Introduction

I have already elsewhere explained much of the background to the manner in which my Epic scenes from The Silmarillion came to be written. In fact my first music for any Tolkien script dates back to the summer of 1966 when I can recall sitting by the lake at Sittinghurst Castle in Kent and making my first sketches for a suite which included both the existing ‘hobbit’ theme and an early version of the ‘Shire’ melody. These were followed in the autumn of that year by other elements that survived into later work: the lament for Boromir, for example, and an early version of In the willow-meads of Tasarinan. These short pieces were originally fragmentary, but soon began to coalesce into a larger framework in the shape of a complete setting of Book IV of The Lord of the Rings, originally given the grandiose title of The Doom but eventually to materialise as The Black Gate is closed.

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Work on this fully operatic setting had advanced far enough for a piano rehearsal of the first scene to be held in the summer of 1968, and the score was substantially sketched by March 1969 including some passages – such as the thunderstorm in Act Three – which would later find their way in largely unaltered form into The Silmarillion. The final chords of the score were written during my Easter holidays that year in a freezing cold cottage near the Gap of Dunloe in County Kerry – as I discovered much later, some years after Tolkien himself had spent a holiday in the same Irish mountain landscape. But even so at that time much of the work was left incompletely orchestrated, and some of the scoring was clearly impractical. The amateur orchestra at the London School of Economics rehearsed a much-reduced orchestral suite in the autumn of 1969, but that was as far as the work ever progressed, despite some interest expressed by those in London who saw the score and a suite derived from the sketches given by the LSE orchestra in 1971. Indeed I was far from clear in my own mind regarding the function of the three-Act torso, except that it might in due course form part of a complete Lord of the Rings cycle of an unspecified but massive scale. Having completed the sketches, I soon turned to the more practical subject of Michéal Mac Liammóir’s Diarmuid and Gráinne which had reached completion and indeed partial performance by the summer of 1971.

During that period I had not entirely abandoned thoughts on the projected Tolkien work, and indeed this took a new departure with my setting of the lengthy poem The Sea Bell completed early in 1972. The principal theme of this song, which returns several times in varied forms during the progress of the narrative, is in all essential features the same as the extended melody employed initially for the Elves as the second subject in my third symphony Ainulundalë, and eventually associated in The Silmarillion with the elven realm of Doriath (and an abridged version of the original setting survives into the final score of The Grey Havens).

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At the same time I finally established a projected form for the putative operatic cycle on The Lord of the Rings, a wildly impractical scheme extending over thirteen evenings of performances (including two evenings devoted to The Hobbit); and I went so far as to devise a complete text for this monstrous construction, covering the whole territory in great detail and leaving very little out. In due course I began some very tentative work on this task: the two evenings which set The Hobbit were fully sketched, and some other Acts – Tom Bombadil and The Grey Havens – were also substantially completed in short score (although the end of both was missing). A good many other sketches also date from this period, but of course the whole enterprise was brought to an end by the difficulties of obtaining copyright clearance for the texts, and in due course – following the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977 – the diversion of my musical attention to the newly emerging material.

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I have explained elsewhere how, beginning with my purely orchestral and instrumental approach to the texts in the Ainulindalë symphony and the piano rondo Akallabêth (both dating from the period 1978-79), and with the approval of the Tolkien estate – and encouragement from both Christopher and Priscilla Tolkien – I eventually began work on my epic scenes from The Silmarillion with The Children of Húrin in 1981-82 and then followed this with the other segments of the cycle during the following years. The completion of Beren and Lúthien, the last of the cycle to be composed at that time in 1996, was followed by a frustrating series of attempts to obtain performance of at least some part of the cycle which was ultimately defeated by the incessant refrain that the work was too long and too complicated, even when attempts were made to reduce the size of the orchestration and forces demanded for suites of excerpts. An attempt to utilise some of the material from the cycle for a setting of Bilbo’s Lay of Eärendil was equally stillborn, although the use of texts from The Lord of the Rings had been authorised by the Tolkien estate as part of the construction of the Silmarillion scenes. At the same time I assembled the remaining fragments from the Lord of the Rings material, completing the scores for Tom Bombadil and The Grey Havens and putting the other sections into some sort of order.

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But it was only when we were coming towards the end of recordings of The Silmarillion that the indefatigable Simon Crosby Buttle, as I have described elsewhere, began by urging me to bring the legends of the First Age to a proper conclusion with the addition of a further Silmarillion segment based around my existing Eärendil setting, which we eventually decided to entitle The War of Wrath. And it was he who suggested at much the same that it might be an interesting idea to provide an Appendix to the recording – in the time-honoured Tolkien tradition – including some of the Lord of the Rings material which had not been incorporated into the Silmarillion cycle. This would also have the advantage of binding the various scores together, allowing listeners to appreciate the connections between them. The theme of Eru which opens Fëanor also closes The Grey Havens; and this is not the only theme associated with the Valar to make a subsequent appearance in the Lord of the Rings sketches (although as might be expected much less frequently than in the Silmarillion). The themes of Elbereth and Yavanna both re-emerge in The Mirror of Galadriel as Galadriel presents the Fellowship with her gifts; and the ‘Arda’ theme from Ainulindalë and Fëanor also reappears, both in its original form and to represent the downfall of Sauron as in the Akallabêth rondo. Even Morgoth, long-banished from Middle-Earth, returns musically in the Balrog scenes and to menacingly underpin the threat of the Nazgul. Ulmo too reappears at several points; although significantly not Mandos, whose curse has been exorcised during the War of Wrath.

