FOREWORD to the Second Edition

FOR THE PUBLICATION of the song cycle The Road Goes Ever On in 1967, I wrote a foreword explaining how I had fallen under the spell of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and how certain poems had grouped themselves in my imagination – about the Road. I have more to add to this foreword now, but I will first retell the origin of the songs, born of my travels over ten years back.

After my wife had communicated to me her passion for the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, we found we were reading them more or less every spring. This raised a special problem when we were about to go to Australia by air and the hard covers weighed too much to carry. (At that time British readers marched under hard covers exclusively.) I was setting out on a tour of At the Drop of a Hat in August 1964 and returning in March 1965. The Australian spring begins in October and we did not want to be without the books. After much deliberation we put the volumes, along with other items, into a steel trunk and sent them off a few months ahead. At the end of the tour the trunk was being packed up for the return sea journey while the Swann family was taking another route via Japan, Iran and Jordan. My wife suggested that I copy out some lyrics from the three books and set them to music en route. I had been performing for four months and I had an appetite for composing. That is how the first six songs came to be written on a beautiful Steinway grand piano in Ramallah outside Jerusalem. The hills outside Jerusalem are extremely lovely, and if the caves around the Dead Sea are the place for old scrolls, they could as well be the place for hobbits: many of the caves are round, dry and extensive.

On my return to England the firm of George Alien and Unwin was good enough to give me permission to use the lyrics, and also to put me in touch with Professor Tolkien. At a delightful tea party in Oxford at the home of his daughter, Priscilla, the Professor approved five but hesitated over my music for "Namárië," Galadriel's farewell in Lorien. He had heard it differently in his mind, he said, and hummed a Gregorian chant. I made a note of it, and in the following week I played it over many times to the Elvish words. There was no doubt that this monodic line from an early Church music tradition expressed the words ideally, not only the sadness of the word "Namárië," and the interjection "Ai!," but equally the ritual mood of the Elves. For my song cycle it would make a variation for the piano to stop, and then return for the next song. So I added only the introductory line, interlude and coda. Number five is thus words and theme by Professor Tolkien.

In Sydney, when I was selecting lyrics from The Lord of the Rings, I searched for the short evocative poems of mood and atmosphere. As I came to them, I was struck by their clarity and concision, and I began to feel their flavour as poems outside the narrative in which they appear. The longer ballads seemed self-sufficient. Rugged, rumbustious and rollicking, they swept on like huge rivers. Not for me to plunge into them. But the shorter ones looked as if they would enjoy musical accompaniment, and every creature in them was on the road – Bilbo, who sets the pace, Frodo and Sam journeying to the Mountains of Doom, Treebeard herding his trees – everyone was moving. So I called the cycle The Road Goes Ever On, and this is also the title of the first song. Its tune is echoed in the sixth, and again in "Errantry," which I added later, composing it on yet another tour in the USA. This is a huge poem, but as soon as I saw it, in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, I felt it was pure music. These songs of Middle-Earth were thus composed in the Middle East and the Middle West!

Eight, nearly nine years have passed, and I have lost two good friends, Professor Ronald and Mrs. Edith Tolkien. I have also lost my friend Michael Flanders. The landscape on the Road now seems different, and yet the song cycle still speaks to me, and has even grown. Soon after the Professor's death, Joy Hill, who had for many years acted as Tolkien's secretary on behalf of his publishers, handed me "Bilbo's Last Song." The poem was a farewell gift to her from the Professor and she was very moved by it. I understand the poem was written a good many years ago, and its appearance in the last year of Tolkien's life was but more evidence of the wealth of unpublished material, now being examined and edited by his son Christopher. The poem moved me, too, and I set it to music. As I did this, a host of impressions came back to me, chapters in my association with the world of Tolkien. There is no particular order unless it be vaguely chronological, so I will give them headings, like this:

OBSERVATION I. I had but to write down one song and play it to the first hearer, to find that each person feels about The Lord of the Rings in his own way. I discovered that at the moment when you set music to a poem you are quite alone, even though your lyric writer's work is well-loved by a large public. Yet my meetings with the Professor and with his wife, who had played the piano to concert standard, heartened me immensely, for I suddenly felt that the piano, instead of being the last instrument you would expect to see in Middle-Earth, had some close connection with Tolkien's imagination. This was a great relief.

