My two favorites are "The Breaking of the Fellowship" and "The Great River". They are, to me, the two best out of all three movies.

I absolutly LOVE Into The West, it has to be one of my favourite songs of all time. It is so beautiful, and it really speaks to you.

I've just seen this. Nice link, cheers!

The tune is all English and I quite agree, Irish folk music is a very different thing and this is most definitely NOT Celtic! It's reminiscent of Martin Carthy's Rackabello too, which derives from a Hertfordshire tune.

I'm amused because this is that rare thing to me, something Tolkien says (yes, I know, he's singing, before you point that out, pedants...) which I can understand! I've never been able to understand a word he says normally - I don't speak RP/Queens English and I can't usually understand it very well if it's too 'far back', which is what Tolkien is.

Now there was a bit too much 'Celtic' stuff going on in the film soundtrack for my liking, although luckily Howard Shore mostly avoided it - it's in the songs that it happens sadly. My favourite song by a country mile was Gollum's Song (followed by the Billy Boyd one which was also decent), as I found the others a bit cheesy alas, a bit too much like that New Age stuff you hear in hippy shops ;) The non-vocal tracks were splendid though and the soundtrack was one of my favourite things about the films. My personal favourite being Concerning Hobbits which seemed to pick up some of the English folk music phrasing you can hear in Vaughan-Willams's The Lark Ascending.