I’m Not Going to Stop Editorializing!

Jared, Oriana and Ned talk about Jared’s choice of topic: Donald Swann’s song cycle The Road Goes Ever On. A member of the hit comic song duo Flanders and Swann in post-WWII Britain and beyond, including the US, Swann’s own interest in The Lord of the Rings, encouraged by his equally interested wife, resulted in a short song cycle for voice and piano drawing on various shorter poems from that text. But this wasn’t a simple example of early fanwork – this ended up being a full collaboration with Tolkien himself, who approved of most of Swann’s work except one song he suggested his own melody for, along with contributing calligraphy, art and short essays to the published songbook of the cycle. Further, Swann’s own recording of the cycle with singer William Elvin on the album Poems and Songs of Middle-earth was itself accompanied by Tolkien’s own readings of his poetry – in all, a demonstration of Tolkien’s own enthusiasm for this extremely rare artistic collaboration based on his work. Yet The Road Goes Ever On has only had extremely low-key interest from even dedicated readers or listeners since, seen as a very strange curio now completely overshadowed by Howard Shore’s majestic work for the Jackson films. What were the circumstances that brought Swann to fame and his ultimate connection with Tolkien? How was it that Tolkien found a resonance in Swann’s work as a whole, and how does this square with wider perceptions of what his work was meant to ‘sound’ like to readers? Is there something ultimately to both the cycle and the published book as a whole that has value even beyond the music itself? And do any of your hosts actually like this at all? (Spoiler: …not really.)