what i mean is if you read lotr in isolation you do understand the pressure of the vast ages of history and events but it’s vague and undefined. lotr is the main narrative but lotr is a hobbits eye view of arda and the events of the silmarillion are there and their presence is felt but they’re just names and references. you hear the words silmaril, beren , luthien, feanor, earendil, but they don’t mean anything to you. they’re the appendix to lotrs story, the backstory for the ruins that lotr is built on. but then you read the silmarillion and come at it backwards and see the story of the ring as an appendix to the silmarillion and it could easily seem so trite and small in comparison but instead it makes lotr burn all the brighter. the fellowship comes to lothlorien and suddenly you see it from the other side. there’s galadriel and celeborn and with them valinor and feanor and the two trees and the silmarils and then suddenly into the middle of all that walks samwise gamgee and tolkien stands sam beside galadriel and finrod and glorfindel and tuor and he tells you that sam is just as important. probably more important. that all these ancient heroes would look at sam and know that. and sometimes people talk as if the silmarillion was tolkien’s ‘real’ story and the hobbit/lotr was just an afterthought or a more marketable alternative but when you hold them side by side you understand what he really meant which is that after all those hundreds of pages and thousands of years of history. sam is what’s important.

The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit stories take place in a post-post-post (and probably a few more posts in there) apocalyptic world. The ruins peak up from the sod and we often think that those ruins are just dead stone, old trees, and maybe a song or two, but in Tolkien’s world those ruins include people who haven’t learned how to die yet, and there’s power in having that history that can speak for itself, in the same way that there are forests that can fight back and little normal people who get to (for once) decide the fate of all things rather than just another bozo with a superweapon.

For a nature-loving historian/linguist who survived two world wars, it’s wishfulfillment, of a sort, and it really reads through his stories. Neither texts invalidate the other, they add to one another. There is joy in the saga of Middle Earth culminating in triumph rather than bittersweet tragedy, and the Silmarillion coming before only lends weight to that - The Long Defeat ended in ultimate victory for goodness, rather than a pyrrhic victory by a too-late vanguard or unending misery under the feet of darkness’ last gasp.