The Wandering Trail: Episode Nine

Hello Wanderers, and welcome back! In our ninth of Beyond the Brandywine, we asked a question that sounds deceptively simple: why does Tolkien include so much music?

Because he does. More than almost any other author in the fantasy tradition, Tolkien fills his world with songs — walking songs, drinking songs, laments, battle cries, elvish chants that go on for pages, hobbit ditties about bathtubs. Modern readers skip them. First-time listeners to the BBC Radio Play discover they've been missing an entire emotional layer. And those of us who came to the books after the films have Howard Shore's soundtrack so firmly lodged in our brains that we can't read a line about Rohan without hearing the horns come in.

But the deeper you look, the more intentional it all becomes. Middle-earth wasn't just described into existence — it was sung into existence. Music isn't decoration in Tolkien's world. It's the architecture. It's the mechanism of power. And it's the cultural fingerprint of every people who inhabit the place. This is our tour through the music of Middle-earth, from the cosmic opening chord to the songs that still make us cry in the car.

In the Beginning, There Was a Song

The Ainulindalë: Music as Creation

Start here, because everything else follows from it. Tolkien opens The Silmarillion — his creation myth, the foundation of all the legendarium — not with a god speaking the world into being, but with a god conducting one. Eru Ilúvatar proposes themes to his Ainur, the divine spirits he has made, and they sing. And what they sing becomes the world.

The Ainulindalë (roughly, "the Music of the Ainur") is Tolkien's answer to Genesis, and his choice to make it a musical act is not incidental. This is a man who spent his career studying oral tradition — Old English, Old Norse, Welsh, Finnish — traditions in which song is memory, history, and power all at once. That his universe begins with a cosmic jam session is a statement of values.

The complications begin immediately. Melkor — who will become Morgoth, the first Dark Lord — decides he has his own ideas about the theme and begins weaving in discords. Eru's response is famous: "No theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite." Melkor's rebellion is absorbed into the larger music. His discord becomes, against his will, part of the design.

The episode doesn't resolve whether this means everything is preordained or whether there's space for genuine improvisation within the theme. What it does establish is the central principle: in Tolkien's world, unilateral control produces discord. Harmony — the collaborative, the participatory — is the sound of things working as they should.

Melkor thought he was creating something. He was just making noise.

Where to find it:

• The Silmarillion, "Ainulindalë: The Music of the Ainur" — the full creation myth

• The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 131 — Tolkien's own summary of his mythology, including the music of creation

Music as Soft Power

Sam at Cirith Ungol

The grandest example of music as cosmic architecture is the Ainulindalë. The most quietly devastating example is Sam Gamgee, alone at the top of a tower he can't get into, not knowing if Frodo is alive. Sam has nothing. No ladder to the upper floors, no plan, no backup. What he does is start singing. A song from the Shire — sometimes attributed to Bilbo, though Tolkien calls it simply "a simple hobbit-song" in the text — the kind of small, familiar thing that shouldn't mean anything in Mordor. But the orcs hear it and assume it's Frodo. And they lead Sam, inadvertently, directly to where Frodo is being held.

The episode calls this soft power, and the term fits. Sam doesn't fight his way to Frodo. He doesn't trick anyone. He just sings, from exhaustion and grief and the sheer hobbit instinct to make something gentle in an ugly place, and it works. Bill Nighy's performance of this moment in the 1981 BBC Radio Play — which was the thing that made the songs real for one of us — is genuinely beautiful, and genuinely worth finding.

This is what Tolkien does with music throughout: it operates sideways. It isn't a weapon exactly. It isn't magic exactly. It's something that works by different rules than force, and in a world where force is Sauron's whole method, that distinction matters enormously.

Where to find it:

• The Return of the King, Book VI, Chapter 1: "The Tower of Cirith Ungol"

• The BBC Lord of the Rings Radio Play (1981) — Bill Nighy as Sam; the musical treatment of this scene is particularly striking

When Songs Are Weapons

The Singing Battles of the Silmarillion

The First Age is where music goes from soft power to something harder. In the Silmarillion, Tolkien gives us what the episode cheerfully — and not entirely inaccurately — calls "rap battles": confrontations in which characters fight with voice and word before (or instead of) swords.

