How Should Elvish Be Sung?

Q: How Should Elvish Be Sung?

ANSWER: “Like Gregorian chants,” according to J.R.R. Tolkien himself in an interview he gave in the 1960s. It is one of my little secrets that there are many very old interviews with J.R.R. Tolkien scattered across the Internet. Some of these interviews have been transcribed or at least mentioned on Tolkien fan sites, but not all of them (unless you count my own references). But even I haven’t catalogued them all.

I wanted to write an article about Tolkien’s lost interviews, and yet no one has asked a question about whether such interviews might still be preserved, even made available online. While reading one recently I cam across the Gregorian chants quote. How Elvish should be sung is a legitimate fan question, although it was never asked of me. If I recall correctly, someone brought it up during an Elvish language lesson at Dragon*Con many years ago (I had arranged for some linguistic enthusiasts to do some panels on Elvish at the convention). I don’t recall what the panelists’ answer was.

Of course, the question also reminds me of Carl Hostetter’s essay “Elvish as she is spoke”, which is an appropriately scathing dressing down of much of the pseudo-scholarship that soaks the Web with nonsense. It is neither easy nor simple to create a good, reliable reference about J.R.R. Tolkien. I am constantly emending, revising, and even occasionally annotating articles here on my own Website because I discover inaccuracies, typos, incomplete information, broken links, and such. Sometimes I find an error many years after the fact, and I fix it as best I can. But out there on the Web many people are less meticulous, especially on the collaborative sites, the wikis and FAQs, the “dark side” of would-be scholarship, for they are prone to treat everything equally credibly even though much of what they mention is absolute pure nonsense.

And that has everything to do with how Elvish should be sung, for the question itself belies an interest among readers in what J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote. It’s fun to speculate and I have certainly indulged myself in speculation from time to time (although rarely wherever my critics annoint me with speculation). One of my most popular speculations is the article that attempts to answer the question “How was Beleriand Destroyed in the War of Wrath?”. It was a question about the makeup of the armies in the War of Wrath (posted on another Website) that led me on a lengthy digression into the Deep Tolkien Web to find interviews; not interviews about the War of Wrath, but — well, it would take too long to explain why I set out on these epic journeys. Many you know exactly what I am referring to, for you digress into these epic journeys yourself.

The War of Wrath is one of those areas of Tolkien inquiry that provokes more questions than for which there are suitable answers. Everything is speculative, and much of it is circular and conflated, or just plain made up. I was amazed to see that Wikipedia, that most awful of attempts to document Tolkien’s fiction, posits specific numbers for the forces in the War of Wrath. And people insist that Wikipedia has standards. But I digress further.

To sing in Elvish as Tolkien sang it is what we all seek, is it not? And though there are many books and journals and Websites that attempt to bring all these details together, the details drift apart. For example, if you try to find the Daphne Castell article from November 1966, published in “New Worlds No. 50”, you will find excerpts but I — only I — know that it is fully published here. Rats. Now you know that, too. Now, maybe the full text is available elsewhere. I don’t know. This interview is the one external source for what we know about Queen Beruthiel’s cats, “external” to any books published by J.R.R. or Christopher Tolkien, that is.

Ah, but you are clever, are you not? You know already that the interview was republished by Festival Art and Books. Yes, well, sometimes you can find two copies of an ancient source of information. It is better to find three, especially if they are not simply replicas of one another (which is often the case). For if people have transcribed these old interviews by hands they will surely make mistakes, but two out of three sources may provide a more faithful telling.

With respect to singing Elvish itself, in the Castell interview Professor Tolkien says:

I had to posit a basic and phonetic structure of Primitive Elvish, and then to modify this by a series of changes (such as actually do occur in known languages) so that the two end results would each have a consistent structure and character, but be quite different. I have met very few (either in person or by letter) among the most intelligent who can distinguish between the two different Elvish languages, or see or feel that (say) the hymn to Elbereth is in an entirely different mode and prosody from that of Galadriel’s lament.

Of course, after decades of intensive study and debate, there are more people now who can distinguish between the two Elvish languages in the Ring (which is how some of these old interviews refer to The Lord of the Rings), but probably still far fewer than would have dwelt in Minas Tirith at the end of the Third Age (in my guessy opinion).

Here is a recording of Tolkien reciting “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” (composed in Sindarin). Does it sound like a Gregorian chant to you?

Here he recites “Namarie” (composed in Quenya).

Here is a recording of the friars of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. performing “Salve Regina”.

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