"The Silmarillion" tells of the events of the First Age - that distant era of Middle-earth, which the heroes of "The Lord of the Rings" look back on with awe. (And some of them, like Elrond and Galadriel, as well as Sauron, have experienced it.) It is the time of the Elves, the Long-lived, whose love for things goes so deeply that they give names to everything. The Men (the Sickly, the Night-fearful, the Incomprehensible) are just emerging from the wildernesses of the East.

In this world, where not all paths are yet crooked, the narrative unfolds in mightier ways than we have known since. Melkor, the master of treachery, steals the Silmarils, which contain the light older than the sun and moon; and Fëanor and his sons declare a hopeless, endless war against him to reclaim them. A continent of stories comes to life, stories sung in the songs of the Elves and told here in "The Silmarillion."

Although "The Silmarillion" was published long after the author's death by his son, it was created earlier than "The Lord of the Rings." The stories of Middle-earth had coalesced for Tolkien over more than fifty years into a tradition that he ultimately approached more as a philologist or historian than as an "inventor." And so the Hobbits and their companions in "The Lord of the Rings" entered this already completed world, the solid ground of legend beneath their feet.