Namárië

• 1. Introduction

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  Namárië begins with a cry: "Ai! Laurië lantar lassi súrinen" , "Ah! Like gold fall the leaves in the wind." Those words, written in a language Tolkien spent decades constructing, belong to Galadriel, the Elf-queen of Lórien, and they carry her grief for a world she can no longer reach. The poem is subtitled "Galadriel's Lament in Lórien", which in Quenya reads Altariello nainië Lóriendessë. It is the longest continuous Quenya text in The Lord of the Rings, and one of the longest Tolkien ever wrote in that language. But Namárië is more than a linguistic achievement. It is a piece of music, a cosmological map, and a farewell that has been set to Gregorian chant, recorded by a Danish ensemble across four albums, sung by a female chorus in a Hollywood film, and adapted, almost word for word, by Led Zeppelin. How did a single poem in an invented language travel so far from the page?

• 2. Language Built for Loss

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  Quenya, the language of the poem, is the "Late Exilic" or "Third Age" variant, as the linguist Helge Fauskanger describes it , the form Galadriel would have spoken in Middle-earth after the long exile from the West. The word namárië itself is a compressed form of á na márië, meaning literally "be well"; Tolkien used this formula for both greeting and farewell. That compression matters. A single word does double duty, carrying the warmth of hello and the ache of goodbye in the same syllable.

  The poem addresses the Valar Varda, who lives on the summit of the holy mountain Oiolossë, also called Taniquetil, the tallest of the Pelori Mountains. It names Valimar, the residence of the Valar and the Vanyar Elves, and the Calacirya , the gap in the Pelori Mountains through which the light of the Two Trees once streamed across the sea to Middle-earth. Allan Turner has stated that Tolkien meant the poem to embody the Elvish culture from the deep past that Galadriel remembers. Fauskanger adds a small but telling note: the poem uses "Valimar" to mean all of Valinor, the blessed realm, rather than just the city that name normally denotes.

  The poem does not rhyme or scan in any conventional way. Jonathan McColl, writing in the journal Mallorn, admits he prefers poems that use those devices, yet finds even the English translation of Namárië poetic, while the original Quenya with its Gregorian setting is, in his word, "lovely".

• 3. Tolkien Hums a Melody

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  Donald Swann came to Tolkien with a musical proposal, and Tolkien turned it away. He had something else in mind. He hummed a Gregorian chant. Swann took that melody up immediately, feeling it worked perfectly with the poem. In his own words, "there was no doubt that this monodic line from an early church tradition expressed the words ideally, not only the sadness of the word 'Namárië', and the interjection 'Ai!', but equally the ritual mood of the Elves."

  The result was published in their 1967 book The Road Goes Ever On, which also contains a full pronunciation guide that Tolkien wrote to help readers intone the poem correctly. The setting is in the key of A major. Gill Gleeson, analyzing it in Mallorn, describes it as having the quality of "improvisatory plainsong for voice and (melodic) instrument, a self-contained unharmonised melody." She calls it "finely balanced in proportion, and held in tension between two modal scales", with the reciting-note C# acting as a pivot. The instrumental mode, she says, resembles a "descending melodic minor scale" in F#, while the vocal mode sits in A major.

  A separate recording survives of Tolkien himself singing the poem to that Gregorian chant. The Road Goes Ever On also carries his note that the translation published in The Fellowship of the Ring is "sufficiently accurate" , a characteristically measured endorsement from a man who had spent decades shaping every syllable.

• 4. Four Albums, Two Versions

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  Between 1997 and 2005, the Danish Tolkien Ensemble undertook an ambitious project: recording every poem from The Lord of the Rings across four CDs. For Namárië they produced two distinct versions, both composed by the ensemble leader Caspar Reiff, and both appear on the album An Evening in Rivendell. The Danish mezzo-soprano Signe Asmussen sings on both tracks. One sets the original Quenya text; the other uses the English translation.

  The earliest surviving version of the poem itself was published posthumously in The Treason of Isengard. Tolkien did not provide a translation for that earlier draft, and some of the words differ in form from those in the published novel. When Tolkien prepared the text for The Road Goes Ever On, he added accent marks to the version already in the novel, guiding the singer toward stronger and weaker stresses. Fauskanger's word-by-word analysis found the two versions "nearly" identical , the accent marks are the main addition.

• 5. Lórien on Screen

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  Howard Shore composed music for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy between 2000 and 2004. In the scene titled "The Fighting Uruk-hai", Shore brought Namárië into the soundtrack. A female chorus sings the poem in Quenya, non-diegetically , the characters cannot hear it , over images of Galadriel watching the remaining eight members of the Fellowship of the Ring depart Lothlórien.

  The choice to lay Galadriel's lament under a scene of departure rather than under a scene of grief is worth pausing on. The poem's final lines, in translation, read: "Now lost, lost for those from the East is Valimar! Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!" The repetition of that maybe , uncertain, not consoling , sits over eight figures rowing away into an unknown river. Tolkien's poem and Jackson's image share the same emotional logic without either explaining the other.

• 6. Ramble On

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  Led Zeppelin adapted the first line of Namárië for the opening of their 1969 song "Ramble On", released on Led Zeppelin II. Tolkien wrote "Ah! Like gold fall the leaves in the wind"; Led Zeppelin opened with "Leaves are falling all around." The rest of the song continues the Tolkien references, naming Gollum and Mordor directly.

  Namárië also reached a theatrical audience in 2001, when a Finnish composer wrote a new setting for the musical Sagan om Ringen , "The Lord of the Rings" in Swedish , staged at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki. Seven years later, the Spanish neoclassical dark wave band released a studio album called Namárië in 2008. The album includes a track titled Namárië: El Llanto de Galadriel, or "Namárië: Galadriel's Lament". Kogaionon magazine described the album as mature and complex, with a "medieval and... forceful aura".