The Road Goes Ever On facts for kids

Quick facts for kids
The Road Goes Ever On:
a Song Cycle

First edition (Houghton Mifflin)
Author	J. R. R. Tolkien (lyrics & main text) Donald Swann (music)
Illustrator	J. R. R. Tolkien (page decorations)
Language	English
Subject	Middle-earth
Genre	sheet music & commentary
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin (USA) George Allen & Unwin (UK)
Publication date	31 October 1967 (USA) 14 March 1968 (UK)
Media type	print; in audio as Poems and Songs of Middle-earth
Preceded by	The Tolkien Reader
Followed by	Smith of Wootton Major

The Road Goes Ever On is a song cycle first published in 1967 as a book of sheet music and as an audio recording. The music was written by Donald Swann, and the words are taken from poems in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, especially The Lord of the Rings. The title of the song cycle is taken from "The Road Goes Ever On", the first song in the collection. The songs are designed to fit together when played in sequence. The ninth song "Lúthien Tinúviel" was added in an appendix rather than in the main sequence. Swann performed the cycle for Tolkien, who approved of the music except for the Quenya song "Namárië"; he suggested it should be in the style of a Gregorian chant, which he hummed; Swann used that melody for the song.

Background

J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist and medievalist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe. His professional knowledge of works such as Beowulf shaped his fictional world of Middle-earth, including his fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.

With Tolkien's approval, Donald Swann wrote the music for this song cycle, consisting of settings of some of Tolkien's poetry in The Lord of the Rings. Much of it resembles English traditional music or folk music. The sole exception is the Quenya song "Namárië", which was based on a tune by Tolkien himself; it has some affinities to Gregorian chant. In his foreword to the second edition, Swann explains that he performed the song cycle to Tolkien in Priscilla Tolkien's garden. Tolkien approved of the music except for "Namárië", and hummed its melody; Swann used that for the song.

Content

The sheet music for the songs occupies most of the book, pages 1–62 and 78–84 in the 2002 edition.

List of songs

The 1967 song-cycle (as released on LP and CD) is as follows. Keys are given, but Swann notes in the foreword to the third edition that transposition is acceptable.

The following songs were added to the CD (but not the LP) after the first edition. A Elbereth Gilthoniel forms a continuation of song 6, "I Sit Beside the Fire", in the text, but is a separate track on the CD. "Lúthien Tinúviel" has an ambiguous status: it is shown as song 9 of the cycle in the table of contents, but it is placed in an appendix, not the main cycle, with a note that it could be incorporated into the main sequence by singing it in D major, described by Swann as "a more baritonal key".

Non-musical materials

One of Tolkien's decorative tailpieces created for the book

The text provides Tolkien's notes and translations of the two Elvish poems in the song cycle, on pages 63–76 of the 2002 edition. The book contains one of the longest samples of the constructed language Quenya, in the shape of the song "Namárië", as well as the Sindarin prayer "A Elbereth Gilthoniel", with grammatical explanations. Tolkien's notes in the book provided information about the First Age of Middle-earth that was not otherwise publicly available until 1977, when The Silmarillion appeared.

In addition, Tolkien contributed decorations in the form of elvish script for the top and bottom of every page of sheet music, and tailpieces for the spaces at the ends of the poems.

Publication history

The first edition of The Road Goes Ever On: a Song Cycle was published on 31 October 1967, in the United States.

An LP record that included the song cycle was recorded on 12 June 1967 as Poems and Songs of Middle Earth, with Donald Swann on piano and William Elvin singing. Side one of this record consisted of Tolkien himself reading six poems from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. The first track on side two was Tolkien reading part of the Elvish prayer "A Elbereth Gilthoniel" from book 2, chapter 1 of The Lord of the Rings. The remainder of side two contained the song cycle performed by Swann and Elvin. The LP record was released by Caedmon Records (TC 1231).

The second edition of The Road Goes Ever On, published in 1978, added music for "Bilbo's Last Song." This song was also published separately.

The third edition, published in 1993, added music for "Lúthien Tinúviel" from The Silmarillion, which had earlier appeared in The Songs of Donald Swann: Volume I. The third edition of The Road Goes Ever On was packaged with a CD that duplicated the song cycle (but not Tolkien's readings) from the 1967 LP record. The CD also included two new recordings. The third edition was reprinted in hardcover in 2002 by Harper Collins (ISBN: 0-00-713655-2); this had the same text and CD as the 1993 edition.

On 10 June 1995, the song cycle was performed in Rotterdam under the auspices of the Dutch Tolkien Society, by the baritone Jan Krediet together with the chamber choir EnSuite and Alexandra Swemer on the piano. A CD of this concert was published in a limited edition.

See also

In Spanish: The Road Goes Ever On para niños