Together we've read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion multiple times as a community (as well as some of Tolkien's shorter works), and I've found that having a group to ask questions to and hear different interpretations from makes the experience of reading Tolkien all the more enriching. At the heart of Tea with Tolkien is our free book club: every year we choose one or two of Tolkien's works to read over the course of a few months, and then we'll discuss it along the way in our Discord server.

It was also around this time that I created Tea with Tolkien, an online community inspired by the works and faith of JRR Tolkien. Thanks to a handful of Tolkien podcasts, the audiobook narrated by Martin Shaw, pages of handwritten notes, and many, many visits to Tolkien Gateway, I was able to finish The Silmarillion for the first time! And approaching it with this mindset made all the difference. Rather than attempting to understand the complexities of Tolkien’s mythology on my own, I surrounded myself with as many resources as I could find. But this time, I took a different approach. It gathered dust on my bookshelf for years until I finally picked it up again about five years ago. I had been captivated by The Lord of the Rings and read it many times in high school, but I couldn't seem to make it past the first few pages of The Silmarillion and eventually every attempt ended right around the Valaquenta. Like many new Tolkien readers, I struggled through several attempts to read The Silmarillion for the first time. Many Tolkien fans new and old often feel intimidated by its depth and bewildered by its vocabulary, but it’s become my goal to encourage, equip, and inspire Tolkien fans to not only pick up The Silmarillion - but to finish it as well! The Silmarillion is one of Tolkien’s most challenging works and yet also the most beautiful and important in my opinion.

The silmarillion martin shaw