Lord of the Rings Soundtrack - opinions so far? Yes I know there are three parts. LOTR is a 3-part book not a trilogy in the conventional sense. Au revoir10 responses total.
(Hi Jeff! Thanks for poking into the conference)
HI KRJ!
I put the $18.98 that would go into buying a soundtrack into buying the $24.98 extended edition DVD.
The soundtrack music for "Fellowship" is competent symphonic movie- music hackwork, nothing more. Lots better than the music for the 1979 Bakshi film, but a poor match for the magnificent story it's trying to accompany. Biggest problems, the use of cheap sequencing rather than harmonic growth to build tension; and the use of imitation Celtic mush to represent hobbit music. Tolkien, whose hobbits were based on English peasantry, not Irish, would have emitted steam from his ears could he have heard that.
On the other hand, Tolkien would probably be happy that all his other stuff is back in publication. All sorts of obscure things of his are now in paperback at Borders...
Actually, all the races in the LotR movies seem to have at least some imitation-celtic flavor. If I remember right from seeing 'em in theaters, there's pipe-y music and ornamental knotwork everywhere you go. (Still, the music and the ceilidh-ish dancing at the Hobbit party was the most blatant of it.)
Scott - Tolkien was happy enough to get the cash for selling the movie rights way back when. He expected to hate the result (there are a lot of strong comments on the subject in his published letters), so while he might consider it a good side-effect that he's selling better, it wouldn't reconcile him to the hash that Jackson's films make of the book.
Actually, The Elves were a more "Celtic"-inspired race - the language Sindarin, which is the one which Aragorn and Arwen use together in the first film, was meant to sound like Welsh and has several "Celtic" features such as hte mutation of initial consonants in certain morphophonetic environments (to put it in quasi-linguistic terminology). AFAIK, there are NO languages in LOTR (or anywhere else such as The Silmarillion) baqsed on modern English, Anglo-Saxon or any other Germanic language. Having said all that, yes they should have used Welsh music, but Enya is known to people who would steer well clear of Celtic music, just as the film is known to people who would steer well clear of the book. I love the film; I hope Tolkien would have too. EOFYR
There most certainly are Anglo-Saxon and Germanic linguistic elements in LOTR. The Rohirrim speak and give their names in the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon - not a language based on it, but the actual language itself. (Of course Tolkien feigns that this is a translation, but in fact it's what he actually wrote in.) Various Frankish and Gothic names pop up here and there, especially in the appendices. The problem with the Enya songs is hardly that she's Irish instead of Welsh (the other Elvish language is inspired by Finnish, so the Elves are hardly pure Welsh), it's that Enya's music isn't even actual Celtic music, but what Ken once memorably dubbed Celtic lounge music; and more importantly still to me, the songs in the movie aren't even good Enya. Sorry, but a reading of Tolkien's letters, and the splenetic rages he got into about illustrations and other adaptations more harmless than this one, convinces me that he would have utterly despised these films. Their superficial resemblance to the books is only skin-deep, and is a thin veneer over a thorough failure to understand what Tolkien is about. (For a clue, read Tom Shippey's "The Road to Middle-earth.")
Point taken
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