Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

In my first essay after my winter holiday hiatus, I begin a new chapter to Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical where I describe the process of research and producing a hypothetical adaptation of the bestselling book series by British linguist J.R.R. Tolkien. At last, I will begin presenting selections of dialogue and music to accommodate the concept art that I began creating in 2024. Composers commonly make demo recordings of their work using themselves or their friends as the performing artists, from “I’m in the Middle of a Muddle” for the 1950 Disney animation Cinderella sung by middle-aged male songwriters Mack David, Al Hoffman, and Jerry Livingston instead of a peppy young woman like the title character, or an early version of “How Far I’ll Go” for the 2016 Disney animation Moana sung by Broadway star Phillipa Soo, a close friend of its songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, since her voice perfectly matched the protagonist. But before I reveal my own demo reel, I need to explain the framing device surrounding my interpretation of the books.

One of my primary goals of creating this hypothetical animated musical was using a storyline where The Lord of the Rings was clearly a book that existed both in the fantasy world of Middle-earth and in the Real World. As mentioned in “Note on the Shire Records”, the book went through multiple copies: the manuscript written by surviving members of the Fellowship and compiled by Frodo; further editing and compiling by Elanor Gardner Fairbairn and her editorial team to produce the Red Book of Westmarch, which they later copied; a copy containing the Westmarch edits sent to the library in Minas Tirith for editing and appending by Barahir, a grandson of Faramir and Eowyn; a copy containing the Minas Tirith edits sent to the library of the Took in Tuckborough, then run by the great-grandson of Pippin and Sam; the English language translation created by J.R.R. Tolkien during the 1940s and 1950s based on the Tuckborough edition used to create the first edition; and subsequent corrections made by Tolkien and other editors for the 1964/5 edition and the 50^th anniversary edition.

I will focus primarily on the “lost” original manuscript, but many of those other copies will be referenced in time. By concentrating on the process of Elanor editing the manuscript, I hope to accomplish two things. First, I leave room for editorial commentary, which appeared throughout the original text and in the many academic essays, journals, and books on the works of Tolkien. If commentators have noted something of significance in the text that would enlighten the reader to Tolkien’s original intention along with plausibly existing in Middle-earth, Elanor could take a moment to make this commentary whether as a note to herself in the margins or by speaking to another character.

Second, this solves part of the problem that there were not enough ladies in Tolkien’s writing. A study conducted by Emil Johansson of Lord of the Rings Project showed that 82% of characters were presented as male, meaning that Tolkien used he/him pronouns for the character in his “translation”. While I will argue that Elves and Dwarves were implied to understand gender differently than Men and Hobbits and therefore may have been “translated” with different pronouns if the book were published today, I am not going to dwell too much on this right now because our focus is on Elanor. Using this canonical female editor, I can highlight the implied existence of women within the text even when they did not receive dialogue.

Finally, I needed a specific setting for the beginning of the musical. Tolkien loved starting his books at the turning point of character’s lives. The Hobbit began with several paragraphs of exposition until the sudden arrival of Gandalf and his Dwarf friends, prompting Bilbo to join their adventure and leave his lifelong home of Bag End. The dialogue portion of The Fellowship of the Ring started with explanation of what Bilbo had been up to and how his neighbors felt about this, including the Gamgee family, before plunging into the party where Bilbo left his homeland for good, and Frodo became the central character both of the book and town gossip. My animated musical will also have a brief explanation of what is happening as funeral-goers discuss the full life of recently deceased Mrs. Rose Cotton Gardner and her widowed husband, while their eldest daughter Elanor takes a moment to quietly reflect in her father’s library.

While this combination of a book within a musical, a woman editor preserving her family’s legacy, and beginning the show at a funeral might seem innovative in combination, the pieces are fairly well-known throughout Western media. Tolkien was famous for recombining folkloric motifs and pop cultural references to create a uniquely modern fantasy world, and I have similarly drawn inspiration from a range of other books, movies, and biographies while creating my interpretation of his work.

