Pastoral folk or Wagnerian metal – which music best suits Tolkien?

In the last few posts I’ve been exploring the way J R R Tolkien subverted twentieth century literature, creating a whole new form of fantasy – and why The Lord Of The Rings in particular was such a runaway success. Today I’m wrapping the series up with a few thoughts on the way people reacted emotionally – through music.

Yes, like a geeky Tolkien fan I had to pose in the entrance, such as it was – you could circle it, just like the door Aslan made to get rid of the Telmarines in .Prince Caspian’.

Tolkien himself worked with composer and pianist Donald Swann – the musician half of the Flanders and Swann comedy duo – to put some of the many songs from his imaginarium to music, notably ‘The Road Goes Ever On’.

But he wasn’t the only one. In 1968, Swedish composer Bo Hansson wrote a whole album – Music Inspired By The Lord Of The Rings. It basically pioneered the prog-rock concept album, though it wasn’t released outside Sweden for several years. The music was instrumental, largely built around some astonishing tone colours and sounds that Hansson was able to extract from a Hammond B3 electric organ.

In many respects it was of its time, a product of the way the youth generation of the 1960s questioned their world. Today I find it almost unlistenable. But when I heard it in the 1970s I thought it amazing. Looking back, I think Hansson had – conceptually, through music – captured the intersection between the subculture of his time and Tolkien’s mythos. It wasn’t going to work quite as well a generation later.

Other music based on the book was folk-ish or pastoral, again drawing conceptual inspiration from the world of The Shire. But there was far more to LOTR than that. The deeper side of Tolkien’s mythos demanded a different interpretation – darker, more powerful – which emerged in the form of heavy metal during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly from Germany and Scandinavia where Tolkien infused material and related fantasy-driven music became a whole sub-genre dubbed, predictably, ‘heavy mithril’. The pattern was set by the German prog-metal band ‘Blind Guardian’. This is their Nightfall in Middle Earth:

This – and a lot of what followed – was music of Wagnerian proportion in blending brutally heavy metal with orchestra and choir, creating monolithc sound-scapes, all steeped in the same Scandinavian tradition that had influenced Tolkien in the first place. The lyrics were often studded with Tolkien references – typified by Nightwish’s  Wishmaster, where there were explicit call-outs to Lorien and Elbereth.

To me this broad musical response to Tolkien captured the reality of his imaginarium, with its layers of meaning – and particularly the dissonance of the pastoral, homely Hobbits set against huge and heroic symbols of deeper mythology. Pastoral folk-rock or Wagnerian heavy metal? Both are appropriate for Tolkien’s world, I think.

Your thoughts?

This series wraps up with the next and final post – watch this space.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2015