SteveR
Member
This post looks both ahead and behind, and was spurred by the discussion in the last session where Corey suggested that The Fall of Gil-galad translated entirely in rigid iambs would get stale pretty quick.
For obvious reasons, I have thought a lot about what some of these songs and poems sound like - what they sound like to me, and what Tolkien might have been imagining when he wrong them. Even accounting for changes to people's attention spans over time, I can't imagine that anyone wouldn't be bored if the entirety of the Lay of Leithian or Ëarendil was a Mariner were sung to the same melody over and over and over from beginning to end. Like those school-room iambs, that melody is gonna get stale.
So is there any evidence out there for how Tolkien thought these would sound, as songs? I have found one recording of him actually semi-singing a song he wrote (the Troll Song that Sam sings, which I'm very excited for us to get to, as I have rather a different take on it, and Tolkien doesn't sing so much as recite beat poetry
). Other than that, he simply reads the poem. This is the case even when the text describes a character singing or "chanting", a word which to my mind bears a sense of musicality. In particular here I'm thinking of the Lay of Leithian, where in the recording I found Tolkien reads "he began not to speak but to chant softly..." before carrying on speaking the poem. The text also refers to Bilbo "chanting" when he recites Ëarendil was a Mariner. I will admit I have not looked closely at songs, or the text around them, beyond the party reaching Rivendell.
One reasonably modern idea for how I think these longer songs might have worked would be something like Gordon Lightfoot's Great Canadian Railroad Trilogy, where a lot of the poem is similar in meter and structure, but the melody and feel of the song really changes with each section. It's well worth the seven minutes to check out Lightfoot performing it live here:
. (And then pull up Ëarendil was a Mariner and sing the first stanza along with the first verse from Lightfoot - you'll have to add a syllable here and there compared to GCRT, but it works awfully well )
Do you, Corey, or others in the class agree that these longer songs would likely vary pretty widely over the course of them, or am I taking a hasty 21st century view of this?
For obvious reasons, I have thought a lot about what some of these songs and poems sound like - what they sound like to me, and what Tolkien might have been imagining when he wrong them. Even accounting for changes to people's attention spans over time, I can't imagine that anyone wouldn't be bored if the entirety of the Lay of Leithian or Ëarendil was a Mariner were sung to the same melody over and over and over from beginning to end. Like those school-room iambs, that melody is gonna get stale.
So is there any evidence out there for how Tolkien thought these would sound, as songs? I have found one recording of him actually semi-singing a song he wrote (the Troll Song that Sam sings, which I'm very excited for us to get to, as I have rather a different take on it, and Tolkien doesn't sing so much as recite beat poetry
). Other than that, he simply reads the poem. This is the case even when the text describes a character singing or "chanting", a word which to my mind bears a sense of musicality. In particular here I'm thinking of the Lay of Leithian, where in the recording I found Tolkien reads "he began not to speak but to chant softly..." before carrying on speaking the poem. The text also refers to Bilbo "chanting" when he recites Ëarendil was a Mariner. I will admit I have not looked closely at songs, or the text around them, beyond the party reaching Rivendell.One reasonably modern idea for how I think these longer songs might have worked would be something like Gordon Lightfoot's Great Canadian Railroad Trilogy, where a lot of the poem is similar in meter and structure, but the melody and feel of the song really changes with each section. It's well worth the seven minutes to check out Lightfoot performing it live here:
)Do you, Corey, or others in the class agree that these longer songs would likely vary pretty widely over the course of them, or am I taking a hasty 21st century view of this?
