Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Instrumental, Gandalf Warns about the Ring
In this essay accompanying my next instrumental, available at the end of the post, I am discussing the music of the three licensed versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings : the Rankin/Bass version, the Ralph Bakshi version, and the Peter Jackson version. From my understanding, while other versions exist, the Tolkien Estate did not approve them. While my own hypothetical animated musical likewise does not have approval, it also is not intended for commercial purposes, as detailed in my discussion on fair use back in the project introduction . Other musicians and performance groups who have written their own music or song cycles to be performed independently during a concert or on an album, rather than as a part of a musical score, will be discussed in a future essay.