Metafictions and Framing Devices

The concept of “metafictions” first appeared in the book Fiction and the Figures of Life by postmodernist professor William H. Gass in 1970. He explained that modern novelists had mastery of language, and they used this skill to build new worlds. When novelists used their fictional writing to talk about the process of their real-world writing, or characters became aware that they were part of writing, that was “metafiction”. The unusual prefix was borrowed from the Greek term meta, which in modern English gained the meaning of “higher, beyond” or “transcending”.

Gass used his term “metafiction” to describe postmodernist books like The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon, which contained the fictitious play The Courier’s Tragedy by Richard Wharfinger. A similarly metafictional work is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Diaz, which focused on a young writer creating a science fiction manuscript and the first person narration of his friend talking to the reader. The concept of writing a book where characters tell stories or understand that they are in a story is much older. Many religions and philosophies use stories of teachers telling parables to explain concepts to the audience. In the gospels of the New Testament, which Tolkien would have known well, Jesus told parables to the point that the apostle Mark wrote “He did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Mark 4:34a).

Of course, the concept appeared outside the West. In India, The Mahabharata written around the 4^th century BC was a hundred thousand verse epic poem narrated by a student and detailing many generations and wars of a royal family. Meanwhile, the collection of Arabic language folktales One Thousand and One Nights, used the framing device of well-read Scheherazade telling a never-ending story so her new husband, the ruler Shahryar, does not murder her in the morning, as was his habit with his other brides.

This format continued to appear in Medieval and Post-Medieval Europe. Our friend Geoffrey Chaucer published The Canterbury Tales in 1387, while Miguel de Cervantes published the Spanish language classic Don Quixote, Part Two in 1615. Other stories within stories from this time included the “nested plays” of William Shakespeare, such as The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet and Pryamus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Metafiction often takes on a sillier spin. The musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which premiered in 1981 and was based on the 1939 book Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot, sometimes includes the song “Growltiger’s Last Stand”, where Gus the Theatre Cat recalls a play from his youth where he took the lead role. The fantasy comedy The Princess Bride is both a book and a movie. Published by William Goldman in 1973, the book’s full title for the first edition was The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure; The ‘good parts’ version, with a note that Goldman “abridged” the text rather than writing it. The 1987 movie based on a screenplay written by Goldman used a grandfather reading excerpts of the book to his grandson to convey the same abridgement affect.

Whether used in serious work or in comedy, framing devices act as a way for authors to quickly deliver information about their world. For my hypothetical animated musical, this would allow the viewer to watch Elanor pause her editing in order to talk with other characters within the framing device, clarify confusing statements, censor or remove portions of the text, conduct additional research, or do whatever else she deemed necessary for creating a cohesive manuscript.

The Role of the Woman Editor

In the West, the publishing industry had historically been dominated by upper middle class, highly educated, well-connected white men. As with every standard, there have been exceptions: Charles Dickens worked in poor houses as a child, Alexandre Dumas père had African ancestry, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was a woman, proving that only four of the five markers were necessary for success. While authors typically receive the attention, their editors are equally important. (Shoutout to my own editor, also known as my dad, who is available for hire at reasonable rates.) Women were frequently editors and promotors of their family member’s work, often at a cost to their own careers.

American musical fans are now familiar with the story of founding mother Elizabeth “Eliza” Schuyler Hamilton, whose husband Alexander Hamilton famously died in a duel. According to Pulitzer prize winning biographer Ron Chernow, whose book Alexander Hamilton was the basis of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical, “Eliza Hamilton was committed to one holy quest above all others: to rescue her husband’s historical reputation…” (Chernow, 2). Her meticulous saving of every scrap that Hamilton had written caused many potential writers to quit the project, until their son John Church Hamilton agreed to help out. The seven-volume set approved by Congress was called The Works of Alexander Hamilton: Containing His Correspondence, and His Political and Official Writings, Exclusive of the Federalist, Civil and Military, while a separate seven-volume set with the opinions of John and Eliza was called Life of Alexander Hamilton: A History of the Republic of the United States of America. This obsession with preserving the legacy of Alexander mirrors the ongoing work of Tolkien scholars analyzing the manuscripts of their favorite author, and I will have more to say about this specific variation of editorship in future posts.

