The whole structure indeed of the Silmarillion lost their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance

The reader who has forgotten his genealogies, or forgotten the original embassy to Valinor, or never realised the equation of ‘Dark Elves’ and ‘Moriquendi’ is left at a loss. The tension of the moment, the skewed relation between truth and whole truth, pass him by. And once the thread is lost, the bitter resentment of Angrod seventeen pages later, the cold mood in which Nargothrond is founded by Angrod’s bother Finrod, the whole structure indeed of the Silmarillion lost their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 284