is seen in the Elvish language Sindarin; Tolkien wrote that he gave it "a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh ... because it seems to fit the rather 'Celtic' type of legends and stories told of its speakers". Reception At the time of release, reviews of The Silmarillion were generally negative. The Tolkien scholar Wayne G. Hammond records that the book's publisher, Rayner Unwin, called the reviews "among the most unfair he had ever seen". The book was a commercial success, topping The New York Times Fiction Best Seller list in October 1977. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 1978. The Silmarillion was criticized for being too serious, lacking the light-hearted moments that were found in The Lord of the Rings and especially The Hobbit. Time magazine lamented that there was "no single, unifying quest and, above all, no band of brothers for the reader to identify with". Other criticisms included difficult-to-read archaic language and many difficult and hard-to-remember names. Robert M. Adams of The New York Review of Books called The Silmarillion "an empty and pompous bore" and "not a literary event of any magnitude". He suggested that the main reason for its "enormous sales" was the "Tolkien cult" created by the popularity of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and predicted that more people would buy The Silmarillion than would ever read it. The School Library Journal called it "only a stillborn postscript" to Tolkien's earlier works. Peter Conrad of the New Statesman stated that "Tolkien can't actually write" and was deficient in imagination. A few reviewers praised the scope of Tolkien's creation. The New York Times Book Review acknowledged that "what is finally most moving is ... the eccentric heroism of Tolkien's attempt". Time described The Silmarillion as "majestic, a work held so long and so powerfully in the writer's imagination that it overwhelms the reader". The Horn Book Magazine lauded the "remarkable set of legends conceived with imaginative might and told in beautiful language". John Calvin Batchelor, in The Village Voice, lauded the book as a "difficult but incontestable masterwork of fantasy" and praised the characterisation of Melkor, describing him as "a stunning bad guy" whose "chief weapon against goodness is his ability to corrupt men by offering them trappings for their vanity". In a 2019 article, Le Monde called The Silmarillion a "cornerstone of Tolkien's imagination"