Poems and Songs of Middle Earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Poems and Songs of Middle Earth arrived in American record shops on the 18th of October 1967, carrying something no commercially released album had ever offered before: the voice of J. R. R. Tolkien himself reading poetry from The Lord of the Rings. The record was a collaboration between Tolkien and the English musician Donald Swann, who had spent 1965 setting Tolkien's verse to music. Half the album was Tolkien speaking; the other half was a song cycle called The Road Goes Ever On, performed by baritone William Elvin with Swann at the piano. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a spoken-word literary record end up carrying one of the earliest audio portraits of a living language Tolkien had invented in private over decades, and what did critics and educators ultimately make of it?

• 2. The Road to Caedmon

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  Donald Swann needed a record company willing to take a chance on something unusual. His song cycle was too short to fill a full LP on its own, and an early inquiry to the music publisher Chappell and Co. was flatly rejected on those grounds. A shorter record, Chappell's representative indicated, would be difficult to market in the United States. The solution that finally worked came from Joy Hill, an employee of Tolkien's British publisher Allen and Unwin. Hill proposed pairing Swann's music on one side of an LP with spoken readings of Tolkien's writings on the other. Her original idea cast Swann's stage partner Michael Flanders as the reader, but by December 1966 Tolkien and Swann agreed that Tolkien himself would record his own work instead.

  Austin Olney of the American publisher Houghton Mifflin then proposed partnering with Caedmon Records, a New York-based label with offices in London that specialized in spoken-word recordings about literature. Founded in 1952, Caedmon had already pressed records by Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, and W. B. Yeats, among others. Historian Matthew Rubery described Caedmon as having answered the question on many readers' minds: what did authors sound like? The label was closely associated with high literary culture, which is what made the fantasy critic Lin Carter openly surprised to find that "even so staid and literary a firm as Caedmon Records" had issued a disc of Tolkien reading his own poems.

• 3. Recording Day

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  On the 15th of June 1967, Caedmon sent producer Howard Sackler and an engineer with equipment to Tolkien's home on Sandfield Road in Oxford. The session started after 4 p.m., later than Tolkien preferred. An earlier start was impossible because Sackler's team had to travel from London that day, though a Caedmon representative assured Tolkien the process would be unobtrusive. In the weeks beforehand, Caedmon had sent Tolkien a tape recorder so he could practice at home, and Tolkien wrote to Rayner Unwin confirming he had been using it.

  Swann and Elvin had recorded the songs for The Road Goes Ever On three days earlier, on the 12th of June. For those sessions, the pronunciation of words from Tolkien's invented languages was a particular concern. In March 1967, Swann had written to Tolkien asking for vocal coaching advice, and Tolkien responded with phonetic notes tailored specifically to both performers' voices. Tolkien also took a close interest in Elvin's name: both Swann and Tolkien noticed, with some delight, that a baritone singing songs steeped in Elvish lore happened to be named Elvin. Swann called it "the unbelievably suitable name", while Tolkien remarked that it was "a good omen". During his own recording session, Tolkien spotted an error in the published text of his poem "The Sea-Bell" that had gone unnoticed until that afternoon.

• 4. Language on Record

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  Two of Tolkien's invented Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, appear on the album in a way that had never been publicly documented before. Tolkien recited lines in both languages himself, and Elvin sang additional Elvish texts under Tolkien's direct phonetic guidance. For listeners curious about how these languages were meant to sound, the album served as the closest available evidence. Tolkien contributed the melody for one of the songs, "Namarie", in a style deliberately evocative of Gregorian chant.

  Swann's compositions across the song cycle drew on English folk music, a choice the critic for the English Journal said suited Tolkien's traditional verse. That same critic compared most of the compositions to lieder, while also hearing a resemblance between the song "Errantry" and the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan. John R. Searles, writing in the English Journal, singled out "Namarie" as likely to strike many listeners as the most appropriate and moving melody on the record.

• 5. W. H. Auden and the Sleeve

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  The cover illustration on the LP sleeve was a triptych view of a Middle-earth landscape painted by Pauline Baynes. It had previously appeared on the slipcase of the deluxe three-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings that Allen and Unwin published in 1964, printed the year before. Tolkien scholar Valerie Anand described the image as placing Orodruin, or Mount Doom, far in the distance, with a dramatic castle as a landmark in the middle ground, drawing the eye forward.

  For the liner notes on the reverse of the sleeve, the poet W. H. Auden agreed in August 1967 to contribute an introductory essay. Tolkien was immensely pleased. The two had exchanged admiring letters earlier that year, prompted by Tolkien's publication of a poem titled "For W. H. A." in a special issue of the literary magazine Shenandoah honoring Auden's 60th birthday. Auden had replied with gratitude and expressed particular admiration for "The Sea-Bell". In his essay, Auden praised Tolkien's verse, calling the poems' metres "as exciting as they are various", and wrote that Tolkien's fantasy works would either totally enthrall a reader or leave them stone cold, with nothing and nobody ever able to change that response. Despite his enthusiasm, Auden noted one disappointment: the album contained no readings from the poetry of Rohan, a kingdom of Men in The Lord of the Rings.

• 6. Reception and Afterlife

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  Critical opinion on the album divided predictably along the line between its two halves. Frederick Woods, reviewing for the classical music magazine The Gramophone, admired Tolkien's fiction and readings but felt ambivalent about Swann's compositions. Edmund Fuller's review for The Wall Street Journal was warmer, calling Elvin's singing "excellent" and predicting that The Road Goes Ever On would become an accepted recital unit across multiple vocal ranges. Fuller described Tolkien's voice as "gruffly no-nonsense" and said it was exactly right for the material. Peter Gellatly in Library Journal praised Tolkien's readings for their "jewelled ornateness" and their "zestful, old-country voice". Catheryne S. Franklin, a professor of library science at the University of Texas at Austin, offered a measured verdict, suggesting that high school English teachers who recognized what she called "the cult" around Tolkien might try the record with students as an example of poetry with metrical tricks.

  In the years that followed, educators found the album genuinely useful. A 1970 article in High Fidelity by Eleanor Kulleseid, a librarian at Bank Street College of Education in New York City, recommended it for Hobbit-lovers and those who wished to brush up on their Elvish. Bibliographer Marshall Tymn listed it in The Science Fiction Reference Book in 1981 as a resource for teaching science fiction and fantasy. The album remained in Caedmon's catalog as late as 1985, when the label still sold tapes alongside audiobooks by Tolkien and other fantasy authors. By the year 2000 it was out of print, though copies continued to circulate through public libraries.

  Swann's song cycle never received a second commercial recording. The Tolkien scholar David Bratman observed that the cycle had never received quite the attention it deserved, in part because its sole studio recording was in what he called a reserved and fastidious style. Bratman himself preferred Swann's later live performances for their livelier mood. At least one of those later performances was captured on tape: a 1993 live recording, privately distributed as a bootleg on cassette, in which Swann sang the lead vocals supported by a choir. Researcher William Phemister found that version generally faster and freer, but concluded that both tempi worked well.