With these considerations in mind, Simon began the long task of reducing down my original rambling libretto to a series of relatively briefer musical chapters which would require a relatively more limited amount of new musical composition to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. With the completion of my work on The War of Wrath in the early summer of 2020 I turned back to the earlier sketches, beginning in an entirely arbitrary and fortuitous manner with the completion of the scene of triumph at The Field of Cormallen, and linking Frodo’s song at The Prancing Pony through to the first appearance of Aragorn’s description in the preceding scene. I then worked backwards through the earlier version of Tom Bombadil, making some thematic amendments; and returned to my 1970s sketch for A long-expected party, again revising and bringing the score into accordance with the existing Silmarillion. The revision of The Black Gate is closed had perforce to be much more extensive – some of the themes, such as that for the Ring itself, had been substantially altered over the years – and the music later written for the Gondorian scenes had to be incorporated into the originally much more basic material supplied for Faramir. Because of the isolation imposed upon me as a result of the worldwide corona pandemic I found, along with the opportunity for uninterrupted composition, that the new and revised music fell into place with remarkable fluidity and ease; and what emerged was a set of musical chapters which formed a partnership with the epic scenes from The Silmarillion in a manner which reflected Tolkien’s own scheme for his work as envisioned in the 1950s with the two cycles forming part of an integral whole.

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At the same time, without the intervention and encouragement of Simon Crosby Buttle, it is certainly justified to say the work would never have been brought to a conclusion. It is with untold gratitude that I dedicate this score to him.

Perspectives

In some ways, of course, the musical chapters from The Lord of the Rings are quite distinct in dramatic style from The Silmarillion, in the same manner as the disparate texts themselves. The role of the chorus in delivering the narration in the ‘epic scenes’ vanishes altogether in the ‘musical chapters,’ which therefore become somewhat more conventionally operatic in form. At the same time the Lord of the Rings texts themselves, generally more closely argued and complex in their development, engender a more contrapuntal and elaborate response in the thematic treatment. The action sequences, for example, which form such a major part of both the Peter Jackson films and the Howard Shore scores for them, are trimmed back considerably with many of the battle sequences taking place ‘offstage’. The chapters focus on the lyrical and philosophical aspects of the text in a manner that goes far beyond the simple restitution of Tom Bombadil and the scouring of the Shire to their places in the tale.

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Another principal difference between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings derives from Tolkien’s distinct approaches to the presentation of the narrative. Where in the texts for The Silmarillion there is little attempt made to represent the viewpoint of the characters themselves – the exceptions, such as Beren and Túrin, being very much the exception – in the more conventional novelistic passages of The Lord of the Rings the perspectives adopted are much more varied, and demanded a distinctive approach to the musical styles. This clearly applies most importantly to the reported narratives which form such a considerable part of the text of The Lord of the Rings and present such an obstacle to traditional dramatic methods of presentation. Some of these, such as Gandalf’s narration of his battle with the Balrog and subsequent resurrection, fall much in line with standard operatic narrations of the kind that have become familiar since the days of Wagner; and indeed, some of the examples in Tolkien seek to avoid any threat of monotony by splitting the narrative text between two characters – such as both Pippin and Merry taking turns to describe the fall of Isengard, or Gimli and Legolas similarly telling of Aragorn’s march to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

But there are other examples in the score of The Lord of the Rings where the narrative is presented as if in flashback while retaining the personality of the narrator in the description itself. The most prominent of these is Gandalf’s account of his debate with Saruman in Isengard, where the character of the latter is clearly established by virtue of his quite distinctive style of declamation (a subject to which I will return later). But there are many other occasions where the character delivering the narration also has a clearly personal perspective: Aragorn on the summit of Mount Mindolluin, Treebeard singing of his realm of Fangorn, the farewell to Lórien and Galadriel’s Namarië (seen entirely from Frodo’s point of view), Legolas longing for the sea, and so on. In every case the music stands slightly apart from the main narrative, often employing distinctive thematic or harmonic material to emphasise the distinction. Galadriel’s farewell, for example, adopts Tolkien’s own modal declamation rather than the Gondolinesque textures that have characterised the realm of Lothlórien heretofore.

Closely related to this issue is the transmigration of musical themes and motives, an extremely complex matter which it would be impossible to explore at other than exhaustive length. When, for example, Faramir talks of the fascination of the men of Númenor with their antiquity, a new theme (originally derived, like that of Beren’s farewell in The Silmarillion, from my Three Songs of Faith) emerges, characterised by mediaeval open organum fifths moving in contrary motion. He later recalls the theme when describing the passage of the Moon over Middle-Earth and the mountain slopes of Mindolluin. But then the theme is taken up, initially by Gandalf, to emphasise the historical background and origins of the Númenorean realms and Gondor in particular, and soon becomes closely allied with the idea of those traditions in the Houses of the Dead in Minas Tirith. They emerge again in full force as Faramir issues the proclamation of Aragorn as King, harkening back to old prescriptions and titles; and then form a background to Aragorn’s own considerations of the future of his own realm and he talks to Gandalf on the slopes of Mindolluin and looks out in his turn upon Middle-Earth.

There are other examples. When Aragorn sings of Gil-galad to the hobbits under Weathertop (his song of Beren and Lúthien having of course been thoroughly explored in The Silmarillion) he not only generates another theme to add to his already well-established portfolio, but also underlines his link to Rivendell, the Elvish refuge originally established under the rule of Gil-galad and now governed by Elrond as the son of Eärendil of Gondolin. Themes from Gondolin now combine with the new Gil-galad melody to provide a further rich source of material for the description of the Hidden Valley (in addition to the other pre-existing material carried forward from The Hobbit), and that for Gil-galad then further expands its remit to cover the claims of Aragorn himself to the kingship.

