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- Jul 2, 2007
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I feel your pain. I think I read once where some critic referred to the Silmarillion as the "Genesis" of Middle Earth because of all the lineage tracing. My wife swears that the book makes more sense if you read the second half of it first. I just can't force myself to read it again to see if she is right.
She was right. I ended up reading reference to an "old story" that Aragorn was telling the Hobbits. Since I followed that story fairly well in LotR, I looked it up in Silmarillion and read it. It went well enough and the story was really good so I read forward a few more stories. Eventually, the references in the stories escaped me since I had skipped the beginning and had no background for who was who. I went back and started reading it from the beginning and it had some relevant info this time through that inspired me to keep going. I doubt I'd have made it through otherwise!