The Road Goes Ever On

• 1. Introduction

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  The Road Goes Ever On began not in a studio or a concert hall, but in a garden. In Priscilla Tolkien's garden, Donald Swann sat at a piano and performed his newly composed settings of J. R. R. Tolkien's poetry for the man who had written them. Tolkien approved of nearly everything he heard. But for one song, a Quenya lament called "Namárië", he had a different vision entirely. He hummed a tune. Swann listened, took it down, and used it. That single exchange between a novelist and an entertainer shaped the song cycle that would be published on the 31st of October 1967. How did a collection of poems from a fantasy novel become a formally published song cycle? What choices did Swann make in setting Middle-earth poetry to music? And what do the songs, taken together, actually mean?

• 2. Swann and Tolkien

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  Donald Swann began composing the settings in Ramallah, near Jerusalem, in 1965. He had started with seven poems from The Lord of the Rings, but one of them, "O Orofarnë, Lassemista, Carnimírië", gave him pause. He felt it was too similar to Henry Purcell's "Dido's Lament", and so he replaced it with "Namárië" for the first edition. Swann and his wife were admirers of Tolkien's writing, and together they chose six poems as the original core of the cycle. Tolkien liked five of those settings. For "Namárië", the sole exception, he hummed a melody in the style of a Gregorian chant. That melody became the song. Scholar Richard Leonberger notes that Swann composed the nine settings over a period of twelve years. The collaboration was not an arm's-length licensing deal. It was a close artistic exchange between two people who cared about the poems and what happened to them.

• 3. The Sound of Middle-earth

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  Most of the songs in the cycle sound deliberately old. Much of the music resembles English traditional or folk music, a choice that scholar Emily Sulka links to the subject matter itself. Songs like "The Road Goes Ever On" and "Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red" are walking songs, the kind of music hobbit characters sing on the road. Educationist Estelle Jorgensen describes being struck by Swann's "simple, folklike, and tonal strophic settings, harking back to an earlier time before atonal music", which she found appropriate to the rustic character of the characters he was portraying. The sole exception in the cycle is "Namárië", the Quenya song grounded in Tolkien's own hummed melody, which has affinities to Gregorian chant rather than to English folk. Swann also wanted the cycle performed as a group without applause between songs, treating the nine pieces as a single continuous experience rather than a programme of individual pieces.

• 4. A Theme of Travel

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  Sulka reads the whole song cycle as organized around a single theme: travel. "In the Willow-Meads of Tasarinan" speaks of Treebeard's journeys through many lands, moving through the seasons from spring to winter. "In Western Lands" opens in despondent mood, following Sam in his captivity, but arrives at a feeling of hope. "I Sit Beside the Fire" portrays Bilbo as a traveller reflecting on journeys completed. That song ends by quoting the melody of "The Road Goes Ever On", the poem that recurs throughout The Lord of the Rings, adapted to each context it appears in. Jorgensen adds that the cycle closes with the longest poem, "Errantry", in which a wanderer ends one journey and begins the next. Sulka sees Tolkien and Swann using poetry and music together to link the story of the novel with the idea of the road always continuing, even after an individual's travel is finished.

• 5. Beyond the Music

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  The book of sheet music is not only a score. Tolkien's notes and translations of the two Elvish poems occupy pages 63 to 76 of the 2002 edition, and they carry material that was not publicly available anywhere else at the time. His notes provided information about the First Age of Middle-earth that would not appear in print again until 1977, when The Silmarillion was published. The book also contains one of the longest samples of the constructed language Quenya, in the text of "Namárië", as well as the Sindarin prayer "A Elbereth Gilthoniel", with grammatical explanations. Tolkien also contributed decorations to the physical pages: elvish script runs along the top and bottom of every page of sheet music, and he added tailpieces for the spaces at the ends of the poems. For readers interested in Tolkien's languages and in the history of Middle-earth, the book offered something no novel had yet provided.

• 6. Editions and Recordings

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  The LP record that accompanied the first edition was recorded on the 12th of June 1967, under the title Poems and Songs of Middle Earth, with Swann on piano and William Elvin as singer. Side one featured Tolkien himself reading six poems from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Side two opened with Tolkien reading part of the Elvish prayer "A Elbereth Gilthoniel", then gave the rest of the time to Swann and Elvin performing the song cycle. Caedmon Records released the LP as TC 1231. The second edition, published in 1978, added "Bilbo's Last Song", a poem given to Tolkien's secretary, Margaret Joy Hill, after his death. The third edition, published in 1993, added "Lúthien Tinúviel" from The Silmarillion, which had already appeared in The Songs of Donald Swann: Volume I. That third edition was packaged with a CD duplicating the 1967 cycle. A hardcover reprint by Harper Collins appeared in 2002, carrying the same text and CD as the 1993 edition, and it is this edition whose page numbers appear in references to the book today.

• 7. Teaching with the Cycle

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  Jorgensen writes that the familiarity of Peter Jackson's film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings has given educators a practical entry point into Tolkien's mythology, opening paths through his prose, his poetry, film, and music. She suggests that students can compare Tolkien's poems with Swann's settings directly, noticing where the music reinforces or diverges from the text. She also proposes that students could improvise, compose, perform, and record their own melodies for the same texts, or write and perform their own stories in which such songs might feature. Her one critical note concerns "In the Willow-Meads of Tasarinan": she finds that Swann captures Treebeard's strength and resilience, but not the quality of chanting that Tolkien describes in the novel, nor the fact that the Ents had been influenced by elvish music. That unresolved gap between Tolkien's text and Swann's realisation is itself a productive question for any student willing to pick up the score.