It’s tough to think of authors throughout history that were more obsessive-compulsive about their craft than J.R.R.Tolkien. The philological scholar and creative mastermind behind The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings wasn’t just scratching down the history of Middle Earth for the hell of it; he was genuinely making an educated guess about ancient history by gathering scraps of yellowed folklore and boldly filling in the blanks. The Lord of the Rings is probably the only novel in history that finds the plot playing second fiddle to the names and languages of different races and locations: it’s an ambitious linguistic exercise that just happens to be one of the most poignant critiques of industrialized society in literary history.
An important aspect of the book that is often overlooked is Tolkien’s poetry: hobbits, elves, dwarves and wizards all have their own poetic strains, all of them rigid in structure and full of rich cultural identifiers. Fans of Tolkien’s work will be delighted to hear At Dawn In Rivendell, the latest collection of musical interpretations of his poems by The Tolkien Ensemble (a Danish classical sextet that was given full consent from the Tolkien estate to make these recordings). It’s easy to see why. All of guitarist/bandleader Caspar Reiff’s compositions accurately reflect the history and disposition of the various characters, from the robust cheerfulness of the hobbits to the mournful tales of the ents.
The lamentations of the heroic ent Treebeard are spectacular, due to Reiff’s dark, foreboding arrangements and the equally riveting voice of actor Christopher Lee (the evil wizard Saruman in the LOR films). Lee’s surprisingly nimble baritone is captivating, perfectly capturing Treebeard’s sorrow. Some of the other pieces do fall short, like “Eomer’s Song,” which sounds like a cheap renaissance fair act, but these instances are few. In the end, the star of the show is Tolkien himself, whose linguistic brilliance allowed him to express complex human emotions in both Elvish and English, in poetry that effortlessly lends itself to song.
Appeared in Artvoice.