Fingolfin and Morgoth

After the catastrophic Battle of Sudden Flame, with his forces destroyed and everything he held dear in ruins, Fingolfin rides alone to the gates of Angband, knocks, and challenges Morgoth to single combat. It is an act of spectacular, grief-stricken defiance — one of the great moments in the Silmarillion, and worth going back to read in full.

Before the physical fight begins, Fingolfin opens with song. The detail occupies only a sentence or two in the text, but the choice is deliberate: he meets the most powerful being in Middle-earth with words first. He mortally wounds Morgoth seven times before he falls. Morgoth limps forever after.

Finrod and Sauron

On Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves (another great Tolkien place name — say it out loud and enjoy it), Galadriel's brother Finrod is imprisoned with Beren. What follows is a singing contest with Sauron — a duel of power expressed through voice, each trying to overcome the other's song. Finrod holds his ground but ultimately loses his life for Beren.

Lúthien and Sauron; Lúthien and Morgoth

Then Lúthien arrives. Half Maia (the same order of being as Sauron himself, who is full Maia), she sings Sauron's fortress apart stone by stone. She cleans up the mess left by the singing battle Finrod lost, destroys the tower, and frees Beren — all through song.

She isn't done. When she and Beren reach Angband itself to steal a Silmaril from

Morgoth's crown, she sings Morgoth into a stupor. Tolkien writes: "she sang a song of such surpassing loveliness and of such blinding power" that even Morgoth, the greatest of the fallen Ainur, feels something move in his dark heart. The most powerful evil in the world is briefly undone by beauty. This is the peak of music as weapon in Tolkien's legendarium. It is also, the episode notes, largely absent from the Third Age — because by then, the elves have faded, the Maiar are gone or diminished, and nobody left has that kind of voice. The magic fades with the singers.

Where to find it:

• The Silmarillion, "Of the Ruin of Beleriand" — Fingolfin's challenge to Morgoth

• The Silmarillion, "Of Beren and Lúthien" — Finrod's contest, Lúthien's destruction of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and the theft of the Silmaril

• For the singing contest specifically: The Lays of Beleriand (The History of Middle-earth, Vol. 3) contains the poetic version, "The Lay of Leithian," which gives these scenes much fuller treatment

A People's Music: Cultural Identity in Song

Tolkien uses what characters sing about — and how they sing it — as a form of characterization that's easy to overlook because we're usually skimming past it to find out what happens next. But the music is a portrait.

The Hobbits: Cozy and Unserious, Intentionally

Hobbit songs are about food, baths, the comfort of home, and the eagerness to get back to all three. When Frodo sings in the Prancing Pony in Bree, it's about the Man in the Moon drinking too much ale while a cat plays the fiddle and a cow jumps over the moon — ridiculous pub material that gets the crowd demanding an encore, which is when Frodo accidentally slips the Ring on and vanishes. The songs feel like something you'd find in the English countryside, inherited from the soil up. They're not deep. They're not supposed to be.

This is contrast by design. When Pippin sings for Denethor in the films — a song that comes from the very beginning of the Fellowship's journey out of the Shire — the mournful arrangement makes it sound almost nothing like what it is: hobbit walking music. The episode notes that Pippin even says something like "I have no songs fit for great halls" before singing it. He's right, technically. But sometimes a walking song, in the right context, is exactly the one you need.

Where to find it:

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 3: "Three is Company" — the walking song "Upon the Hearth the Fire is Red"

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 5: "A Conspiracy Unmasked" — the bath song at Crickhollow

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 9: "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony" — Frodo's Man in the Moon song

The Elves: Beautiful, Mournful, Entirely Understandable

Elvish songs are about loss. Lady of stars, lights that have faded, things that will never come again. Galadriel sings about golden leaves as she watches Lothlórien begin its long diminishment. The elves in the Shire-woods sing of Elbereth Gilthoniel, a Vala they cannot reach. When they mourn, they mourn with the weight of an immortal lifespan's accumulated grief.

Once you learn what the elves have been through — kinslaying, the loss of the Two Trees, the destruction of Beleriand, the long retreat into the west — the melancholy stops seeming like aesthetic choice and starts seeming inevitable. They're emo for reasons.

