Abby Epplett, Historian

In this week’s essay, I introduce the next musical selection, which includes an instrumental and the song “The Wood Is Full of Rumour”. While not treated as a song in the original text, I wrote the piece by borrowing information provided by Gandalf to Frodo while he discussed the interaction of the Woodmen and Wood-elves who live in Mirkwood and could not catch a monstrous “ghost who drank blood” . I also drew inspiration from music of the Middle Ages, including the medieval method of creating harmony and the instruments that originally played this music.

This week, I take a deep dive into the folklore of man-eating beasts based on a line in “The Shadow of the Past” . Gandalf told Frodo of a rumor he heard from the Woodman: “some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood”, allegedly Gollum. To be clear, in the era before CCTV, nobody saw or recorded Gollum eating a baby animal or baby Woodman, and any statistician knows correlation does not equal causation. Neither the Woodmen nor the Wood-elves nor Gandalf would deliberately lie about a dangerous creature in Mirkwood . Something was certainly eating the contents of nests, holes, and cradles, but whether it was Gollum is not provable. The concept of a man-eating or blood-drinking creature is nearly universal folklore, from ghosts and vampires representing the undead remains of a restless human to human-like monsters stalking the borders of a community to hungry wolves terrorizing medieval villages. I take a look at each of these concepts, as the works of Tolkien drew...

This week, I look at the rarely discussed relationship between Wood-elves and Woodmen, two peoples of Middle-earth who lived in Mirkwood. While the short-lived mortal Men had vastly different lifestyles than the immortal Elves, the two groups shared the forest peacefully, united against the Dark Powers of Mordor. During this essay, I will review the background of these two fictional groups and compare them to other forest-dwellers in the real world, including a pair of cultures in Cameroon that once shared the forest and prehistoric collaboration between early humans.

After this instrumental, I will take a short break from composing music to research topics in folklore and Real World history related to The Lord of the Rings . Out of the seventeen scenes to appear in this chapter, this instrumental is for the twelfth scene. In this piece, I include a new theme to represent Gandalf interrogating Sméagol/Gollum, a new motif to represent the moon, and the return of multiple recurring themes and instruments.

While describing the history of the Ring to Frodo, Gandalf explained that Sméagol/Gollum and Bilbo had many similarities, as they were both of hobbit-kind. While this bothers Frodo, he would later realize Gandalf wisely spoke the truth, if in a long-winded way. Because of their shared background, hobbit-kind quickly understood each other, more so than “a dwarf, an orc, or even an elf”. Tolkien viewed this connection as being of the same cynn , an Old English word meaning “family”; it’s also the ancestor of the word “kin” . It’s important to note that Tolkien did not see genetics or “blood” as an indicator of personality, although plenty of people in his day did, and used the concept to suppress others. He believed instead that language was what brought people together. Accordingly, I will take a brief look at linguistic factors that make the speech of hobbit-kind unique, along with how Sméagol’s mental decline changed his speech. After that, I will give an overview of the music theo...

This week’s instrumental covers the mental decline of Sméagol from the time he discovered the Ring’s power of invisibility until he made his home in a cave underneath the mountains. While most of the musical motifs in this section have been covered in previous essays, one brand new motif representing the Sun makes a brief appearance. In this essay, I will talk about my inspiration behind how I portray the Sun along with describing how the many motifs blend together to create the piece.

This instrumental introduces the “fathers of the fathers of the Stoors”, the character of Sméagol/Gollum, and the death of Déagol at the hands of Sméagol after discovering the Ring. During this instrumental, I introduce a new percussion motif to represent Stoors and related hobbit-kind, along with referencing previously used themes to create a complex musical landscape.

Frodo was originally incredulous that Gollum, also called Sméagol, could be “of hobbit-kind”, even as Gandalf explained how he was likely related to “the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors”, the ancestors of the Brandybucks and other hobbits in Buckland and the East Farthing. As mentioned many months ago when discussing the three breeds of hobbits , this group had distinctive features. They were broad and strong, enjoyed boating along the river, and may have had unusually blue eyes. However, their culture was distinct from that of their distant relatives in the Shire. They appeared to respect matriarchal authority rather than patriarchal, and they built boats of reeds rather than wood. In this essay, I’m going to explore those differences and how they inspired my design of Sméagol and his relatives.

While creating the instrumental for “The Story of the Ring”, I brought back musical themes and motifs used in previous sections while introducing new themes. In this essay, I will describe the history and inspiration behind the new themes for Sauron, Ringwraiths, Gil-galad, and Men of Westernesse while demonstrating how these themes fit together to create a cohesive score.

The War of the Last Alliance was referenced by Gandalf as a major event in the history of the One Ring. Both Gil-galad and Elendil died in the Siege of Barad-dûr, the fortress of Sauron, along with many Elves and Men. While Isildur survived and killed Sauron by cutting off the finger wearing the One Ring, Isildur kept the ring instead of destroying it and was killed by Orcs two years later during the Disaster of Gladden Fields. This was a paradoxical location. The Gladden River was a tributary of the Great River Anduin, the longest river in Middle-earth, and the Gladden Fields were formed where the Gladden reached the Anduin. The soil in this area would have been fertile, perfect for growing plants, hence the many gladdens flowering in the area. At the same time, it would be remembered for generations as a place of death.

