Tolkien Tunes

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Legolas

Tom Bombadil's ode to all those trying to classify him, with his typical bit of rhymey nonsense.

And yet more from one of the greatest bands of all time. This one's for Aragorn.

Underneath a sky of red, there's a storyteller sleeping alone.
He has no face and he has no name and his whereabouts are sort of unknown.

[Boo Radley]

Not necessarily tunes that I might find "Tolkienesque", but (and I feel a roight gormless berk in saying this) I've only just heard about The Tolkien Ensemble.
Why was I never informed about this group? Did I miss a memo, perhaps?

[Galadriel]

Originally Posted by Boo Radley

Why was I never informed about this group? Did I miss a memo, perhaps?

I only found it through Youtube

[Boo Radley]

Which is how I found them. I was looking for the Donald Swan recording and they popped up and I was quite surprised.
And they've been around awhile, too.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

We've discussed the Tolkien Ensemble's music in the past, though perhaps not so recently that you'd have noticed. A search should bring up the pertinent threads.

I suppose the chance of hearing (about) them depends on your location - in Europe, especially here in Germany, they are well known through their popular concert tours. They've played together with orchestras which perform the movie sound track live, at times also with Sir Christopher Lee as narrator. I was privileged to hear their concert in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, and it was wonderful! Christopher Lee's voice is marvelous.

The German Tolkien Society (of which I'm an active member) has close connections to the Ensemble - the founding members, Peter Hall and Caspar Reiff, were our guests of honour and played and sang for us at the annual weekend get-together in 2010. And one of our members who specializes in costuming sewed Hobbit and Elvish dresses for the ladies.

One more bit of interesting information - the Ensemble has good connections to the Danish royal family. Queen Margrethe permitted the use of her well-known LotR illustrations on the cover of the 4-album box which has all of the songs and poems in the book.

Crown Princess Margrethe (now Queen Margrethe II) of Denmark, an accomplished and critically acclaimed painter, was inspired to illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own drawings. In 1977, Queen Margrethe's drawings were published in the Danish translation of the book...
(Wikipedia)

/end excursion to Denmark