Where to find it:

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 3: "Three is Company" — the elves' song of Elbereth in the Shire

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 8: "Farewell to Lórien" — Galadriel's lament

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 1: "Many Meetings" — Bilbo's song of Eärendil, sung at the feast in Rivendell, is the most extended elvish poem in the main texts

The Rohirrim: The Sound of Old English at War

The Rohirrim are Tolkien's most explicit linguistic exercise in Middle-earth's Third Age. Their language is Old English. Their culture is drawn from Anglo-Saxon and Norse tradition — the mead hall, the oath of loyalty, the elegiac poetry of Beowulf and the Elder Edda. Their songs sound like something you'd uncover on an archaeological dig, which is not an accident.

The Ride of the Rohirrim — Tolkien's own reading of it is on YouTube and worth finding immediately — is not sung, exactly. It's spoken word, or closer to chanting: the rhythm of Old English alliterative verse, performed by the man who spent his career thinking about it. It's one of the finest things ever written in English, and Tolkien reads it like he knows it. The films match it. Arise, Arise, Riders of Théoden. Few passages of literature do what that one does to the heart.

Where to find it:

• The Return of the King, Book V, Chapter 5: "The Ride of the Rohirrim" — Théoden's call to arms

• The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter 6: "The King of the Golden Hall" — the Lament for the Rohirrim ("Where now the horse and the rider?"), spoken by Aragorn in the books

• Tolkien's recording: search "Tolkien reads Ride of the Rohirrim" — it has been widely shared online and is entirely worth the five minutes

The Dwarves: What We Know Is Mostly "Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold"

The Dwarves are the hardest to characterize musically because we get so little from them — mostly the opening of The Hobbit and whatever echoes through Moria. What we do get is good: their songs are about lost kingdoms and long memory, about Erebor taken and the fire-drakes of the north. "Far over the Misty Mountains Cold" is one of the most beloved songs in Tolkien, and the film adaptation — which the episode's resident listener knows in its 18-minute extended fan version, available online — captures something essential about what dwarven music should sound like: deep, many-voiced, patient as stone.

The one non-canonical exception the episode endorses wholeheartedly is from The Rings of Power, in which the dwarves sing to the stone as they mine. Whether or not it's textually grounded, it feels right — resonance, vibration, voice used to commune with rock. Tolkien, it is suspected, would have found the idea sound.

Where to find it:

• The Hobbit, Chapter 1: "An Unexpected Party" — "Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold" and "That's What Bilbo Baggins Hates"

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 4: "A Journey in the Dark" — the choir in Moria

Songs in the Films

What Made It Off the Page

The Peter Jackson adaptations made choices about which songs to use and how, and most of those choices were good. A few were excellent.

Pippin's song for Denethor — "Home is Behind, the World Ahead" — is drawn from a walking song the hobbits sing early in The Fellowship of the Ring, before they've understood what they're walking toward. Billy Boyd reportedly nailed it in one take. The arrangement he developed with screenwriter Philippa Boyens strips the hobbit cheerfulness away entirely, leaving something that sounds, over footage of Faramir's doomed charge, like a farewell. It's devastating. The scene earns it.

The bath song (Ho ho, to the bottle I go) appears in the extended edition of The Two Towers, with Merry and Pippin dancing on a table in Rohan. It's from The Fellowship of the Ring, from the Crickhollow chapters — the hobbits' last moment of uncomplicated hobbit-ness before the world gets serious. Both the book version and the film version accomplish the same thing: a reminder of what these people are, before everything that happens to them.

Gollum's use of the Barrow-wight poem is a small, strange Easter egg in the films. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the Barrow-wights chant over the hobbits: "Cold be hand and heart and bone." In The Two Towers, Gollum murmurs lines from this poem to himself, in a scene with Frodo and Sam. He probably learned it in the Barrow-downs, centuries earlier, during one of his long wanderings. It's the kind of detail that rewards readers who noticed it, and doesn't punish viewers who didn't.

Where to find it:

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 8: "Fog on the Barrow-Downs" — the Barrow-wight incantation in full

• The Return of the King, Book V, Chapter 1: "Minas Tirith" — the athelas poem, which also appears briefly in the films

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 5: "A Conspiracy Unmasked" — the bath song at Crickhollow

Howard Shore, David Salo, and the Sound of Middle-earth

The films didn't just use Tolkien's songs. They built an entire sonic world around them, with Howard Shore composing leitmotifs for every people, place, and Ring of Power, and linguist David Salo filling in gaps in Tolkien's languages to give the choral music actual words. The result means that the music Angela and Kelsey spent years hearing as gorgeous but wordless atmosphere has, in many cases, been full of lyrics the whole time.