These are but two instances of occasions when the close thematic argument of The Silmarillion is further stretched. I have already mentioned the parallels between the Hidden Realms of Gondolin and Lothlórien which are emphasised by the derivation of the orchestral descriptions of the latter from the purely choral hymn to the Gates of Summer heard in The Fall of Gondolin. The Elven kingdoms and their inhabitants of course reflect these further. Arwen, already described in Tolkien in terms which underline her parallels with Lúthien, takes over one of the latter’s principal themes as her own on her very first appearance before The Council of Elrond, and it happily forms a contrapuntal unit with Aragorn’s own ‘Strider’ theme (first heard at the end of Tom Bombadil and receiving definitive form during The Prancing Pony). Moreover Arwen brings her inheritance with her to Gondor; her union with Aragorn is accompanied by the wedding march from The Fall of Gondolin, now happily heard in combination with the ‘Strider’ theme and finally concluding with Frodo’s apostrophe to the night. It will be seen that the precise description and nomenclature of these evolving themes, which was generally possible in The Silmarillion, becomes increasingly difficult under these circumstances.

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Results of these considerations

One example must perforce suffice here; the whole of the chapter The Steward and the King, extending from the Song of the Eagle (written in 1969) to the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen, is condensed in the film to a single scene of some five minutes in which only Aragorn’s speech in Quenya is actually delivered in the actual words written by Tolkien. In the ‘musical chapter’ we not only hear the song of the Eagle developed as part of the coronation scene itself, and the return of the wedding music from The Fall of Gondolin now transfigured in the same manner that Frodo describes in his summons to blessing on the night (his speech on the subject concludes the scene); but we also hear the lengthy philosophical debate between Gandalf and Aragorn regarding the future development of the world and of the realm of Men in particular. And the discovery on the mountain of the scion of the Tree returns us musically past the era of Gondolin to the second scene of Fëanor, with the theme associated with the Two Trees finally reappearing after its age-long absence as part of a complete structure lasting nearly half an hour. A more detailed analysis of the music structure of this scene perhaps serve to illustrate the degree of complexity involved, where musical material written as far back as 1969 is developed and merged with other and later themes to form a newly unified structure.

The opening 1969 Song of the Eagle stands almost alone in all of the Lord of the Rings material, in that it has no thematic cross-references to the rest of the cycle (although the opening bars were later developed as part of the earlier passage leading to the scene on the Field of Cormallen). However immediately after it reaches its climax, now scored for solo voice (either soprano or tenor) and chorus behind the scenes, we are presented with some entirely new material associated with the proclamation of Aragorn’s title before the Gates of Mordor a couple of hours earlier. This is turn leads to a coronation procession where other themes associated with Gondor are presented in combinations with the theme of Aragorn himself (as written in the 1970s and heard as part of the song Strider) and the theme of Lúthien from Beren and Lúthien, which has already been adopted by Arwen herself during her appearance in Rivendell during The Fellowship of the Ring. These two themes are interwoven with each other here, as they were then; but they are then further presented in counterpoint with the Gondorian march originally associated with Boromir, the opening bars of the Song of the Eagle, and the ‘Gates of Mordor’ fanfare. Over all this appears an entirely new theme, which will later become associated with the new Kingdom. The entry of Gandalf and the hobbits brings back their own motifs as originally sketched back in 1967, and heard here almost exactly in the same form as then; over which Ioreth chats busily to her companion, explaining her own part in proceedings and introducing her own musical material from The Houses of Healing.

Faramir steps forward to surrender his staff of office. The solemn theme now introduced is, as already mentioned, a sort of mediaeval organum (set in parallel open fifths) and first heard during his description of the antiquity of Gondor in Henneth Annûn; it formed, in full brass augmentation, the introduction to the chapter Minas Tirith; and here, complete with a bass in contrary motion (and also harmonised in open fifths) it brings a suitably mediaeval and ceremonial tone to the proceedings. Faramir then, after his title has been restored to him by Aragorn, sets out a long description of the latter’s heritage and rights to the kingship. At this point a positive phantasmagoria of thematic references erupts: no fewer than eleven previously heard thematic motives concentrated into a contrapuntal web extending over a mere 27 bars – two of these themes, those of Eärendil and Arda itself, originate from appearances in The Silmarillion. And it is to The Fall of Gondolin that Aragorn now turns as he sings the words of Elendil on his arrival in Middle-Earth: singing in Quenya, while the chorus murmurs the Westron/English translation in the background and the orchestra turns to the theme of Men as the Second Children of Ilúvatar, taking the form it assumed in the closing section of Scene Seven of The Fall of Gondolin describing the union of Tuor and Idril.

The final section of the coronation itself turns back to the mediaeval ceremony of the ‘antique’ Minas Tirith theme, now combined in harmonic union with that of Gandalf and yet another appearance of hobbit material originally written in 1972 but heard most recently in the Lord of the Rings when Sam rescued Frodo from the Tower of Cirith Ungol. And, as Gandalf sets the crown on Aragorn’s head, he simultaneously reveals himself as the Emissary of the Valar with the theme of Ilúvatar himself appearing soaring above the texture and looking back to the very opening of Fëanor and the creation of the world. The triumphant return of the Song of the Eagle then brings the scene to a close, evoking the sound of an organ (although the church organ finds no place anywhere in either of the cycles based on The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings).

The music now introduced from The Fall of Gondolin, however, continues to make its presence felt during the second scene of the chapter, where Gandalf and Aragorn on the mountain tops contemplate the future history of Middle-Earth. After the mediaeval harmonies of the Minas Tirith theme, now transformed into a higher and more mysterious sphere (with counterpoints derived from the Númenor theme familiar from both The Silmarillion and Akallabêth) Gandalf contemplates the coming of the Fourth Age in music already associated with the Mission of the Istari; but when Aragorn raises the question of his own mortality, the music veers back to the themes of the Second Children of Ilúvatar as heard in Scene Seven of The Fall of Gondolin; and it is to this source that the musical development now turns. As in the original Gondolin appearance, where the theme of the Two Trees (dating back to Fëanor) gradually emerged from the texture, so here the same material now gains in triumph as Aragorn discovers the sapling of the Tree of Gondor; and the closing phrases of his apostrophe to the new sign of hope acts as an apotheosis to the love duet between Tuor and Idril in the earlier work. At this point, Tolkien’s text tells us, when the old Tree is uprooted it is laid to rest in Rath Dinen; here, as a symbol of the healing which the new Tree brings, the violin melody associated with the Houses of Healing is heard for the last time before a quiet brass echo of the Minas Tirith theme.