During the Last Alliance, Gil-galad and the Ñoldor were joined by Elendil and the Númenóreans in a desperate effort to defeat the dark forces of Sauron. Since I detailed the armor of Gil-galad and his fellow elves last week, I will reveal my designs for the Númenóreans this week, including their arms and armor, the symbol of the White Tree, and illustrations created by other artists.

Gil-galad was the mysterious last King of the Ñoldor, part of a royal family that included Celebrimbor and Galadriel . The exact relationship is part of his mystery, as three different elves have been listed as his father in the legendarium. This enigma is discussed at length by Tolkien scholar Renee Vink , so I will give only a brief summary here.

The Ringwraiths, also known as the Black Riders or the Nazgûl in Black Speech, were nine mortal Men transformed into evil, undead horrors due to their rings of power addiction. Sauron used them as his top servants, ordering them to track down the One Ring and terrorize the Free People. Despite their power, they were not particularly effective in much of what they did, to be seen in future chapters. In this week’s essay, I will explore the folkloric motifs that may have inspired Tolkien and explain the etymological differences between different categories of undead people appearing in The Lord of the Rings . I will also present a brief literature review on what other experts say about the Ringwraiths, along with sharing portrayals by other illustrators.

This week, I am releasing another section of music for “Book II, Chapter 2 The Shadow of the Past”. In this brief section, Gandalf began explaining the story behind Frodo’s ring and sang the famous theme song of the series, which originally appeared as the Epigraph in the text and was sung in the “Prologue” of the animated musical . While no new musical themes are introduced in this section, I used motifs occurring in previous sections to develop a cohesive score. This essay focuses mostly on music theory, but history-themed essays will be back in two weeks.

I first introduced Gandalf during my overview of wizards and balrogs , noting that he was an archetypal wise old man similar to Odin, Merlin, and Prospero. He also appeared as Olórin while discussing Lady Nienna , his mentor who was “acquainted with grief” and taught him “pity and patience”. While Gandalf was not born as a baby, since he did not have a biological mother, he did describe his early years in Valinor as his “youth”. He shared a commonality with Tolkien and many other characters in the legendarium: he was a foster child. This experience affected him throughout his lives. In this essay, I will explore how his experience as a foster child with a grieving surrogate mother may have related to his homelessness, apparent nicotine use disorder, and internalized need to always be good.

The One Ring was famously engraved with the final line of its dark theme song, “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them”. In this essay, I am exploring motifs and myths surrounding goldsmiths, the history of goldsmithery in the Real World, how to make gold things, and attempting to answer a physics question concerning the One Ring.

This nine-minute instrumental uses musical themes found throughout the work, some of which have already appeared in previous pieces. I will review past themes, explain the history and inspiration behind new or updated themes, connect the technique appearing in the composition to the emotions I intended to convey, and provide careful analysis to the structure of the piece. If you find this essay too technical and would rather simply listen to the music, feel free to jump to the bottom of the page where I have embedded the sheet music video.

The White Council was a name given to wise immortals who protected Middle-earth from Sauron and his vassals. The White Council in The Lord of the Rings that drove the dark forces from Mirkwood was actually the second White Council. The first White Council is described in Unfinished Tales (263) and was formed to remove Sauron from Eriador (northwestern Middle-earth, including the Shire) after he had tortured Celebrimbor to death. The second White Council likely emulated the first White Council and was formed for a similar purpose, this time to drive Sauron from Mordor and be rid of him for good.

Among the most famous fortresses in modern English-language literature, Orthanc was a stone tower at the center of the fortification Isengard located in Gondor and built during the Second Age. As described in Book III, “Chapter 8 The Road to Isengard” in The Two Towers , the “black and gleaming” tower was made of “four mighty piers” holding up a narrow floor of polished stone that allowed a visitor to stand at a height of “five hundred feet above the plain” . The black stone contrasts the White Towers near the Shire and the Grey Havens of Lune , playing into the themes of darkness, shadow, and light that appear throughout the text.

While I have been a fan of Tolkien’s writing for about twenty years, I saw his depictions of Mirkwood for the first time only a few weeks ago. Initially, I was surprised by the orderly rows of trees that looked no more than a hundred years old. Then, after considering the history of Middle-earth as a place of severe habitat destruction from millennia of wars, the apparently recent rehabilitation of the forest made sense. Unlike the Old Forest in the Shire with its massive trees, much of Mirkwood was restored as a shadow of its former arboreal glory. In this essay, I discuss the name of the kingdom and its place in folklore, how the elves’ respect for trees may have been inspired by Finnish culture, and how silviculture or active forest management has been practiced in Europe from ancient times to the present day.