EPISODE I. The publication of the song book, and the subsequent recording by the bass-baritone William Elvin (now of Covent Garden Opera House) was an invigorating experience. It was marvellous to see Tolkien's beautiful Elvish script shown in all its elegance. He unexpectedly contributed a glossary which contained information about the Elvish language, and indeed about the Elves, that had not appeared anywhere else. I discovered then that Tolkien's calligraphy, his scholarship and his inventiveness were all one thing.

EPISODE II. Singing a Tolkien setting in At the Drop of a Hat effected a link between Michael Flanders and Tolkien. The Professor had a vast admiration for Michael Flanders' lyrics. They both adored words and the adept use of them. They met backstage after one of our performances at the New Theatre, Oxford. This reminded me of the vein of Oxford University fantasy (Michael had been, like me, at Christ Church). Michael's courting armadillos on Salisbury Plain are, to my mind, cousins to the flamingos in Lewis Carroll's Alice; to the Hrossa of C. S. Lewis; and the talking eagles of Tolkien.

OBSERVATION II. I encountered the Tolkien cult in the USA in 1966, and soon felt its kinship to certain American sub-cultures; indeed, the Tolkien cult seemed to reflect the strong American urge for varying life styles, such as the Pennsylvania Amish, compulsively rural, like the Shire hobbits.

1966 still had its flower children in hippy garb. " 'Supper is ready,' said Goldberry; and now the hobbits saw that she was clothed all in silver with a white girdle, and her shoes were like fishes' mail. But Tom was all in clean blue, blue as rain-washed forget-me-nots, and he had green stockings." Is there a kinship even here?

Some remarkably naive thinking and bad art has been pinned onto the name of Tolkien, but the "cultists" I met then in America were undoubtedly book lovers. If a few expressed their devotion by sending parcels of mushrooms to the Professor, this was but an expression of constant reading and re-reading of The Lord of the Rings. I know the cult puzzled and sometimes annoyed the Professor, and that some of the fans became a nuisance to him. But living for some time in the States, I have become accustomed to enthusiasts of all kinds. I think I may even have helped think up the lapel button "Gandalf for President." I often wish he were.

OBSERVATION III. Back in England, playing the Song Cycle in concerts, I noted that about a quarter of a general audience knew The Lord of the Rings and were especially interested in the words that were being sung. For the remaining three-quarters I had to be careful about how much I said before the music began. If I told them "I Sit Beside the Fire" was a meditation by a 130-year-old hobbit, it only produced a confused impression in their minds when they heard the quiet elegiac lines. If I told them the next song would be in Elvish, they wondered if it were some kind of children's game I was playing; and to explain "In the Willow-meads of Tasarinan" as a song by a walking tree seemed impossible. I am indebted to Roger Cleverdon, a bass who sings Treebeard's song beautifully, for this useful introductory line: "Think of one of those road-signs: CAUTION HEAVY PLANT CROSSING."

OBSERVATION IV. My interest in religious ideas and music brought me into touch with numerous people for whom Tolkien's books were a kind of Christian beacon. I read Tolkien's essay "Tree and Leaf," where he explores fascinatingly the matter of happy endings in faery stories and the way in which happy endings pattern the Resurrection. I began to see a connection between Tolkien's Catholic beliefs (including the Gregorian tune he had hummed to me) and the feudal but noble world in which his Middle-Earth creatures lived.

EPISODE III. I took a holiday near Limerick in Eire, and suddenly lived where there are very few cars and no industry. This set me thinking of the ubiquitous green in The Lord of the Rings (the publishers, under this spell, have produced our new edition with green as the second colour!). Tolkien now shone forth to me as the forerunner of the conservationists, the man who stood for forests and fields over against slag heaps and concrete jungles. Having chosen myself to live in Battersea in South London, best known for its power station, I wondered whether his instinct had carried him too far. But there is surely no doubt that he foresaw the era in which we now live, when the "age of technology" is about to be balanced by a more Franciscan attitude, and the extinction of an animal species now hurts young people as much as, earlier, the introduction of a new brand of motorbike pleased them.