And the links between the music of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are established even more securely in the third scene of the chapter, which constitutes in effect an extended wedding procession for Aragorn and Arwen. It is heralded by Glorfindel blowing his trumpet, both motives already established in his earlier appearances during Flight to the Ford and The Council of Elrond, and then moves into other already-heard musical material which in Rivendell had already foreshadowed the union of the couple – employing Aragorn’s ‘Strider’ theme (based on the song written in 1971) in conjunction with the ‘Lúthien’ theme which Arwen appropriated from his ancestress, who had herself originally introduced in her hymn of praise to the nightingales in Beren and Lúthien where the name ‘Tinúviel’ which Aragorn applied to Arwen made its original appearance. The sound of near and distant bells also echoes the wedding march from The Fall of Gondolin, but now the atmosphere of the music is nocturnal rather than illuminated by the glittering light of day. When the principal theme from the central section of the Gondolin wedding march does appear in full orchestral panoply, it settles over the whole of the ending of the scene as an illustration of Frodo’s words to Gandalf as Arwen enters the City. This is not a triumphal wedding march, but a celebration of a nightfall which is however not devoid of hope; and as the procession ascends into the citadel of the city, the three sets of bells – small, medium and large – familiar from The Fall of Gondolin are enhanced by a halo of reverberation from celesta, harp harmonics and vibraphone.

The treatment of the action and narrative sequences

Quite apart from any other considerations, the medium of music is least well suited (beyond the provision of simple ‘background’) to action sequences of the kind in which the cinematic medium excels. What it can however do is underline the emotional impact of the drama, and also provide a commentary which can indeed supply ‘background’ in a manner that is inaccessible to any other artform. Both these options were explored in the existing film adaptations; the Rosenmann score for the earlier Bakshi cartoon adopted standard ‘action’ music, while Howard Shore for Jackson more imaginatively wrote music that consciously went against the screen images often featuring solo soprano voices (it should perhaps be observed that much of the composition of these “musical chapters” in fact preceded the appearance of either of the films). It seems that, quite apart from the inability of stage production to match cinematic possibilities in depiction of realism, that there is little further to be explored in either of these directions. But there are alternatives available.

Two brief examples: when Gandalf describes the prophecy regarding the doom of the Lord of the Nazgûl, the orchestral accompaniment in the ‘musical chapter’ inserts a brief reference to the theme already heard and associated with Glorfindel, so that the listener is reminded of the identity of the one who originally made the prediction. Or then, when Gandalf confronts Saruman and breaks his staff, the authority by which he is able to do so is emphasised by the appearance of the Ilúvatar theme from the very opening of Fëanor and thereafter throughout The Silmarillion, leading to a transformation of the ‘Gandalf the Grey’ theme by modulation into a new key as ‘Gandalf the White’ – a musical effect which in its own turn has already been anticipated at the moment of his return in Fangorn. These are subtleties, but they should be audible even to a musically untrained but attentive listener. Such cross-references reach their apogee at the eruption of Mount Doom, emphasised by the theme of Ilúvatar rising seismically up from below a whole fragmenting battery of themes associated with Sauron and the Nazgûl.

The depiction of nature

There are also extensive possibilities available for the music to depict the landscapes of Tolkien in the form of miniature tone-poems, examples of which had already been seen in The Silmarillion is such passages as The Haven of the Swans in Fëanor, the depiction of Menegroth in the prelude to Scene Four in Beren and Lúthien, or The forest of Brethil at dawn in The Children of Húrin. Quite apart from the representative Elvish themes in the chapters describing Rivendell and Lórien, there are similar sections to provide impressions of the Great River or the Black Gate of Mordor. One such passage, originally introduced by Aragorn when he talks of Weathertop (and indeed employed in an extended version at the beginning of Flight to the Ford) is then taken up as yet another of his own themes by Aragorn, returning for instance as a conclusion to the Last Debate in The Houses of Healing. Many of these miniature depictions of landscape also feature elements from The Silmarillion, with themes associated with both Sauron and Morgoth heavily featured in the lengthy prelude to The Black Gate opens.

In a curious reversal of this procedure, the storm sequence which opens Cirith Ungol was originally sketched back in 1969 during half an hour on a late-night tube journey in London. Although written for just this context, it was heavily revised for Scene Three in The Children of Húrin and then re-emerged in The Fall of Gondolin as well. Another such backward traversal occurred with the extended melody heard in The Lord of the Rings at the beginning of The Grey Havens, where the context was even more complicated.

Some eight years later, at the same time that I was writing the Akallabêth, I was also at work on a symphony, based on the programmatic outline of the opening of The Silmarillion as published in 1977 and which resulted in 1979 in the completion of my Third Symphony Ainulindalë. The opening of that symphony, describing the creation of the world, reappears in its entirety as the prologue to Fëanor, the first of the epic scenes in my Silmarillion cycle; but the same theme I wish to examine in more detail now comes slightly later in the dramatic series of events, with the creation of the Elves and their awakening by the Waters of Cuiviénen. This theme, which as we have seen originated in the 1972 setting of The Sea Bell and which we can conveniently call at this stage The Awakening of the Elves, takes the form of an extended melody nearly two minutes in duration and building to a sonorous climax.

