Riders are scary again, Moria is scary, the breaking of the Fellowship is scary (or at least bewildering because it breaks the basic heroic narrative children are used to), basically all the wars are very suspenseful, the Dead Marshes are scary, Cirith Ungol is scary, Mordor is scary, the Scouring of the Shire is again bewildering... I don't think The Silmarillion is half as emotionally unsettling for kids simply for the more detached tone and less atmospheric descriptions.

So, from my personal experience, you shouldn't be too worried about the upsetting elements in Tolkien' works, children can take it. But like I said, I love how you've put such a personal spin on The Silmarillion and basically made your family's own branch of The Legendarium. I can't help thinking The Professor would greatly approve.
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