re: The early tales in Tolkien's world seem more epic than LOTR/later tales.

They were distant descendents, but nothing like the Numenoreans of old. Only Aragorn and his fellow Rangers qualified to be considered anything like true Numenoreans.

I don't remember if Tolkien ever explicitly says that. Maybe someone else does. My understanding is that, over the centuries, the Numenoreans of Gondor (and elsewhere) had mixed with the lesser indigenous races of Men. Only the Dunedain had kept their bloodlines relatively pure.

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Posted by Decisions on 8/16/17 at 10:59 pm to HailHailtoMichigan! If I remember correctly the Silmarillion was Tolkien's true passion. Upon bringing it to his publisher, though, he was told that no one else would really care to read what amounted to a fantasy history book.

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The Silmarillion is too dry. It's like reading an encyclopedia. It's a fictional cosmology, not a literary narrative.

Before you jump all over me, I love it - but I'm a Tolkien geek.

It's not that it's not "good", it's that the unvarnished, objective truth is that it isn't literary. It's not a tight, concise, human-scale narrative.

It ended up attaining some degree of success, only because it was preceded by a LOTR and the Hobbit, which are literary.

If the Silmarillion had been published first, instead of 30 years later, Tolkien would be unheard of because it would have flopped and they would have refused to publish his other work.

Even now, the only people who read it are Tolkien geeks (us) because we want to basically shoot up with a full syringe of undiluted pure essence of Tolkien. But more broadly, among the general population, there's no desire for that.

People want a story about one quest, on a human scale that's relatable to them, that travels along a heroic quest arc they are familiar with from all mythology, and that has a beginning middle and end. That's why LOTR is set at the ebb of Elvin and really more broadly "magical" power, at a time when the handoff is being made to men, with the heroes being stand-ins for simple rural Britons (Hobbits) doing battle against the last gasp of a long-ebbing evil power (because that makes it defeatable by a human scale opposition). All of those attributes make it relatable, which a galactic-scale battle between alien demi-gods just isn't.

The Silmarillion is unlike anything else in literature. It's really more experimental than people give it credit for. By itself it would be confusing and impenetrable. But, taken in context with The Hobbit and LoTR, it deepens those stories far beyond any other fictional world of which I am aware. I still catch new things in LoTR that refer back to events and stories in The Silmarillion every time I re-read it. The entire tone of LoTR is actually changed by it. Taken by itself, LoTR is primarily an exciting story, full of danger and adventure. Taken with full knowledge of The Silmarillion, it becomes a very, very sad story, and that is the way Tolkien intended it, I think.

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Only the Dunedain had kept their bloodlines relatively pure.

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You are forgetting Imrahil and the knights of Dol Amroth