But, like the Elves themselves, the theme displayed a propensity to migrate. When the action returned to Middle-Earth in Beren and Lúthien, the original theme established itself as a specific representation of the Hidden Kingdom of Doriath. Obviously that melody has no dramatic place in the plot of The Lord of the Rings. But then, nearly at the end of the action, it reappears at full length when Arwen talks to Frodo about the possibility that he may take her place on the last ship leaving Middle-Earth for Valinor. The realms of the Elves in Middle-Earth are ending, but they continue to survive in the Undying Realm, and this is the vision that Arwen holds out to Frodo. And in the very final chapter, The Grey Havens, Frodo takes up the same theme, now seen as representative of the Elven-Kingdoms as a whole – at first in his singing of the first part of Tolkien’s poem The Sea Bell, which tells of his despair of ever achieving rest. And it is this same Doriath theme, now come full circle, which once again describes the Elves abandonment of Middle-Earth and departure to the West, as the Ring-bearers ride to the Grey Havens. This is just one of many examples where, over the course of a musical structure which now extends over some thirty hours of music, themes will emerge and disappear over a period of time assuming changing perspectives on the action – not only in the shape of symphonic development of the material, but also in underlining dramatic and emotional parallels.

More on motivic development

While the music for my cycle of epic scenes from The Silmarillion displayed a slow evolution of thematic material – from the densely chromatic opening chords of Fëanor to the multiplicity of motifs associated with the Valar, the Eldar, Men and the other populations of Tolkien’s Middle-earth – that for the parallel cycle of musical chapters from The Lord of the Rings depends to a very large degree on the assumption that the motifs of The Silmarillion are taken for granted as a background to the dramatic development, and only slowly reveal new musical facets as the action develops. It therefore makes no sense whatsoever to consider the material of The Lord of the Rings in isolation from The Silmarillion, even when in the actual course of the compositional process music written for the former during the 1970s found itself adapted and reinterpreted in the latter from the 1980s onward. It seems therefore more germane, and certainly more readily comprehensible for the listener, to treat the various thematic elements in the chapters of The Lord of the Rings in the context of their initial appearances in The Silmarillion, making reference to the descriptive system employed in the musical analysis of that work and then adding further citations from the score as required. The alternative involves the very real danger that certain passages, such as the ‘last debate’ or the coronation of Aragorn, with their close contrapuntal intersplicing of a whole variety of individual themes, might degenerate into a complex mathematical series of numbered themes which would bewilder the reader of this analysis and (even more dangerously) convey an entirely incorrect formalistic structure to a freely evolving musical tapestry. And the most comprehensive manner to avoid this, therefore, is to treat the thematic structure of both the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings works in terms of the peoples, locations and events they describe.

While the opening prelude of Fëanor, derived in turn from my third symphony Ainulindalë, laid out for the hearer a whole series of brief (and not so brief) themes depicting the creation of the Valar and their functions, the very more realistic nature of The Lord of the Rings inevitably means that the mythological element is distanced. The theme representing Ilúvatar through the medium of his vicegerent the Elder King, which opens the musical development of Fëanor and is a constant presence throughout The Silmarillion, does not even make the shadow of an appearance until the opening music itself returns to describe the resurrection of Gandalf as the White Wizard in The Riders of Rohan. It is clear however from the music here that it is the intervention of Ilúvatar himself that provides the impetus for the action, with even the densely chromatic opening chords from Fëanor (that is, the primeval chaos before creation) making a solitary appearance; and thereafter the same theme will return at climactic moments of crisis, as when Gandalf reveals his power to break Saruman’s staff (in The Voice of Saruman), during his dispute about his mission with Denethor (in Minas Tirith) or in the passage where he overpowers the Mouth of Sauron (in The Black Gate opens). It makes its final almost ghostly appearance immediately following the death of Saruman, when the wraith of the slain wizard makes an appeal for the clemency of the Valar, and is dissolved by the wind blowing from the west (in the closing bars of The Scouring of the Shire). In The Silmarillion there also evolves a second demonstration of the power of Ilúvatar in references to the Downfall of Númenor, where the original theme evolves a much more violent tone, and this also reappears in The Lord of the Rings with reference to the defeat of Sauron both in the Downfall of Númenor and in the overthrow of the realm of Mordor itself; so that when Faramir, beholding the latter from a distance (in The Field of Cormallen), says that it reminds him of Númenor, that resemblance is not only a simple verbal reference but a musical one as well.

Other cosmological considerations

The final musical motive from the Fëanor prelude, that identified with Arda as the created realm of Middle-Earth, recurs of course incessantly throughout The Silmarillion. As a depiction of the primaeval planet it has inevitably less significance in The Lord of the Rings; but its opening phrase, with its distinctive fall from the major to the subdominant minor, has already figured in the piano rondo Akallabêth in connection with the fall of Númenor as well as the destruction of one of the Silmarils in The War of Wrath; and this isolated phrase returns at another planet-changing climax, the final destruction of the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. As we have seen, it occurs again as a symbol of triumph when Faramir refers to Aragorn as “victorious”; but before then it has already undergone a major transmutation based on its symbolism as an element of the earth itself. As they prepare to march on Isengard, the Ents gather strength from their roots in the ground to generate a rhythmic variation on the same chord progression; and at the end of The King of the Golden Hall, this is suddenly revealed, as they contemplate the tower of Orthanc by moonlight, as a high fluttering figuration on flutes and celesta. It now becomes a theme associated with the enchantments of technology and magic – it sparks off an explosion as Saruman’s forces demolish the walls at Helm’s Deep, and then becomes attached to the destructive forces associated with the Lord of the Nazgul. Nevertheless, its prime function is to illustrate the machinations of Saruman himself.

