The Silmarillion

What Hacker News says

1. bigstrat2003Oct 2026
   > But the fans? Why do nerds want everything spelled out for them? It boggles the mind.

   Because it's enjoyable when done well. As a teenager I read LOTR, and noticed all the references to the larger mythos Tolkien had worked on - references to Fëanor, Elbereth, Valinor, and so on. Those were very intriguing, and the greatest joy I've ever had reading a book was when I finally read the Silmarillion and got to see what those things were all about. I concede that filling out the world can be done poorly (though I haven't read the Brian Herbert stuff and can't comment on whether he did a good job). But when done well, it is truly magical to have those elements in the background of the story take on a life and detail of their own.

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2. kelnosMar 2024
   This is fantastic! I read the Silmarillion when I was in high school, and while it was a bit difficult to get through at times, I was in complete awe of the world Tolkien had built. Seeing it all laid out like this is amazing.

   (OT, but it looks like the page's character encoding is broken. And of course Firefox decided to ditch the ability to set the correct charset manually. The "Repair Text Encoding" button isn't working for me.)

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3. JachDec 2022
   Finally got around to The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson (https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...), I think it's my favorite this year. It's a fun psychology/sociology book and gives a pretty convincing explanation for some seeming puzzles across several areas of human behavior and policy. It's also fun to explicitly introspect my own motives from the assumption that some things I've done or planning to do are a lot more for self-serving reasons than I like to admit.

   On the fiction side from this year that I'd recommend, I reread Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion and read Unfinished Tales for the first time, all were great. I've read Tolkien as a kid, a teen, and now an adult, enjoyed him each time but I think I got even more out of some things this time around. I also liked Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and in the last month or so I read two enjoyable tearjerkers: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Still Alice by Lisa Genova.

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4. cm2012Sep 2022
   I've read LOTR many times as well the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Tolkien's letters, etc. I really recommend trying out this show. It gets the heart of Tolkien if not the exact details.
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5. AlotOfReadingSep 2022
   It's best to treat the Silmarillion as you would read the Bible. The styles are intentionally similar and both evolve throughout the works. There are narrative diversions throughout Tolkien's work, but it's ultimately a history of Middle Earth rather than a narrative story.
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6. MichaelCollinsAug 2022
   This hasn't been my experience. A lot of people say they think the moon landing was fake because they have a general distrust of anything the government says, and are particularly skeptical of anything from the cold war era. But they may still be willing to listen to reason if you approach the subject with a compassionate mindset, not shaming them for questioning authority but instead acknowledging the basic legitimacy of their anti-authoritarian skepticism. After all, the government has done shady shit before, it just happens that the Moon landing isn't one of them.

   The depth of publicly available information about the Moon landings helps a lot too. Most people have only seen a few minutes of video footage at most, and may conclude that Hollywood could fake that video. But the amount of documentation about even the most minute detail of the Apollo program is staggering. If it were all fake,it would be the greatest most detailed work of science fiction ever created. Seriously, it would put Star Trek/Wars to shame. No fiction has lore with such fractal depth of detail as NASA, not even close. Not even Silmarillion comes close.

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