This is one of the three songs for which I had originally written a setting back in my high school days, and which I absolutely abhorred.  When listening to the songs I had composed more recently, in particular "The Song of Nimrodel," I finally understood why I despised it:  It sounded too much like a Hobbit song and not enough like an Elven song -- in particular, not like a song that would have come from the same group of Elves, in this case the Elves of Mirkwood.  When he sang the song of Nimrodel for the Company, Legolas said that it was one that had long been known among the Elves of the North, and as is true of a great deal of folk, ethnic, and regional music, I felt it should have certain similar qualities.  Those most common in regional folk music are harmonic patterns, keys, and melodic embellishments, so I attempted to devise a simpler tune than "The Song of Nimrodel," while keeping the general "flavor" that might be distinctive to the Elves of Mirkwood.

The introduction (all of four measures) is the only part I'm unhappy with, because the flute sounds a little too much like a harmonica and has a weirdly "cowboy" sound, but after attempting to use several other wind instruments and altering the octave in which it was played, trying to avoid that unfortunate similarity, I finally had to admit defeat.  MIDI instruments can only sound so much like the real thing, and if I wanted the countertune heard and played by a wind instrument, I had to let it go.  This is a song of accommodations, I guess, for all its brevity; in order to get a sound reasonably like a troubador harp in the accompaniment, I needed to use the MIDI acoustic guitar played an octave above normal range.  The final arrangement is for cello, flute, "harp," and contrabass.

After coming upon several songs I'd thought I'd lost while digging through old files, I decided that I ought to look things over a bit more closely and see what I might accidentally be tossing out before I lost something for good.  Among the various items I discovered was an incomplete setting for "The Song of Nimrodel" (the song Legolas sings in the chapter "Lothlórien"), and I decided this was one that was quite salvageable, if I just got around to finishing it.  So after spending a very boring morning waiting around in the doctor's office, I did.

The string ensemble sheet music is a recent revision of the original MIDI version, for an 8-part string ensemble in D minor.  The file folders include the full score for two violins, two violas, three cellos, and contrabass, along with extractions for each of the eight parts.  They are full-page bitmap images compressed into a downloadable zip folder, and can be printed using virtually any graphics or word processing program.

Buried amid the boxloads of music manuscript containing things like the sonatas, piano concerti, wedding Mass, choral works, half-finished songs, and other remnants of my more active years as a composer, I found this little ditty, which I had completely forgotten.  Unlike much of my other Tolkien music, it's not only in a major key, it's lively!  Of course, what else would one expect of a Hobbit bath song?

This was the first setting of a poem from LotR that I actually sat down and transcribed, in 1970, when I was all of 17 and did things like this to pass the time while babysitting, after the kids had gone to sleep.  Of the few settings I wrote  back then, it's the only one that doesn't make me cringe in horror every time I try to play it.  Unfortunately, those other dreadful things (three of 'em, I believe) are so stuck in my head that even 30 years of distance hasn't yet been able to get them out well enough to let me compose new arrangements for them.  There are two MIDI versions, the standard and a "string" interpretation.  After considerable puttering, I managed to devise one in which the solo violin doesn't sound too bad -- with the right sound card.  If it's too primitive a card, the violin sounds more like a duck quacking in agony, especially at certain pitches.  I've discovered that this also can change depending on the playback program you're using, so if you want to listen to that version, you might consider experimenting by playing the file with a different program if you find yourself unable to stand listening to the chorus of agonized ducks.

This has long been the piece de resistance of my various Tolkien-related music, and to folks who were active in Midwest filksinging circles during the late '70s and through the '80s, it became fairly well known.  It eventually acquired the nickname "The Tolkien Top Ten" (which meant that occasionally, I had to perform it with an eleventh song, just to annoy people, usually "Galadriel's Song of Eldamar" tacked on at the end).  The ten songs are, in order:  Gandalf's Song of Lórien, A Rhyme of Lore, The Burial Song of Theoden, The Riddle of Strider, A Song of Tom Bombadil, Sam's Prayer to Elbereth, Gandalf's Riddle of the Ents, Quickbeam's Lament for the Dead Rowan, The Lay of Gil-galad, and The Verse of the Rings.  It is STRONGLY suggested that those who merely want to listen download and print out the guitar reduction to follow along.  Although all of the songs are presented in their entirety, there are bridging passages and other additions (as well as an odd beginning to the Prayer) that are shown in the reduction (which is a PDF in a zip file).  In time, I will make the full sheet music score available, but it's quite long, and is really just a rendering of my guitar accompaniment.  These songs were composed on and for acoustic guitar, not piano, and I really had to wing it to render even a near approximation of my guitar rendition.

And now, after a month of learning how to make MIDI files with crummy programs and no teacher, the piece de resistance  of my efforts to make these things more "listenable" rather than merely accompaniment for singing.  It took nearly a week of effort, tweaking, massaging, and rearranging things, partly because I had not ever arranged this for more than guitar and voice, and partly because of program limitations (like it wanting to crash every few minutes because of the sheer size of the file, or mix up the channels for different tracks, so that the clarinet came out sounding like a fiddle).  What I came up with in the end is an arrangement for 17 instruments:  violin, viola, fiddle, 2 cellos, recorder, English horn, two clarinets, two trumpets, acoustic guitar, harp, stringed bass, harpsichord, piano, and drum.  Look out for the volume!  It starts out quietly, with a solo guitar and harpsichord, builds up and down at various points, and ends with all instruments but the drum on the last song, before fading off.  My husband considers it quite dramatic, and though I'm not entirely pleased with it (I never am), I think it turned out fairly well, given how long I haven't been doing this, and how many years it's been since I did a lot of orchestration.  I hope you enjoy it.