Saruman is, as Tom Shippey has pointed out, the most modern character in the whole of The Lord of the Rings: a definitively twentieth-century figure as opposed to, say, the idealised late nineteenth-century Victorian Diamond Jubilee Shire of the Hobbits. As such his musical language is inevitably different from anything else in either The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings. His elegant use of the language and rounded periods of the Enlightenment are reflected in a slightly florid baroque style; but it is not the natural elegance of Voltaire, but the cultivated double-speak of the Orwellian demagogue, and the baroque style is that of Stravinskian neo-classicism rather than Mozartian cantilena. There are moments, too, when he allows his cultivated style to slip – either in moments of anger and tension, or when he is trying to daunt the hobbits with the threat of his latent power – and at these moments the elegant decoration of his vocal line suddenly reverts to a more brutally syllabic style which is noted even by his listeners – “they shuddered at the change,” Tolkien notes. Wormtongue too, as the creature of Saruman, adopts his more florid style of delivery when addressing Théoden in Edoras, and it is only later that he reverts to a more natural line when he is driven by a sense of increasing servility and desperation. At the end of The Scouring of the Shire, when Saruman is reduced to a sense of futility and despondency by Frodo’s proffered mercy, his vocal line shrinks in an almost Oedipal fashion; but this is no lux facta est. Saurman’s own aspiring theme is now inexorably and grotesquely corrupted by the chromatically distorted ‘Sharkey’ theme heard earlier in the chapter; and as he vents his frustration on Wormtongue, the one object left on which he can still exercise coercion, and the latter cuts his throat, the themes of Isengard are heard for one last time clattering to the ground in ruin.

But that, as Tolkien shows in a very late addition to the book, is not quite the end of the story. It is clear that Saruman still has one remaining option; he can return his physical body to the One, in the hope that he may be reincarnated in a new existence, as has already happened to Gandalf earlier in the drama. But whereas Gandalf, in his narration of his spiritual journey, has made it clear that his voyage involved a return to the primordial chaos before Creation – indeed, to the very opening of Fëanor in The Silmarillion – Saruman in his pride and wilfulness is not willing to abase himself so far. He seeks for salvation from the Valar, and the shadow that rises from his dead body makes itself manifest in the music heard somewhat later in the same passage of Fëanor, when the Valar themselves have already come into being. Without that basal structure the shadow of Saruman is simply dissipated by the wind, at the same moment when Gandalf’s new incarnation as the White Rider had come into being. All that is left is dust – “fragments of skin” – which are left to scatter with the last remnants of the Isengard musical material, which are themselves the isolated fragments of the original Arda theme from the Fëanor prelude.

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The undying Elves

The theme associated with Rivendell was one of the very first motifs written for the Tolkien cycle back in 1966 but reached a more-or-less definitive form in the first interlude in Over Hill and Under Hill in The Hobbit. It is repeated at full length twice in The Lord of the Rings, in both instances before the hobbits arrive at the hidden valley, but it also returns in more developed form during the feast in The Council of Elrond. The descending woodwind phrases in the theme later expanded into the music given to the Elves in the Ainulindalë symphony and then in the opening scenes of Fëanor where they even preceded the melody associated with Doriath (which has already been discussed). As also has been already noted, the music for the Elven-kingdom of Lothlórien is closely derived from the Elvish chant in The Fall of Gondolin. So the greater part of the material associated with the Elves in The Lord of the Rings derives directly from the Silmarillion scores, the only exception being the theme given to Legolas which is an exact copy of that assigned to his father Thranduil in The Hobbit (but also shares the descending phrases of the Rivendell theme). And in the closing bars of The Grey Havens we return to the theme associated with the bearers of the three Elven-Rings in The War of Wrath, as they depart across the seas to Valinor. That theme has already appeared in The Shadow of the Past, both when Sam and Ted Sandyman discuss the sailing of the Elves and when Gildor and his followers encounter the hobbits in the woods of the Shire on their own journey westward. In The Grey Havens the theme is set against the turn of the melody of Athelas! as a symbol of healing.

Two other themes from The Hobbit, both of them depicting elven artifacts, should be mentioned here: Bilbo’s sword Sting, with its characteristic repeated notes, and his coat of elven mail with its glittering scoring for tuned percussion. Both remain substantially unchanged even on repetition and when surrounded by the evils of Mordor, rather like the star-glass of Eärendil (to which discussion will return shortly).

There is one entirely new theme in The Lord of the Rings which first appears at full length during the interlude following Gandalf’s nomination of Sam as Frodo’s companion when he leaves the Shire. It consists of four phrases which taken as a whole form a description of the White Council, the body of Elves and wizards formed to combat Sauron. The theme will become that associated more specifically with the Fellowship of the Ring from Farewell to Rivendell, but it is also noteworthy because it incorporates within it the theme of Gandalf the Grey (already familiar from The Hobbit) and Saruman the White. Both of these will frequently detach themselves from their context to represent the two individual wizards and their conflicts, and the theme for Gandalf will as already noted undergo further transformation following his resurrection as Gandalf the White. Nonetheless the theme of the White Council and the Fellowship of the Ring as its representative and successor will continue to be heard in its original form until the Fellowship itself is brought to an end by Aragon during the chapter Homeward Bound.

Another theme which will make its final appearance in the same scene is that associated with the Palantir. This is first heard at the beginning of The voice of Saruman and then reappears frequently during the following scenes, usually distinguished by the colouring of the vibraphone. With its characteristic rising tones at the end it invariably leads into further thematic developments.

The mortal themes

The theme associated with Men as the Second Children of the One, which originated in my Ainulindalë symphony, first appears in Fëanor when the title character looks forward to the eventual usurpation of the Elves by their younger kindred during his speech to the Noldor in Tirion. Thereafter it grows in importance throughout The Silmarillion. It appears during the final bars of the tragedy of The Children of Húrin and at greater length forms the principal material for the duet between Tuor and Idril in The Fall of Gondolin. It makes its final full appearance in The War of Wrath when Eärendil and Elwing discuss whether they wish to be adjudged as Elves or amongst Mankind, but thereafter it is only heard in the guise of its opening phrase during the forging of the Ring at the words “nine for mortal Men doomed to die.” It is not therefore surprising that in The Lord of the Rings its initial appearances are restricted to those occasions when the Ring is discussed. But then it suddenly re-emerges at the climax of Aragorn’s coronation, when the newly crowned King recalls the words of his ancestors singing in Quenya (with the chorus providing a simultaneous translation); and then it dominates the later part of the following scene already discussed, where Aragorn laments his mortality and the evanescence of his inheritance; and it blossoms fully as he finds the scion of the Two Trees which heralds the future of his posterity, emerging into a statement that echoes the ecstasy of his ancestors Idril and Tuor and looks forward to his own forthcoming union with his beloved Arwen. It is not heard again during The Lord of the Rings; but it does return during his dialogue with Arwen at the time of Aragorn’s own death in the appendix scene (added some years after the completion of the remainder of the score).