The Lothlórien sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring is sung in Elvish. The Khazad-dûm chorus — that deep, relentless chanting as the Fellowship runs for the Bridge of Khazad-dûm — is in Khuzdul, the Dwarven tongue, and translates to something close to: "The dark grows heavy. Cold snaps our bones. Deeper into the earth." It ends with "The demon comes." It did not need to be any more effective than it already was, and yet.

The three end-credit songs complete the picture. Enya's "May it Be" (Fellowship), Emiliana Torrini's "Gollum's Song" (Two Towers), and Annie Lennox's "Into the West" (Return of the King) each function as a kind of emotional summary for their film. "Gollum's Song" is an underappreciated one — written from Gollum's perspective, full of a loneliness and abandonment that makes you feel something for a creature whose relationship with morality is complicated at best. "Into the West" is, as the episode confirms, structurally perfect funeral music, which some of us know from experience.

Where to find it:

• Howard Shore, The Lord of the Rings: The Complete Recordings — the full score with liner notes

• David Salo's work on Tolkien's languages for the films is documented in his book A Gateway to Sindarin and in various interviews; searching "David Salo LOTR" will turn up substantial material

• For a deeper dive: The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films by Doug Adams is the definitive analysis of Shore's score, with full translations of the choral texts

A Note on Tolkien Reading Tolkien

If you haven't heard Tolkien's own recordings, the episode recommends them without reservation. There's a famous one of him reading from The Lord of the Rings — the Ride of the Rohirrim, specifically — that demonstrates exactly what the episode means by the difference between poetry-on-a-page and poetry-as-sound. He doesn't quite sing it. He doesn't quite chant it. He reads it with the cadence of someone who understands, in his bones, the alliterative tradition he's working in. It sounds ancient because it's drawing from things that are.

The 1981 BBC Radio Play, which dramatizes the songs with actual melodies, is the other reference point the episode keeps returning to. It's the thing that made the songs feel real — that gave them tunes to carry into rereads. Once you've heard Sam's song at Cirith Ungol with music, reading the text is different.

Reflections

The episode ends where it should: in a concert hall in Philadelphia, watching The Fellowship of the Ring with a live orchestra and chorus. The thing that happened there, the episode says, was the same thing Tolkien's songs do in the books: they force you to slow down. To be in the scene. To stop running ahead to find out what happens and just hear what's happening right now.

Tolkien put songs in his books to make readers do that. To interrupt the narrative with something that requires a different kind of attention — not plot attention, but musical attention, emotional attention. They're not decorative. They're structural. They're the places where the world breathes. And maybe that's why Middle-earth keeps calling people back. It doesn't just ask you to watch. It asks you to listen.

Further Reading

Primary Sources:

• The Silmarillion, "Ainulindalë" — the creation myth and its music

• The Silmarillion, "Of Beren and Lúthien" — the singing battles

• The Hobbit, Chapter 1: "An Unexpected Party" — the Dwarves' songs

• The Fellowship of the Ring, Books I and II — the most song-dense of the main texts

• The Return of the King, Book V, Chapter 8: "The Houses of Healing" — the athelas verse

Secondary Sources:

• The Lays of Beleriand (The History of Middle-earth, Vol. 3) — the poetic "Lay of Leithian," which gives the Beren and Lúthien singing contests their full treatment

• Doug Adams, The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films — definitive guide to Howard Shore's score, with choral translations

• The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 131 — Tolkien on his mythology and its musical foundations

Questions for the Reader

• Did you read the songs, or were you a strategic glancer? And has anything — the films, the BBC Radio Play, a particularly good reread — changed that?

• Which people of Middle-earth do you think Tolkien wrote the best music for? The Hobbits' coziness, the Elves' grief, the Rohirrim's epic cadence, the Dwarves' deep memory?

• The singing battles of the Silmarillion feel almost sui generis in fantasy literature. Can you think of any other author who uses music as a weapon in quite this way?

• If Howard Shore's score is now the default sound of Middle-earth for you — the melody that plays when you read "The Shire" — what do you make of that? Is it a gift from the films, or has it crowded something out?

• And the big one: if you could hear one moment from the books performed live — the Ainulindalë, Lúthien before Morgoth, the Ride of the Rohirrim, Sam's song at Cirith Ungol — which would it be?

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