Heidi Steimel

If you smell something funny about this book, it is probably the whiff of desperation.

There seems to be a deep, passionate need for people to associate music with the stories of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. The phenomenon goes back to Tolkien's lifetime, when Donald Swann asked Tolkien to let him produce music for Tolkien's poetry -- the only genuinely authorized settings of Tolkien's words. It's understandable that people would want to do so; after all, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are full of references to music, and most of what is printed as poetry is described as being in fact song.

And the link between Tolkien and music only became stronger after his death, when the various posthumous works made it clear that music in the Middle-earth universe actually had physical power -- power to create, and power to work mighty deeds. Clearly music was a fundamental part of Tolkien's vision.

Which doesn't mean that we know anything about his music. Which means that all the writing about Tolkien's music (and there is a lot of it, including at least one other book and a lot of scattered essays) is built essentially upon sand. Several of the essays in this book wring out every detail they can find in hoping to learn something new -- but the results are far from convincing. Tolkien may have loved music, but he wasn't a musician; he couldn't have known some of the things the authors speculate about. Contrary to the essay by Norbert Maier, for instance, we'll never know the structural details of the "harps" Tolkien describes -- Tolkien flatly did not know the reasons why harps are built the way they are, and you cannot proceed from the content of the poetry to talk about the nature of the instrument. (After all, we are told that the poems are translated -- and we can't know what the untranslated works would have been like.)

At least that essay is about Tolkien. The last four essays, "Interpretations of Tolkien's Music in Our World," aren't about Tolkien. They're about people making musical hay of Tolkien material. So there is discussion of songs using Tolkien themes, of the music in the Peter Jackson movies, and of other settings. But none of these are about Tolkien. You may like the movies; you may hate them -- but they weren't written by Tolkien. They are not music in Middle-earth; they are music inspired by Middle-earth.

If that isn't desperation to find something to put into what would otherwise be a very thin volume, I don't know what is.

I'm a musician. I'm a fan of Tolkien. More, I am a person who wants to know how music influenced Tolkien -- because I think the answer to that question could help us understand other people with special abilities like Tolkien's. I felt frankly offended by those four essays that weren't about Tolkien; it's false advertising. The other essays were more relevant, but the discussion of Tolkien and folk music, for instance, showed a lack of understanding about folk music which made its contents pretty useless. (It didn't even dig into the fact that "The Stone Troll" is to be sung to the melody of the well-known folk song "The Fox.") I truly didn't feel as if I this book told me anything about Tolkien, or about Middle-earth, that I didn't already know either from the biographies of Tolkien, or from works like Tom Shippey's, or just from studying the same music Tolkien studied in his work on folklore.

The editors may have had a target audience for this book. I can't imagine what that audience would have been. I know that -- as a musician, as a folklorist, as a person interested in languages, as a student of medieval romances, in other words, as someone whose interests are very like Tolkien's -- that audience does not include me.… (meer)