Another theme associated with the destiny of Men in The Silmarillion is that originally conceived for the House of Hador in The Children of Húrin which subsequently became the principal theme for the kingdom of Númenor (and formed the principal theme of the piano rondo Akallabêth). This extended grandiose melody returns in The Lord of the Rings much earlier, in association both with the Númenorean realm in exile founded in Gondor and with the aspiration for the refounded kingdom which will be established in The Return of the King. It reappears in its most triumphant guise as Aragorn leads the Fellowship past the pillars of the Argonath, and then with added vainglorious trumpet fanfares as Boromir envisages the forces of Gondor which he will lead in battle wielding the power of the Ring – and here it parallels the similar passage in the Akallabêth where Ar-Pharazôn is seduced by the wiles of Sauron; in both instances the bass line is subverted by the chromatic movement associated with the wiles of the Dark Lord. It is not until Aragorn is finally established as king of the reunited kingdom and bids farewell to the Fellowship at Isengard in Homeward Bound that the Númenor theme is heard in full splendour for the last time.

But before then it has also generated a more subdued version in mournful mode (which had been briefly pre-figured in The War of Wrath as Eärendil flew over Middle-earth and heard the cries of lamentation from below). It is first heard here in The window on the west as Faramir describes the downfall of Gondor as a “springless autumn” and is soon adumbrated by Denethor’s vision of the end of his stewardship and realm. This pessimistic outlook, quoted by Gandalf in his report to the debate of the captains in The Houses of Healing, underpins later dialogues between Faramir and Éowyn and then between Gandalf and Aragorn during The Steward and the King. And it is this version of the theme, too, which Arwen adumbrates when she pleads with Aragorn before his death.

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Faramir’s first employment of the pessimistic Númenor theme is followed immediately by another theme associated with the antiquity of Gondor, and this is entirely new to The Lord of the Rings. As discussed already although it is first heard as a distant whisper descriptive of “childless lords musing on heraldry” and “moonset over Gondor” it later becomes strident as Gandalf bears Pippin on horseback to Minas Tirith; indeed it opens the chapter of that title at the beginning of The Return of the King. It becomes dominant as Denethor asserts his power, and represents the lineage of the kings and stewards in the Houses of the Dead; and Faramir takes it up formally during the coronation of Aragorn, before it returns to describe the mountain above Mindolluin where he and Gandalf confer about the future. In The Lord of the Rings it only recurs once more, its opening phrase reduced to a whisper, as the withered Tree of Gondor is “laid to rest in Ras Dínen” – but it will again return in the Aragorn and Arwen appendix where indeed it will open and close the music as a sort of antique epigraph and postscript.

Aragorn himself has a whole family of themes, all of which are heard exclusively in The Lord of the Rings and which appear during the reading of Gandalf’s letter where the material is drawn from the early song Strider. These generally revolve around a rising scale with a rhythmic fall in the final notes, but there is also a middle section at the words “from the ashes a fire shall be woken” which leads to another characteristic phrase at “renewed shall be sword that was broken”. The material of the song, heard twice in close succession in The Prancing Pony and prefigured when the hobbits see their vision at the end of Tom Bombadil, forms the basis also for the prelude to Flight to the Ford which can be viewed as a portrait of Strider the Ranger of the Dúnedain; the material returns in full as he is joined by his kinsfolk in Rohan in the opening scene of The Passing of the Grey Company, and of course at many other points. But immediately after we hear the song during the reading of Gandalf’s letter, another new extensive melody emerges which is initially associated with Weathertop, the fortress built by Aragorn’s ancestors on the road to Rivendell. It returns twice at full length both before and after the scene of the attack on that fortress, but it then becomes inextricably associated with Aragorn himself especially when he foresees the disaster which will befall Gandalf in the Mines of Moria in the closing pages of Farewell to Rivendell.

The Strider material also returns during the prelude to The Passing of the Grey Company, where is forms the middle section of another of Aragorn’s melodies, this time that associated with the Riders of Rohan which he sang to the melody Where now is the horse and the rider? during The King of the Golden Hall. Before then he had also delivered another salutation to the southern kingdoms of men in his paean Gondor! Gondor! (immediately following on a full statement of the Númenor theme) which is then taken up by the orchestra during Minas Tirith when Gandalf leads Pippin into the city to meet Denethor, and returns as a symbol of the reunited kingdom in Aragorn and Arwen where it reaches an apotheosis as a description of their “years of bliss.” And yet another new theme derives from a song by Aragorn, this time his folk-like ballad of the fall of Gil-Galad delivered to the hobbits under Weathertop. This first reappears during the scenes in Rivendell during The Council of Elrond but eventually becomes another element in Aragorn’s armoury; and it is this theme, now transformed to regal splendour, which accompanies his proclamation of his ancestry at the end of The Passing of the Grey Company and his arrival at the battle in Pelennor Fields.

The rising theme associated in The Silmarillion with Eärendil as a star and beacon of hope also returns in The Lord of the Rings, at first when Frodo sees the ring on Galadriel’s finger as a star and then when she presents him with the star-glass containing the light of Eärendil’s star itself. It continues to represent the hope which it symbolises throughout; and during the iconic scene in Mordor where Sam looks up at the star in the sky, the music associated with Eärendil in The War of Wrath returns at full length during an extended orchestral interlude immediately before the arrival at Mount Doom. Of similar type are the theme associated with Glorfindel (first heard in the final scene of Flight to the Ford but recurring thereafter) and the reforged sword Andúril, which also returns in conjunction with the phrase from the Strider song “renewed shall be sword that was broken” most notably when it is blasted out by trombones immediately after the sword is reforged.