In contrast to the love held for Alexander Hamilton by his family, animosity grew between Sophia (also spelled Sofia) Andreyevna Behrs Tolstaya and her husband, 19^th century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who was sixteen years older than her. Tolstaya was unhappy with her marriage and critical of her husband’s work according to her posthumously published diaries. While Tolstoy wrote his famously long and highly acclaimed book War and Peace, Tolstaya edited the manuscript from end to end seven times while single-handedly raising their thirteen children and cooking two sets of meals, since Tolstoy insisted on having a different diet than the rest of the family. Tolstaya managed to gain control of Tolstoy’s royalties when he decided to reject material goods, a decision that might have bankrupted the family without her intervention.

Not all women editors supported the work of a husband. Rose Wilder Lane was a journalist and freelance writer with her own successful career who encouraged her mother, semi-retired newspaper columnist Laura Ingalls Wilder, to publish stories about her childhood as a pioneer. The Little House series spawned an industry of romanticized and family-friendly stories in print and on television about the American Midwest during the 19^th century. Outside of her support for her mother’s late blooming literary career, Lane was an early feminist libertarian who worked with Ayn Rand, best known for her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, along with literary critic Isabel Paterson. While I am not a fan of their work, I appreciate their commitment to their own political views during the women’s liberation movement.

Like these real-world women editors, Elanor worked to preserve the legacy of her biological father through editing and copying the manuscript before sending at least one copy to Gondor for further editing. She must have made sure to cast Sam in a good light, cementing his place as the hero of the story even if he is treated as a secondary character in earlier books. This points to Elanor considering the legacy of Frodo as her spiritual father, not a huge leap in mental gymnastics as he had already assigned Sam to be his heir and dearest friend, and she was the only Gardner child born when he still lived at Bag End.

For younger and more secular generations, the term “spiritual successor” is more often used in media to describe a work created to “strongly echo others’ work”, such as a piece of fiction with the same themes as an earlier story. However, the phrase has historically been used in religions to describe an adopted child or disciple who speaks with the same authority as the father or teacher. This often happens when the teacher’s biological children do not have the right personality for religious leadership, or the teacher had no biological children.

In Islam, the Sufi mystic Baba Farid declared his disciple Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya to be his spiritual son while acknowledging that his biological son Shaikh Nizamuddin, for whom the disciple was named, was his lineage son or inheritor of physical property. The practice of spiritual successor also appears in Hinduism. Hridayasiva was a spiritual successor to Chudasiva, as both were Shaiva ascetics, meaning that they mainly worshiped the god Shiva. They lived during the reign of Lakshmanaraja II, who ruled in the Kalachuri Dynasty between 945 and 970 AD, and Hridayasiva even received a monastery from the king.

Of course, Christianity has its own spiritual successors, most notably in Orthodox and Catholic denominations. Popes are considered spiritual successors to the apostle Peter, also known as Saint Peter, starting with Clement of Rome, also known as Pope Clement I, who is traditionally said to have lived from 35 AD to 99 AD. The idea that the spiritual successor to Peter is the head of the Church is called papal primacy, and arguments over who is his spiritual successor have led to splits in the church. The most notable was the Great Schism of 1054, also called the East-West Schism, when the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church broke apart with western Catholics following the successors of Pope Leo IX and eastern Orthodox following the successors of Patriarch Michael I Cerularius. The concept of Elanor acknowledging two fathers is comparatively less fraught.

Starting with the End: Funerals in Film

Using a funeral as a framing device is no new concept to film. It creates a delightful paradox, allowing flashbacks to the characters entire lives as seen through the eyes of those who knew them best. This also enables the audience to forgive the rose-colored glasses approach that often shades these types of narratives. People often speak nicer of people at funerals than during their lives with the exception of Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1843 holiday novella A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, where those who knew him say good riddance and steal his stuff. The 1970 musical film Scrooge even featured the song “Thank You Very Much” complete with a dance routine atop his casket.

