A Faërie Ring:Poetry and the Metaphor of Music as Devices of Enchantment in Tolkien's Fiction Fez Silk (bio) One of the most immediately obvious characteristics of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, evident even upon a casual skim through their pages, is an unusually large (arguably, unprecedented) quantity of poetry, with the text of The Lord of the Rings alone containing over sixty poems.1 To certain readers, the plenitude of poetry in Tolkien's work has seemed soporific or annoying—some have even suggested that the poetry ought to be skipped.2 But dismissing the poems as mere ornamentation obscures a subtle yet crucial feature of Tolkien's work: the role of music. After all, most of the poems are not merely poems but songs, although they are rendered as poetry (there being little alternative in the pitch-free medium of a prose narrative). The use of poetry as a substitute or medium for music is a surprisingly significant aesthetic feature of Tolkien's writing. In this essay, I will discuss the nature of music3 in Tolkien's secondary world (distinct from primary-world music) and investigate the external-world function of the inclusion of songs as poetry in the text. My goal is to demonstrate that Tolkien's use of prose descriptions of music deliberately coupled with poetry is an important contribution to the production of the state that in On Fairy-stories he termed "Enchantment," which is integral to stories of the realm of Faërie. I do not seek—as other scholars such as David Bratman, Amy Sturgis, and Bradford Lee Eden have done—to examine the primary-world music that influenced or was influenced by Tolkien's work, or to explore the relationship between music in Tolkien's life and his work: rather, I focus on Tolkien's use of the description of music as a narrative, aesthetic, and rhetorical device of surprising efficacy. Part I: Tolkien's Conception of Music Although music is (both in the real world and in Tolkien's mythology) a cross-cultural, even universal, phenomenon, there are three key factors that distinguish the music of Arda from that of the primary world: first, in Arda, music is either imbued with or is a conduit of powers of evocation, compulsion, and creation that are universally or almost [End Page 85] universally effective and measurable;4 second, musicality extends not only across cultures but across species, being a trait even of non-humanoid lifeforms like Ents, and even crosses biological kingdoms to extend to non-living entities, with references to musical ability (and not entirely in a figurative sense) attributed to trees, rivers, and the ocean; and third, even across widely diverse cultures, species, and kingdoms, the actual manifestation of musicality, in terms of musical theory, compositional structure, or musical tradition, does not seem to vary substantially. Although we cannot directly examine the melodies of Tolkien's songs (which are provided in the text only as poetry), we can observe both the prosody of the poems and the supplemental information supplied by Tolkien outside the text to determine, with something approaching certainty, that all of the songs recorded in the text of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit follow a generally Western musical format. As poems they generally conform to the format either of oral poetry (e.g., Bilbo's song of Eärendil in Rivendell, or most of the songs of the Rohirrim, which appear to be composed at least partially extempore around a pre-existing or pre-composed structure5), drinking or walking songs (e.g., Sam's troll song, which, according to Tolkien, was written to fit the meter of an extant British folk song6), or folk songs and ballads, following the traditional English ballad meter of four-line stanzas with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter (e.g., Bilbo's lament in Rivendell [FR, II, iii, 291–92] and Legolas's song of Nimrodel [FR, II, vi, 354–55]), and would have been set to repetitive melodies that were traditionally Western in mode and structure.7 Perhaps the least...