In the Silmarillion, Tolkien paints a picture of the history of Middle Earth. I read The Hobbit when I was in second grade. I surely didn't understand it all, but my brother Gary was in sixth grade, and he was reading it, so I picked it up when he was done and read it. I have deeply rooted memories from reading that book at 7 years old, vivid pictures that were created by the narrative, that I have lived with all my remembered life. Of course, I read the trilogy several times over and watched the movies with enjoyment. But it is the Silmarillion that had a tectonic affect on my life. In the Silmarillion, the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy that the western world knows and loves that seems to be grand and large is just a few pages, just a few paragraphs in the epic tale that is the Silmarillion.
I read through the book, not reading too deep. So many names, and I didn't try to keep track to much. But the first few pages describing the creation of Ea..and the music of the Aenor meddled deeply with the core structure of my thought life.
Tolkien is such an author as to transport me into his narratives, escaping for a time my own situatedness in the mundane world around me. And by mundane, I do not mean boring, but rather, expected. But I left this world for a while, captured by the long expanses of time and the long time away from home as Middle Earth is created and the story plays out, but with a true home always as the backdrop.
And from that place, I could look back at this cozy universe as if seeing it in a bolus, in a bubble in the distance. And I saw it differently, and have never seen it the same since.
I came back to my life as if as a visitor from a different land, and discovered that my world had become one filled with magic, where the people who inhabit it were as gods and goddesses. What I mean by that is how I think about the gods and goddesses of Greek and Norse myth...they might be in stature no more than we are, but their personhood inhabits great expanses and fill words like mighty, powerful, immortal...and I find that it is us...not gods in any theological sense, but that man as he is inhabits a narrative space that I typically only peopled with gods or titans until reading Tolkien's history of Middle Earth.