OBSERVATION V. Along with many others I often found myself desiring to vanish into Middle-Earth, to escape utterly into fantasy! On the one hand this was a temptation making one unfit to live in this earth at all; on the other, the phrase Middle-Earth is but a mediaeval way of describing our own world poised between Heaven and Hell. Is Tolkien's world of fantasy an escape at all, or do we therein meet ourselves, with all our problems? His books, as those of C. S. Lewis, include well-nigh perfect creatures, Elves, eldila, great lords and magicians. These heroes, I decided, were but paradigms of humans with a sense of destiny and purpose; and Frodo, the central hero, carries mortality in the shape of a lasting wound. The heroes of Greek legend were often real people of a past time, only with wings drawn in. To sum up this paragraph, I used to feel that the Tolkien dimension was almost a danger. I then went against this, and decided I would enter it at any time I chose, but with this golden rule (with this phial glowing on my desk?) that I must be able to emerge, to shut the book, and get up from the chair. If I can't, I will earn the disapproval of the author. He was an upright man in the real world, and had no intention of casting a spell on anyone. I told him once of a young man who thought he was Frodo. "I've ruined their lives," he said disconsolately.

EPISODE IV brings me up to the present time, and to the new musical addition to the Song Cycle, "Bilbo's Last Song." This came into music instinctively as a solo-plus-chorus; the soloist of the song cycle, joined by a group. What group? The tune exists obviously as a solo melody. But my imagination is curiously full of choral voices, holding Bilbo's story within their harmonies. Yes, the soloist has in my mind slowly become Bilbo himself. It is the end of the Road, and Bilbo now craves companions. He has travelled so long; first cheerfully and jauntily as "Upon the Hearth the Fire Is Red"; then as a tree-herd through the ever-changing seasons; then as Sam Gamgee alone on the mountain passes of Mordor , picking up the dreaded ring and uttering "In Western Lands." As Galadriel and her Elves intone to him their lamenting farewell, Bilbo travels on until eventually he is again by the red hearth, reminiscing. The Elves' voices are at his door. He hears them in his mind, but in performances I began to ask my own group of singers to pick up these "outside" voices for me, while I sang Bilbo's solo. The voices at the door became real for me.

"Errantry" I began to see as Bilbo's long encore. He retells his Odyssey, but the mood has become lighter, more delicate, dare one say, faerier. Tom Bombadil's lyric has the most complex rhyming scheme ever to have been thought up. Bilbo is taxed by this tour de force, and he asks companions to help him out. This strong feeling within me has produced the chorus indications now seen in "Errantry." Though Bilbo is ever present, other voices take individual lines; short passages of harmony enrich the sound here and there, and finally give the song a coda. Bilbo has courted, fought and explored. He arrives at the remotest point, and there on the "little isles that lonely lay" he finds "naught but blowing grass." He realises that with much wandering he has forgotten his message. Bilbo takes a deep pause… then starts again "for ever still a messenger, a passenger, a tarrier." "Errantry" was the end of the song cycle, until "Bilbo's Last Song" stood on my music desk.

"Day is ended," now says Bilbo, "Journey long before me lies," (still). "But the sails are set and we are going to islands behind the sun. Rest is in sight." As I read the poem I felt a surge of hope that at last even the weather-driven mariner of the last line of "Errantry" would find a home. The Elves are with him, as they were so often with Frodo, accompanying him and consoling him. Most wonderful of all, after cycles of lifetimes on earth, the Elves have taken to the sea. "Bilbo's Last Song" is awash with sea metaphors. It was deeply moving to perform this piece at the Commemoration for Michael Flanders who loved the sea more than anything else. Could it be that at the very end Tolkien expressed another profoundly important streak in the English character, the love of the sea? Tolkien, whose name was Viking (he was proud of that), closes Bilbo's story with lines that Vikings and British alike have repeated with infinite variations:
Lands there are to West of West,
Where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

DONALD SWANN