This was one of the oldest, simplest and yet most complex of the LotR poems I set to music.  The tune popped into my head during an early reading of the book, inspired by the description of Aragorn "chanting" the song, and that it was in a "mode" (the type of music of which Gregorian chant is a part).  That was the simplicity, as modal music tends to be fairly simple and very repetitive.  The complexity came when I used it as the basis of a composition class assignment in which we were to use variations in accompaniment to help make a long and repetitious song more interesting through the multiple verses.  As I recall, I got an A on the assignment.  The sheet music file is a zipped PDF.

The MIDI ensemble rendition is for a ten-piece group, consisting of oboe, violin, viola, harpsichord, piano, guitar, and contrabass.

This was the second oldest of the poems I set to music.  It never had a complex arrangement, as I felt none was needed; Frodo, after all, did not have an accompanist when he recited it for Sam.  I have always sung it either a capella or with acoustic guitar accompaniment -- though I must warn you, I'm not a strummer.  The chord symbols indicate when the harmony changes, but I don't let those chords, or the strings, sit still very much, and the accompaniment in the MIDI file emulates this.

I cannot recall what prompted me to write this setting, but I know for a fact that I have always heard this tune in my head when reading the poem as Gimli chants it during the journey through Moria -- albeit sung an octave or two lower, in a Dwarvish voice.  For all their generally gruff reputation, the Dwarves obviously have a fondness for music, if the "jam session" in Bag End in The Hobbit is any indication.

This is the second most recent of all my LotR poem arrangements, composed in the mid-1990s.  Again, it was written for guitar and solo voice, and is a splendid example of a slightly odd harmonic pattern I seem to be quite fond of.  The ensemble version of the MIDI file is for two violas, two cellos, two flutes, a harpsichord, and a contrabass.

In need of an original "hobbit song"  for an early chapter of my current novel in progress, Twice Blessed, I composed this little ditty, both words and music.  As the story goes within the story, the words were an early effort of Bilbo's written soon after his great adventure, when his head was still full of Elven stories and songs heard in Rivendell and Mirkwood. Feeling that hobbits lacked any proper "magical" songs and stories (such things interfering as they do with the important business of lunch and dinner and tea), he wrote this poem, inspired by tales and tunes of the Fair Folk.  Who wrote the music is subject to debate, but it is rather more hobbitish in nature than Elven, though it's doubtful Bilbo composed it himself.  More likely it came from one of his friends in Buckland, where hobbits are known to be little more receptive to such nonsense.  Or so goes the story.

What distinguishes this song from many of my other LotR-based tunes is that it is clearly a dance:  major key, 3/4 time (minor keys, 6/8 and I are considerably more well acquainted).  Until the sheet music is up, the words can be found in the LotR fiction section, in the Tales of Valinor, Twice Blessed, part one, chapter two.

Composed for future inclusion in Twice Blessed.  Although it was written to be sung without accompaniment -- as a children's tune or teaching song -- the MIDI file version is rendered with accompaniment, in the synthesized "harp" voice available in my music programs.  It only occasionally actually sounds like a real harp (mostly in the melodic line), but I thought it was appropriate, given both my fondness for the instrument and its presence in Olórin's house in my fan fiction.

For years, I thought I had completely lost this song.  I wrote it in the late 1970s, during one of my more active phases as both a filksinger and a Tolkien fan.  I cannot recall which came first, the music or the lyrics, but as with many of my songs, I wrote down the words and chords but had the melody stored in my head.  During the three major moves we made in the intervening years -- not to mention the basement flood that destroyed a lot of our things, paper in particular, from the years prior to 1984 -- things got shuffled around, and by the late 1980s, I discovered that I could not find a single copy of the words and chording for this song.  It wasn't among the most popular of my works at conventions because people didn't know the words and couldn't sing along, and it wasn't a short song, so in time (and doubtless due to a lot of personal stress over the next ten years), I forgot it, both words and tune.  I remembered that I had written it, but no one I knew could recall more than a few words, and no one remembered anything of the tune.  Then recently, while digging through old papers that had been in storage since before the flood, I happened upon a box that (so I thought) was full of nothing but old writing notes and early drafts of stories long since completed.  I was about to toss it out, when I decided to look through it, just in case -- and lo! there was the single remaining copy of a short-run one-shot publication I'd done through the auspices of our SF club in 1980.  It was a 50 page, rather slap-dash collection of my filksongs called The Perpetually Incomplete Filksinger, and since only 30 copies had been made, I'd thought they'd disappeared ages ago (my master copy having been destroyed in the flood).  I remembered some of what I'd put into that collection -- and to my wonderment and against all expectations, there was this song.  Like all writers and composers who look back upon work now over 20 years old, I thought it needed a little tweaking, but it really wasn't all that bad.  And so now, to make sure it doesn't get lost again, here it is for your enjoyment.

The MIDI guitar version is an approximation of the performance I gave of the song at SF convention filksings, with acoustic guitar accompaniment.  The ensemble version is for violin, viola, cello, recorder, harpsichord, and contrabass.