One other theme in The Silmarillion specifically associated with mortal men does return in The Lord of the Rings, but in a somewhat transmuted guise. The rising theme of Beren himself, which had already been subjected to a whole series of rhythmic permutations in Beren and Lúthien, is now taken up and extended into a more warlike and aggressive form which becomes symbolic of the military might of Gondor, and is employed as such by Boromir during The Council of Elrond and more forcefully when he tries to take the Ring from Frodo in The Breaking of the Fellowship. Beregond among others also evokes the theme when he describes the preparations for war in Minas Tirith, and the second part of the theme (now detached from its Beren-derived opening) becomes symbolic of the power wielded by Denethor and the forces of Gondor headed by Imrahil. This is closely related in its turn to two themes associated with Faramir as captain of the armies (both heard for the first time during the prelude to The Window on the West) which are taken up during his wooing of Éowyn and combined with a third theme originally associated with Boromir but which then becomes symbolic of the whole House of the Stewards and forms the principal theme for the rejoicing in The Field of Cormallen before it is taken up into the coronation ceremony in The Steward and the King.

Before we turn to the themes associated with the Rohirrim, there are a number of other themes associated with the realms of the Númenoreans in exile which should be mentioned. The sword motif associated with Andúril is transformed in The Black Gate opens into a fanfare during which the heralds proclaim the title of Aragorn as King of Gondor; and at the same time a version of the same theme in contrary motion is heard, which will eventually become associated more specifically with Arwen as Queen of Gondor and the offer of healing which she makes to Frodo following the destruction of the Ring. The latter returns at the opening of The Grey Havens as a counterpoint to the theme of the elven kindred, and here it is combined with a second theme of healing which first makes itself apparent as a representation of athelas in The Houses of Healing before it manifests itself as an incipient love theme as Faramir makes his first tentative approach to Éowyn. It also expands into the more extended lyrical setting of Come Athelas! as sung by the Herb Master, and it is this melodic form which returns towards the end of The Grey Havens where it combines with another theme associated with the Undying Lands – the principal melody from the epilogue in The War of Wrath, which has already been briefly reprised during The Shadow of the Past but not heard for some twelve hours.

The music associated with the kingdom of Rohan is entirely new to the Lord of the Rings scores, with no antecedents in the themes for either The Silmarillion or The Hobbit. The principal theme, with its plunging octaves and fifths, is heard at the outset of The Two Towers although it has been briefly twice prefigured at the point of Gandalf’s escape from Orthanc (firstly in a dream sequence in Tom Bombadil and then in the wizard’s own narrative during The Council of Elrond). This theme will recur many times throughout the remainder of the score, but almost from the first is underpinned by a repetitive galloping theme like the hoofbeats of horses, often in a characteristic rhythmic pattern of 3+3+2. This has been heard before during The Fellowship of the Ring to represent the horses of Glorfindel, Gandalf and indeed the Black Riders; and during the opening chapter of The Two Towers it finds itself also in combination with the theme of the Orcs from The Silmarillion, turning their original 4/4 syncopations into an uneasy 12/8 ostinato that underpins the chase across the plains of Rohan. When the pursuers are in their turn overtaken by Éomer, the latter brings with him a whole raft of new themes including his own variant on the Rohan theme (with a falling third replacing the original fourths), and a more heroic rising theme which will eventually become associated with Théoden as both the newly reinvigorated King of Rohan and then the charge of the Rohirrim themselves during the battle of the Pelennor Fields. Other themes also appear during these chapters; firstly a rising and questing theme which in outline is an inversion of that of Théoden, and associated specifically with his sister-daughter Éowyn which remains basically unchanged through its encounters with both the Witch-King and later again with Faramir. Secondly there is an exciting descending theme which first appears as the Rohirrim set forth to war at the end of The King of the Golden Hall, which recurs both during the following battle scenes, and then extended with an air of despair as Éowyn vainly pleads with Aragorn to avoid the Paths of the Dead. There are other motifs also in this group, including a brusque plunging theme for Háma, a rising inquisitive fragmentary series of phrases representing Wormtongue, and a free-floating rising theme for Shadowfax (the latter always associated with the characteristic 3+3+2 galloping rhythm) which has been briefly prefigured during Gandalf’s narrative during The Council of Elrond.

Most importantly of all, as Théoden summons his warriors to battle, a marching theme is launched which will represent the Rohirrim in warfare which has several novel features. Unlike most modern military marches in 4/4 it sets out in a swinging 3/4 metre, but at the same time the underpinning rhythm is three-against-four or two-against-three, to represent the irregularity of hoofbeats beneath the precision. This reaches a positive climax of conflicting rhythms not only in the choral Ride of the Rohirrim which opens the chapter The siege of Gondor, but also in the ensuing chapter set against the strict 2/2 rhythm of the march of the men of Harad at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields (which in turns derives from the plodding folk-like setting of Oliphaunt in The Two Towers). In the same scene the choral narrative describing the battle, in a stern 4/4 narrative, is set against a slow funereal rhythm which once again follows the 3+3+2 pattern. And the funeral march for Théoden in Homeward Bound takes the same pattern, slowed down ever further, and counterpoints it with a whole series of contradictory pulses in the choral and brass writing. As such the music associated with the Rohirrim is always contrasted with that for the Númenorean kingdoms with their more regular military formations.

The Haradrim’s Oliphaunt song does in fact break into triple rhythm at one point – although it always returns to its forthright 2/2 – but their allies the Corsairs of Umbar have a more fluid and malevolent style characterised by chromatic movements of chains of diminished sevenths which find themselves into persistent conflict with their old enemies the men of Númenor whose rising theme struggles against them at each cadence. Each of the warring peoples also have their own fanfares and battle calls, mirroring their own musical styles and often totally at odds with everything else in their vicinity.