Looking back on it now, I think that one of the strangest things about The Lord of the Rings is that either
Aragorn and Legolas managed to compose an absolutely epic lament for Boromir in the time it took to get Boromir’s body down to the river and arranged all nicely in the boat,
or Aragon just started singing on the spur of the moment and Legolas took over for the second verse while Aragorn quickly made up the third.
That’s some Cyrano de Bergerac wizardry right there.
Consider: Aragorn and Legolas had a generic lament all worked out with Mad Libs-style blanks for relevant personal details, just in case someone kicked the bucket and nobody else was down for singing their death song
OR
We take the fact that The Lord of the Rings is multiple of translations before it gets to the reader and is, in fact, made up by a later author and they just did some sort of haiku.
oh no Boromir
he is very dead what do
put him in the boat
I can absolutely buy that Legolas made up verse two while Aragorn was singing verse one, and that Aragorn’s education was long on ‘spontaneous poetry to suit the occasion.’
Consider, it’s likely there are a couple existing templates for elegies in terms of tune, so they just needed words, and if ‘dialogue with the winds’ is also a common poetic device, the song basically just requires plugging in some suitable rhymes. Aragorn could totally hack that together in the time it took to pile up all the orcs’ weapons and arrange Boromir nicely in the boat and all that.
The wild part to me has always been that they chose to sing as Denethor. Legolas didn’t even know Denethor, and Aragorn knew that Denethor disliked him personally.
Aragorn and Legolas share broad elvish music practices, but from wildly different cultures, so it’s possible that the style of their verses did not match up at all
i just recently reread this and i noticed another wrinkle
‘You left the East Wind to me,’ said Gimli, ‘but I will say naught of it.’ ‘That is as it should be,’ said Aragorn. ‘In Minas Tirith they endure the East Wind, but they do not ask it for tidings.
i know the thing is that the east wind comes from mordor and they’re leaving it out for that reason. but this also sounds like
gimli: you left a verse for me but i’m not doing it aragorn: no no no we didn’t leave a verse for you. we don’t want you to do a verse. we’re good
This song was almost certainly a Gondorian lament, with, as someone else suggested, mad-libs style openings for personal details. Aragorn would have known it due to his time spent in Gondor or possibly written it himself in the Gondorian style – he would have used something appropriate to Boromir’s culture at any rate, not something random. Most likely Legolas made up the second verse while Aragorn was singing the first, but a verse was not left for Gimli because it’s less likely he would have the cultural knowledge to compose something appropriate. Legolas shares a language and a number of cultural values with the Gondorians that gave him a window that Gimli just wouldn’t have had.
That being said, I imagine Aragorn didn’t really intend for Legolas to start singing either, he just kind of did and it would have been more disrespectful to pick a fight about it so he went with it. Legolas’ verse has this interesting equating of the sea with death, which makes sense for him, as an Elf who was probably born in the third age. Everyone he ever knew who went to the sea probably never came back, and the concept of Valinor is probably more of a theoretical to him than to many older Elves. Sailing probably seems more like the Doom of Men to him than it really is.
This is, however, not really a cultural concept that Gondorians are likely to share, with their multiple coastal cities and specific history regarding the sea. The foundering of Númenor, while clearly still alive in their cultural memory, was still the event that led to the inception of their nation, and in other poetry regarding Gondor, such as the song about the Palántiri that Gandalf sings to Pippin, it is treated as a beginning, and not an end.
TL;DR: Legolas’ verse is a little bit off, culturally speaking, and most likely Aragorn intended to sing the whole song himself, but just kind of rolled with it when Legolas got involved.
@sweetshire said prev tags sooo
#elves are absolutely the sort of people who WOULD spontaneously make up songs like that tho #and have the innate sort of music-in-their-souls thing where even a silly flibbertigibbet like legolas could absolutely jump-in like that #and follow someone’s lead even when they start singing in an utterly unfamiliar style and concept #half the conversations in mirkwood are probably spontaneous songs rather than talking #(remember the tra-la-lally elves in the hobbit? elves just do this shit) #(the world was formed from song and elves are tied to the world more than anyone else they are music and music is them yadda yadda) #and aragorn is both a: well-travelled enough and b: familiar enough with elves in general to be unsurprised when legolas jumps in #because OF COURSE he does? he’s an elf and someone is singing a lament for a shared friend OF COURSE HE SINGS TOO? that’s what you DO
#did aragorn deliberately leave an opening for legolas to take the second verse because he knows enough about elves to know he probably woul #or was it a surprise that he just rolled with? idk #but it honestly fits both those characters very well that they would do this like this #(gimli could ABSOLUTELY make up spontaneous songs like this too; but dwarf-songs are very different and probably have more rules) #(at least more rules than wood-elf songs which are probably pretty willy-nilly compared to gondor’s cultural structures) #and the fact that aragorn’s verses sound like something Traditionally Gondorian and probably are drawn from existing frameworks #while legolas’s goes more towards the sea (the sea! he hasn’t even heard the gulls yet and already it’s seeping into his songs! my HEART!) #is exactly the sort of depth and nuance of language i expect from tolkien tbh
tags via @tathrin
