I've mentioned before that The Iliad doesn't discuss the run-up to the Trojan War but starts in medias res, and honestly it's just a small slice of the entire story. For example, if there's one thing everyone knows about the Trojan War, it's the Trojan horse. That's not there. It doesn't even cover Achilles' death. If all you knew about Greek myth was from The Iliad and The Odyssey, you wouldn't even be able to conceive of everything else you're missing.

That's all I was thinking about as I read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. I never really got into The Lord of the Rings until the movies, and as I watched them I could perceive there was a lot more going on than what was being played on screen. For example, what is the Third Age they're living through? What happened in the First and Second? Who exactly is Sauron? Where did he come from? How come he was able to make these rings and no one else? How did he get these massive armies without anyone noticing? Why the hell are all these elves getting on boats and heading west? What is there?

The Silmarillion explains all this shit and more starting from the creation myth. In it you find Sauron is just the lackey of a bigger badass named Melkor/Morgoth, whom you can interpret as Satan because he was one of the most powerful Ainur (angels) but went against the creator Eru (God) and eventually came to Middle Earth and created all the fucked up stuff you see like goblins and whatnot. I can't even fucking give a summary of the crap that he did, but essentially he started a war between himself and the other Valar (Ainur who descended to earth to help create it) that completely fucked up the land all the Valar were living in, and they decided to build a new continent out west.

As I'm reading this I was thinking, "Jesus fuck, you had all this backstory and very, very little of it ended up in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit proper." Like, wizards are just Maiar (spirits who help the Valar) who've taken human form to be particularly effective against Sauron since they can communicate with mortal beings. That's why Gandalf was able to return after "dying," because he was just sent back in human form to keep on fighting. And that's just like three pages in The Silmarillion, of which is just one out of like five or six other large tomes about the topic.

It's a dry, dry book that is almost textbook-esque, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you're interested in Tolkien's wider universe. I heard they're actually planning a movie for this, which I'll admit I cannot conceive can be smashed into one film because of the density. Oh my god, it is dense. I guess another trilogy it is.