“...I think it’s at least derived from the prequel to the LOTR trilogy, The Silmarillion...” [Samurai_Jack, post 53]
You have your internal plot timelines mixed up. Also, your points of emphasis.
The complete story arc of The Hobbit and LOTR occupies only a couple pages at the end of The Silmarillion - a perfectly accurate representation of the amount of time it occupies in the author’s imagined Elder World.
Thus, The Silmarillion is a prequel only in the sense that it was published more 20 years after LOTR. It expresses a bunch of linguistic, philosophical, moral, religious, literary, and other concepts the author had come up with years before, and for long wished to draw together into a coherent, unified work. He wrote some of it down as early as 1917 - twenty years before The Hobbit was published.
Much of The Silmarillion is written in a distant style echoing epics, heroic legends or Biblical material. Possibly too remote for some readers. “Dull” may not be too strong a description. And it does contrast with the concrete, pulse-quickening, you-are-there tone characterizing much of LOTR. Bringing that level of detail to The Silmarillion may have required an expansion to one hundred volumes or more.
The author did write snippets of various sub-tales that are summarized in The Silmarillion, expanding and enhancing them at levels of nuance, detail, and import fully comparable to the best passages in LOTR. Rather more adult, occasionally darker, even somber. Son Christopher (also executor/editor) published several in Unfinished Tales, and a number of later volumes.
Read up and enjoy.
“Thus, The Silmarillion is a prequel...”
Thanks for the affirmation poindexter.