In seventy years, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has been established time and again as the gold standard of fantasy literature. The world of Middle Earth is so thoroughly built, its lore so richly developed, that readers cannot help but be swept away by its mythology and its story alike. If seven decades of literary relevance were not enough to prove The Lord of the Rings staying power, Peter Jackson brought the stories of Middle Earth into the cinematic age with two blockbuster trilogies, cementing Tolkien’s world as a mainstay of pop culture for many more decades to come.

Of course, adaptation is always a tricky task, and Jackson’s various renderings of Middle Earth contain much for critics and fans to debate. It should not surprise viewers, then, that one aspect of the books was significantly curtailed in all six movies: the role of music and poetry (collectively, of verse) in the story.

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To say that verse is integral to The Lord of the Rings would be something of an understatement. According to the index, the combined volumes contain seventy-nine combined poems and songs over a little more than a thousand pages; a reader cannot read more than thirteen pages without encountering a section of verse (on average—technically, the longest stretch between verses is eighty-three pages, the shortest, zero).

Aragorn and Arwen in Lord of the Rings

Even for readers who are accustomed to the flowery prose style, the lines of verse thus present something of a chore, pulling the reader away from the story action to interpret lines of poetry. Yet many of these lines testify to the richness of Middle Earth itself, making ample reference to the ongoing mythology that Tolkien developed alongside his stories (which would eventually be aggregated into The Silmarillion, as well as other posthumous publications). Later works certify that the history of Middle Earth predated the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and the incorporation of musical and literary traditions gives weight to that claim.

The mode by which Tolkien integrated this history into The Lord of the Rings tells the audience almost as much about the world of Middle Earth, however, as the verses themselves. Though the world reflects numerous, diverse influences, it is distinctly marked as a post-tribal, pre-Industrial civilization—easily recognizable to Western audiences for the ways in which it mirrors the late Medieval period of Western Europe. There is literature and art, but no printing press exists to widely disseminate those works. There are major roads and smaller byways, but no unified system of transit links the enclaves of disparate populations. The concept of ‘travel’ (or, in this case, of a ‘journey’) is synonymous with ‘adventure’: rarely sought, but highly lucrative, recounted in tales that mingle fact with fable. Music in this world is more than just a diversion—it is a way of keeping history alive in the cultural consciousness, through mixed oral and early written tradition.

It makes sense, then, that everybody sings (or chants) in The Lord of the Rings (well, almost everybody—the wizards, who are special in every sense, seem to have fewer songs than the rest). Tolkien experiments widely with poetic forms in these verses, but certain conventions dovetail with implied subcultures: the pastoral hobbits tend toward effervescent couplets, the aloof elves’ verses are reflective and meandering, the poetry of men reflects Tolkien’s scholarship in Old English. This, in turn, adds further depth to the worldbuilding, as the distinct oral traditions of subcultures give the audience a sense of preexistence—the various races are grounded in an unexplored prehistory.

Yet it is not a restrictive structure: following one of the most longstanding conventions in narrative history, the most important verses are also the most memorable—“All that is gold does not glitter” and “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky” persist well beyond the text, appearing on bumper stickers and mugs, providing the very tagline for Peter Jackson’s adaptation.

To Jackson’s credit, he and screenwriter Fran Walsh incorporated as much of the source text as might be deemed humanly possible into their adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. This includes the lines of verse—some reproduced as songs, some dropped as mumbled lines, without context.

Of course, it would have been impossible to get all seventy-nine songs and poems even into the extended editions (someone would have to be singing or reciting every nine minutes, for the record). But this is one instance where the Hobbit trilogy is actually something of an improvement on The Lord of the Rings: the music is incorporated more momentously, more theatrically. Instead of appearing as an after-dinner pastime, often in the background, music in The Hobbit movies is an essential part of the story, setting the mood for the audience and building—or breaking—tension. Music is brought to the foreground, which is more closely aligned with the prevalence of verse in the books.

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There is a lesson here for Amazon’s much-anticipated Rings of Power series. Incorporating more music and poetry roots the exposited history in a layered world, linking the present traditions to their past progenitors—to the history that begat the legends. The Hobbit movies are, in most ways, inferior to The Lord of the Rings, but they have the capacity to sweep viewers along nonetheless because the history is so dynamically realized and integrated into the story.

Rings of Power promises to be as epic as the literary tales of Middle Earth, but it needs to find ways to communicate its rich world without losing the viewer with endless monologues (or distracting the viewer with naked bodies on screen, as Game of Thrones was famous for doing). Music provides a way for the show to do just that.

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