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I don't know if the Donald Swann settings can be termed "authoritative." They're, well, Donald Swann. Poppy Lieder-lite, just the sort of thing which might entertain an elderly man born in 1892 who even in his youth found ragtime distasteful!
However, the one really good piece in there, the haunting Namarie, is actually Tolkien. Or at least, he rejected Swann's original tune and hummed out the chant-like theme which Swann adopted- so the old Professor was not without his musical side.
Most of the songs Tolkien put in the book (and, it's often forgotten, they're *songs*) are hobbit-songs, and so it seems to me that the ideal settings should be in the style of genuine English folksong- genuine, and English, not the rather bogus 'Celtic' stuff one so often hears. In fact Tolkien himself intended The Stone Troll to be sung to, and himself sang to, the tune of "The Fox Went Out."
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The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it.
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