Octoburn
Active Member
A (not entirely) brief preface.
I have loved the Silmarillion from the first time I read it. It is something altogether different than anything I have ever read. Even vastly different from the Bible to which it is often compared. The first copy I owned (the silver paperback with the Anime-style Feanor on the cover) literally fell apart at the seams within a couple of years, mostly from cross-referencing the index/genealogies/maps with what I was reading. And I still have it somewhere, for some reason (the spine, I laminated and made into a bookmark.) Shortly after it fell apart, a friend of mine found a first American edition hardback in a used bookstore, which I shall cherish forever.
Having fallen down the Tolkien-rabbit-hole (and still falling) by way of the LotR movies, not long after discovering the Silmarillion, I started imagining how it could be adapted. My first instinct was movies. I thought, you could make 4 really great movies, and hit most of the high points of the story, if you did what Tolkien called the Great Tales (Beren and Luthien, Children of Hurin, the Fall of Gondolin, Earendil/War of Wrath)
Then I realized that CRT would never allow that to happen. Around 2012 or so, I ran into a bit of an oddity, to me anyways, in a Barnes and Noble. The Illustrated Edition of the Hobbit... which is very little "illustrated edition" and very much a Graphic Novel. This led me to inquiring with an editor at Harper Collins about the possibility of a Silmarillion Graphic Novel, which was quickly shot down. That didn't stop me from spending countless days outlining my grand Silmarillion Graphic Novel series, and writing a few scenes for pitches. One of those scenes actually got me a comic writing gig though, so I suppose it wasn't all a waste.
After reading a lot of online discussion about the Silmarillion and the potential ways to adapt it, I ran across a site called the Silmarillion Series, which was a vast online outline of 10 seasons that covered from the Flight of the Noldor to the Lord of the Rings. This in turn, led to me believing that the best route may be television (though I still see the merits of Graphic Novels as well) and I made my own outlines for a television series, of 8 episodes a season. The endeavor led me to see that there are stories outside of the Great Tales that deserved to be told in full (rather in flashback, as I had planned with my Great Tales Graphic Novels.)
All of that ultimately led me to find SilmFilm and get involved here a little over 2 years ago. Which has, in turn, shown me the narrowness of my scope even with that previous exercises in creativity, making everything in the Silmarillion even more relevant.
So naturally, when I began to get involved here, I started thinking about the Graphic Novels again. I still believe this may be the best medium for the Silmarillion to be adapted. But, with no chance of legal publication, I knew no artist was going to do this amount of work for free (and I wouldn't expect them to.) And then, over the last year and a half or so, I have started to form another idea: audio drama. Since July of last year, Audible has released two "Acts" of the Sandman, adapted from Neil Gaiman's comics. I absolutely love those adaptations, and Marvel also started releasing a series of podcast audio dramas called Wastelanders (which are pretty good, but not nearly on par with the Sandman stuff.) So I started thinking about the idea of doing SilmFilm as an Audio Drama. This would obviously have to be done with no intention of monetizing it, without being shut down. And I still fear it may be shut down even without any money changing hands.
I think the Silmarillion lends itself very well to the medium, as much of Tolkien's writing could be incorporated by a narrative voice (if you've listened to the Sandman, this is one of the highlights of it for me; hearing Gaiman read his own prose and/or comic descriptions that were never published) as well as leaving room to expand as SilmFilm has and incorporate Tolkien's own dialogue as well as our own invented dialogues.
The main issue to arise will be voice casting. Not many want to work for free. (Understandably so.) So the only way it would work is if we have a couple dozen good voice actors among the boards who don't mind working for free. lol.
I would love to work on it, and could likely do the majority of the writing and audio editing.
I would, however, likely make a few changes from the SilmFilm norm, mostly the structure of the frame story. Namely that it would probably be similar to what Tolkien intended (Sam telling the stories to his kids, with others stopping in to tell parts of the story.) rather than the stories we are doing now as frame narratives. I feel that the current way we are doing it would be less effective in the audio drama format.
Is this a project worth pursuing, or just another pipedream?
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