THE SELLAMILLION 

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

With the runaway success of A.R.R.R. Roberts’s parody The Soddit, it is no surprise that his “grand-nephew,” B.C.D. Roberts, should collect the elder author’s unfinished works and collate them into a grand work, The Sellamillion.  Like Gaul, divided into three parts, The Sellamillion includes The Ainusoul, the story of the creation of Upper Middle Earth, the titular legend, and finally a history of Roberts’s creation of his acclaimed War of the Thing.

Roberts’s work consistently brings smiles and chuckles to the reader’s lips, not just because of his parody of the familiar (or, in this case, not quite so familiar, but perhaps legendary) source material, but because of the humor of his words and the juxtaposition of fantasy, humor and reality.

For his source material, Roberts is happy to go far afield, visiting not only the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, but those of Dr. Suess (“Farmer Greenegs of Ham”) and Dylan Thomas (“Under Mirk Wood”).  In addition to Tolkien’s own works, The Sellamillion is, of course, a parody of Christopher Tolkien’s mining of his father’s notes, both in The Silmarillion and the multi-volume History of the Lord of the Rings.  This gives Roberts plenty of material to parody, and he does it well, always treating the material with a loving pen, even when might cry for ridicule.

The Sellamillion adopts the epic scope and style of The Silmarillion even as Roberts deals with matters great and mundane.  When jokes and puns don’t fit into the narrative, he gleefully refers the reader to footnotes, some of which provide the humorous background, others of which break the imaginary wall between the reader and the author as Roberts speaks directly to his unseen audience.

Perhaps because Roberts is writing parody rather than taking itself seriously, The Sellamillion is more readable than The Silmarillion, even as it follows in the earlier book’s footsteps.  For those who are familiar with Tolkien’s work, whether The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or even The Silmarillion, The Sellamillion provides a clever look at Tolkien’s myth and techniques.

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