The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? by Dawn Felagund

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Fanwork Notes

Back in 2019, I wrote a blog post called The Inequality Prototype. As part of it, I counted a bunch of stuff related to the Valar and looked at how those metrics differed based on gender. At the time, I thought it would be interesting to extend this work over the entire Silmarillion, namely looking at who speaks in the text and who doesn't.

For Tolkien Meta Week, I began this work and am collecting my analyses related to it here. It is very much still a work in progress and will likely take me years to complete.

As with all of my data, I am making the dataset and analyses available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. What this means is that you can use my data as long as you're not profiting off of it and you also make your work available for others to use under similar terms. You can make a copy of it and build on it and post/publish your own work using it. You don't have to ask (the CC license is permission!) but credit me if you do as Dawn Felagund (in fanworks) or Dawn Walls-Thumma (in scholarship) and, if possible, link back to my website at dawnfelagund.com. I also appreciate if you let me know what you do with the data so that I can read it!

View the data | Copy the data

Methodology

I have used an unauthorized digital copy of The Silmarillion to perform word counts, using the Word Count tool in Google Docs. I own a Kindle copy, but Kindle imposes limits on how much text you can copy. I swear, Tolkien Estate, I am not illegally selling Silmarillions; I am just a data nerd. Given this, though, there might be minor discrepancies in word count.

When counting words:

  1. Only dialogue (between quotes) is counted. Dialogue tags or interrupting action are removed before calculating a word count.
  2. New paragraphs are counted as new dialogue (unless uninterrupted dialogue is divided into multiple paragraphs without interceding action; Fëanor has a couple of speeches like this, for example).
  3. Thoughts in the form of dialogue are not included.
  4. Remembered dialogue that repeats earlier dialogue is not included (e.g., Ulmo's warning to Turgon).

Project Progress

Phase 1

Phase 1 will document all dialogue in The Silmarillion. This is the current phase of the project.

  • Collect all instances of dialogue from The Silmarillion using a search of the text for single quotation marks: Complete
  • Check the first collection of dialogue by reading the text for dialogue: In Progress
  • Classify dialogue by character, group, subgroup, and gender: Complete
  • Classify dialogue by canon source and type of dialogue: Not Started
  • Compile statistics on dialogue in The Silmarillion: In Progress

Phase 2

Phase 2 will document instances where a character is indicated as having spoken but is not given dialogue. Phase 2 has not begun.

Phase 3

Phase 3 will document instances where a character is indicated as not speaking or as staying silent. Phase 3 has not begun.

Fanwork Information

Summary:

On ongoing project to analyze who speaks in The Silmarillion and who is silent.

Major Characters: Túrin, Fëanor, Melian, Elu Thingol, Mandos

Major Relationships:

Genre: Nonfiction/Meta

Challenges:

Rating: General

Warnings: In-Universe Intolerance

Chapters: 5 Word Count: 3, 266
Posted on 26 December 2024 Updated on 4 January 2025

This fanwork is a work in progress.


Comments on The Silmarillion: Who Speaks?

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To this person for whom numbers generally have very little "colour" this is surprisingly interesting! 

 Because of the double effect of Tolkien not finalising anything and Christopher inserting his bias/preferences, I'm often wondering how a JRRT-published work might have finally appeared.. (Although even if he lived as long as Elros I'm sure he would have still been changing his mind throughout and would still not have finished!)

That is truly a wonderful compliment if I managed to make dry old dusty numbers come even a little bit alive for you!

I wonder about that a lot too and tend to end up with JRRT never being able to finish a "Silmarillion." His purpose changed so much between the Lost Tales and some of his late writings where he was completely reconsidering the cosmogony and historical transmission. I also wonder if the constant rewrites weren't part of the purpose. Intended or not, he did create a historical tradition right in the drafts of his work ...

Thank you for reading and  commenting! <3

 

It's your extrapolations that make this so interesting. I mean, the way I read, I originally read the whole Silm as an omniscient view, and never even noticed that Turin's chapter might be a different narrator. Just learning about JRRT's narrators and their likely biases changed the Silm dramatically for me. So extending that view by delving into this dialogue aspect is opening my eyes even further. 

I agree that, with the published Silm being cobbled together from various (often incomplete) writings spanning decades of mind-changes, we end up with quite a jumble. And yet I'm also really glad we do, because I love the magic and whimsy of his early ideas as much as his later writing, and I think the Legendarium would be far less rich and engaging without either. 

I'm also wondering how much of the Ainur's dialogue is Aulë and Yavanna having their domestic?

To be fair, I didn't realize that Turin's chapter was a different narrator until REALLY recently given how long I've been working on stuff with the narrators. XD And that's my least favorite chapter so I'm still not 100% sure how it is constructed from its extremely complex textual history. Right now, my slightly informed stance is that Dirhaval wrote the verse version and our good ol' pal Pengolodh put it into prose in the book we call The Silmarillion. But this is probably 75% headcanon at this point.

Because you, like I, enjoy maps, you might enjoy this atrocity that I made for my "Death, Grief, and the Other" presentation at Oxonmoot in August:

map of narrators

(Why didn't I color in the ocean? The mind boggles!)

(And Sirion is spelled wrong!!!!)

I absolutely LOVE that the Silm is a posthumously published textual jumble. (That is the perfect word for it!) It feels like real history, where you have to wade through sources and debate their various merits. This is why, while I have to stop short of saying "Tolkien intended," I do wonder if someone who worked with medieval texts in all their various and contradictory forms wasn't maybe a little bit intentional about creating a similar tradition. I don't think he wanted to leave it unpublished, but there would have been this whole iceberg of texts under the surface ... and of course the doubt that a fallible narrator creates.

I'm also wondering how much of the Ainur's dialogue is Aulë and Yavanna having their domestic?

Yes, as I'm working with the data, I'm realizing that this is coming up again and again as a complicating factor. I probably need to dig into the provenance of the various instances of dialogue that I've collected sooner rather than later, then see how the data changes (or doesn't) once Christopher's additions are filtered out.

....I am usually wanting more about the lives and motivations of his sons (and any adjacent/non-adjacent females, or other genders*), rather than the father who disappears from the scene leaving the Oath in his wake. As for Thingol talking more than everyone else, while he was making his bad and/or potentially bad decisions, fanfiction to the rescue again....

*actions/pronouncements/events of January 2025 related

....statistics* from your report (which has overall been a great read). I love the possible permutations of Námo's journey to expressing himself at length.

*Statistics was my one and only grade below B at University.... Calculus made sense; Engineering, Literature, Architecture, History all made sense; Statistics just wouldn't go in.