Yet there is more to this history than these stories alone. For the most part, they concern only a short period in the Third Age of Middle Earth—an age 3,021 years long that begins with Sauron the Great's first destruction and ends with the Passing of the Rings. But it was not until the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion in 1977 that the true immensity of Tolkien's undertaking would be understood or appreciated. The Silmarillion houses the complicated cosmology of Middle Earth, replete with elaborate "tales of sorrow and ruin" that recount the First Age of mythological "Holy Ones" and their various offspring and creations. Begun by Tolkien as early as 1917, the book demonstrates the detailed and holistic vision of a man whose imagination thrived in the splendid joy of making real what most of us know can never be real enough—the sources of our collective consciousness and genealogy as special beings.
It is not surprising then that Tolkien's secondary world has such great contemporary appeal for readers.
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