J.R.R.Tolkien, Donald Swann & The Road Goes Ever On
An extraordinary archive of manuscripts and letters relating to the songs and poems Tolkien wrote for The Lord of the Rings and the collaboration with Donald Swann which led to the publication of The Road Goes Ever On, containing Tolkien’s original manuscript for the commentary to The Road Goes Ever On and two calligraphic manuscripts in Tengwar of poems from The Lord of the Rings. Introduction
Donald Swann, composer, musician and en- tertainer, most famous for being one half of the comic musical duo, Flanders and Swann was also an avid reader of The Lord of the Rings . He explains how this caused his as- sociation with Tolkien in his foreword to The Road Goes Ever On ,
“After my wife had communicated to me her passion for the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings , we found we were reading them more or less every spring... My wife sug- gested that I copy out some lyrics from the three books and set them to music en route [to Jordan, returning from a tour of Austral- ia]. I had been performing for four months and I had an appetite for composing. That is how the first six of these songs came to be written on a beautiful Steinway grand pi- ano in Ramallah outside Jerusalem... On my return to England the firm of George Allen and Unwin was good enough to give me permission to use the lyrics, and also to put me in touch with Professor Tolkien.”
William Elvin, J.R.R.Tolkien and Donald Swann at the launch party for The Road Goes Ever On in 1968
With that introduction began an association which quickly developed into a warm friendship which would last for the remainder of Tolkien’s life. After their first meeting in late May 1965 it seems Tolkien was pleased, even flattered, to have his songs set to music by Swann, and for the most part approved of the music, but had had a different type of melody in mind for Galadriel’s lament, Namárië, and hummed a Gregorian chant, which Swann developed into the new melody. Almost a year later in the spring of 1966, Swann and the baritone, William Elvin, gave a performance of the songs in Tolkien’s rooms at Merton in celebration of the Tolkiens’ golden wedding anniversary. Later that year, whilst on a USA tour, Swann mentioned the songs to Austin Olney of Houghton Mifflin, who was enthusiastic about the prospect of publishing the works as a song cycle. Whilst Swann’s perspective was mostly musical and Olney’s commercial, Tolkien, whose involvement in this project was to extend well beyond the original composition of the poems, was primarily concerned with language. Language, its expression and development, had been a lifelong fascination for Tolkien both professionally as a philologist and as an author of fiction. The tales of Middle Earth, for which he is now famous, have their genesis in the family of Elvish languages that he began to construct in his teens and developed further in the 1930s, from which grew the history and sociolinguistics which in turn begat the legendarium into which he fitted the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Swann had chosen two poems in Elvish and it quickly became apparent that these would need Tolkien’s assistance with pronunciation and metre, both to aid the composer and any performer. At various points throughout their correspond- ence Tolkien offers instruction for performance and also context for the language and its place in the The Lord of the Rings narrative. This, Tolkien refined and adapted into the essay which makes up the commentary for The Road Goes Ever On , the original manuscript for which is included here.
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