Recommendations
Books Like The Silmarillion
Best books to read after The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion is the mythology of Middle-earth — the First Age, the creation, the Wars of Beleriand. These recommendations continue the Tolkien posthumous mythology, explore the epic fantasy tradition The Silmarillion's worldbuilding helped inspire, or offer companion reading in the tradition of myths and secondary world creation.
- 1Buy
Unfinished Tales
by J.R.R. Tolkien
The more narrative companion — events from The Silmarillion told in fuller narrative form, including Gandalf's choice of Bilbo and the full history of the Rings of Power, more accessible than The Silmarillion itself.
- 2Buy
The Children of Húrin
by J.R.R. Tolkien
The standalone First Age novel — the most novelistic account of the First Age, following Húrin's cursed son through his tragedy, the best single narrative from the Silmarillion world.
- 3Buy
Beren and Lúthien
by J.R.R. Tolkien
The First Age love story — the tale Tolkien cared most about personally, Beren the mortal and Lúthien the Elf-maid, with the full compositional history of how the story developed.
- 4Buy
The Fall of Gondolin
by J.R.R. Tolkien
The earliest-written First Age tale — the siege of the hidden city, the destruction of the last Elven stronghold, tracing Tolkien's mythology from its earliest form to its latest.
- 5Buy
The Iliad
by Homer
The epic poetry that shaped Tolkien's formal sense of heroic myth — Achilles and the siege of Troy, the Greek tradition of the warrior's honor that Tolkien translated into Elvish mythology.
- 6Buy
The Prose Edda
by Snorri Sturluson
The Norse mythology Tolkien studied as an Oxford professor — Odin, the World Tree, Ragnarok, the mythological tradition most directly reflected in The Silmarillion's cosmology and heroic age.
- 7Buy
The Earthsea Cycle
by Ursula K. Le Guin
The philosophical feminist fantasy that most directly responds to Tolkien's secondary world creation — Earthsea as a more concentrated but equally internally consistent mythological world.
- 8Buy
A Song of Ice and Fire
by George R.R. Martin
The most ambitious secondary world-building in contemporary fantasy — the history of Westeros and its houses, the Wars of the Roses in fantasy form, Martin explicitly positioning his work in relation to Tolkien's tradition.
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