CHARLESTON, SC — Everyone starts out with the best intentions at the beginning of a new year, but it's February and already Michael Watson is faltering on his Read-Through The Silmarillion In A Year plan, according to sources.
"I have read The Lord of the Rings nine times," said Michael. "So I thought to myself that The Silmarillion would be a piece of cake. But, man, is it brutal! It's like getting smacked in the face every day with the hilt of Andúril, Flame of the West."
"There are all these obscure genealogies of unpronounceable elf names and for some reason, they all start with ‘F'! There's Finwë, Feanor, Fingolfin, Finarfin... why?" Michael lamented. "And every time a group of elves does something they get a new name! I had to learn all the names of the different elves depending on whether they stayed in Middle-earth, or went right away to Aman with the Valar, or tarried in Middle-earth for a little while and then went to Aman, or went to Aman and then rebelled and went back to Middle-earth! I felt like my brain was going to explode!"
Michael tried to list out all the different branches of Quendi that he had put to memory thus far, and after making it past the first sundering between the Eldar and the Avari, he tried to make distinctions between Calaquendi and the Moriquendi, and then proceeded to become hopelessly lost when trying to place the Vanyar, Noldor, Falmari, and Sindar elves.
"Why are there four different groups of Teleri elves? Ugh!" Michael vented.
Michael's plight is an example of why reading scientists believe that The Silmarillion is approximately ten times harder to get through than Leviticus and Numbers in the Bible. To fill in that reading difficulty gap, The Tolkien Society came up with the 'Read-Through The Silmarillion In A Year' plan.
"We hope that this plan, which breaks up what has been called 'Tolkien's Old Testament' into 365 easy readings will help make The Silmarillion more accessible to the average dullard out there," said education chair of The Tolkien Society, Seamus Gungor.
"We had a lull in between planning our next conference on exploring the transgender realities of Middle-earth and smashing the patriarchy and cishetero amatonormativity of Gondor, when someone asked us why we don't do something related to what Tolkien actually wrote, and that's how 'The Silmarillion-In-A-Year' plan was born."
The plan also includes morning and evening prayers for the help of Eru himself to help you get through each reading day by day, but that has not been enough to help readers like Michael.
At publishing time, Michael was booting up Amazon's Rings of Power hoping to get a break from accurate Tolkien lore.
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