re: The Silmarillion

quote:

---

The Silmarillion is a pretty cool book. It reads like the Bible, with huge eons being spanned in a paragraph, then sudden zoom-ins to watch the life of a single character play out.

In short, though, Eru (God) sang a song with his choir of angels (Ainur) which described the nature of reality through its time stream. At some point one of the angels, Melkor (Lucifer), decides that he wants to sing his own song, and some of the other Ainur follow him. Eru works the dissonance into his song, creating even greater beauty out of the conflicting melodies.

When the song ends, Eru says, "Nice work, gang. Now here's what that looks like!" and creates the universe, using the song as a template. Then he says, "Why don't some of you Ainur head on down to Earth and make sure everything goes according to plan? It'll be fun!"

So a bunch of Ainur go down to Earth and become Valar, basically manifested gods who are still answerable to Eru the Almighty. These are the Middle Earth pantheon, like Mount Olympus's cast or the Norse gods. They help guide the first Elves and then direct the Elves to help the first humans. (One of the Valar creates the Dwarves because he wants to be all creative like his daddy, and when he screws them up, Eru reprimands him for getting above his station but grants the Dwarves life because he was doing it with good intentions.)

Meanwhile, Melkor goes down to Earth to crap all over everything because he's become a giant jerky jerkface. His physical manifestation is called Morgoth, and he's basically Satan with a giant flail that opens lava pits. He takes his evil Valar and causes all sorts of havoc, messing with the Elves and trying to destroy the humans because screw everything.

So the Ainur are angels, and the Valar are Ainur who came down to Earth. Among those Valar are another tier of dudes called the Maiar. They're basically the bottom rung of angels, the least powerful of them. They tend to be about as powerful as the most powerful Elves. (In fact, one of the Elven kings gets super-pissed and challenges Morgoth to a one-on-one, and he damn near wins. The Elves used to hulk out and rock faces.) Among the Maiar are the Wizards (Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, and the Blue Twins), Sauron, and the Balrogs.

Sauron was actually one of the dagnasty evil Maiar that followed Melkor down. That's right, the great evil of Lord of the Rings was actually a lackey for the big guy.

The big guy fought with the Elves who, at the time, were actually so hard-core that they could challenge him. Eventually the good Valar were like, "Screw it," and beat the piss out of Melkor and his armies of Balrogs. That's right. Armies. Of. Balrogs.

Once that was done, they kinda retired back and let humanity and Elfanity and Dwarfanity take care of themselves. They sent in a handful of Maiar, though, as special agents to make sure everything runs smoothly. Those Maiar became the Wizards (or Istari if your'e a filthy Elf). Once again, Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, and the two Blue Wizards are immortal lesser angels.

So the Valar retire back to Valinor (their little paradise that only Elves can find) and let everything play out. Yadda yadda, the Elves start waning in power until they're the flaky little wisps we see in the movies, humanity waxes and wanes, OMG Sauron!, One Ring crap, Hobbit is Super Effective!, hooray the world is saved, Elves get bored being not-awesome and go back home to Valinor where they originally lived among the Valar.

There's a lot more to it than that, and it's really worth a read. But that's a quick brief, and I think that knowing the spiritual side really helps you understand where everything stands in the world.

---