The historically inaccurate 1981 film Chariots of Fire began with the funeral of Harold Maurice Abrahams, an English-Jewish track & field athlete who had died but three years before in 1978. The completely fictional master of ceremonies Lord Andrew Lindsay reminisced about their youth of running in slow motion on the beach while fighting prejudice in Olympic level sport alongside a fairly large cast of men who all look about the same but apparently were religiously different. Abrahams was, in fact, the deuteragonist or secondary character for much of the movie, the focus mainly being on Scottish bivocational minister Eric Liddell who refused to race on Sundays and later became a missionary in China.

To situate these events in sports history, the culminating event for the athletes was the 1924 Olympics in Paris, France, a hundred years before those horrifyingly human-sized Phrygian caps were released onto the same streets for the latest celebrations of athletic triumph. Additionally, the Olympics featuring Jim Thorpe was hosted by Stockholm, Sweden twelve years earlier in 1912, while the Olympics featuring Jesse Owens was hosted by Berlin, Germany twelve years later in 1936.

Back to the plot device under discussion, the last few minutes of the film returned to the funeral as a boys choir sang “Jerusalem” with grieving parishioners, and as all exited the church, low contrast text at the bottom of the screen let the audience know that Abrahams had a happy marriage and successful career in athletics, while his counterpart Liddell died in a Japanese-run internment camp in China near the end of World War II. The scene faded a final time to the pack of identical men running in slow motion along the beach, and “Jerusalem” ended to allow for a final rendition of the film’s theme song. For all my dislike of the movie, this was textbook usage of a framing device.

For a less family-friendly and church drive-in movie worthy film, The Barefoot Contessa used a funeral as a framing device in 1954, twenty-seven years before Chariots and the same year The Fellowship of the Rings was published. Made by Hollywood about Hollywood, the plot detailed the rise of barefoot actress Maria Vargas thanks to her natural beauty along with the number of wealthy and influential men who fought over her even though they should have known better. Her eventual husband, Count Vincenzo, killed her and a boyfriend in a fit of jealousy, hence the graveside funeral framing the movie.

While not as technically acclaimed as Chariots, Contessa employed impressive metafiction elements. Her friend and promoter Harry Dawes narrated much of the film based on his experience as a movie director, even remarking in the opening scene:

“..the staging and the setting, even the lighting of Maria’s funeral were just what she would have wanted… I wrote and directed all three of the movies Maria Vargas was in… on the screen that is… The Fates or the Furies or whoever wrote and directed her short, full life, they took care of that… Life every now and then behaves as if it had seen too many bad movies when everything fits too well.”

Dawes’ belief that a higher creative power controlled the narrative of the world was similar to the concept of “the Great Writer”, a name used by Tolkien for the creator deity in his Legendarium. Both Dawes and the members of the Fellowship felt unable to decide their own destiny, no matter what actions they took to control their own lives.

Considering Tolkien’s belief as stated in a 1968 interview with BBC that “human stories are always about one thing: death”, the funeral acts as an ideal tool for situating the viewer in the story. It provides a sense of direction or reference point, since the plot is driven by the death of a major character, be it Harold Abrahams, Maria Vargas, or Rose Cotton Gardner. The viewer will inevitably create their own theories as to why the funeral of this character was chosen, and this mystery is solved by the end of the film.

The Scene Is Set

In the opening scene of my hypothetical animated musical, a large crowd of respectful but noisy hobbits dressed in somber dark green gather in a beautiful garden on an appropriately drizzly day. In the dialogue, three elderly hobbit-lasses discuss the many accomplishments of their late employer and friend, Mrs. Rose. The background music is called “Funeral Instrumental”, since despite all my creativity, I am not always the best at coming up with names. It features a melody I call “Pledge Motif” played in a minor key. You will hear more of this motif and learn how it gets its name in future posts. I have included two short videos at the bottom of this post. The first is “Funeral Instrumental” with accompanying sheet music, and the second is a demo reel for the scene. I hope you enjoy this first taste of audio!

Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

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