Reading Tolkien to the children the past few months, I can’t help but notice how much the characters in The Lord of the Rings speak of songs of heroic deeds. Many of them wonder at the writing of verse and whether anyone will be around to hear it sung. In fact, they do this more frequently than they actually sing themselves. The works exist in Tolkien’s vast appendices of course, but in the novel proper, it is mostly contemplation and analysis. I think perhaps this is Tolkien’s own voice speaking here rather than Sam’s or Merry’s.<\/p>\n
Today we still honor soldiers in various ways, but songs and ballads have fallen into disuse. It’s too bad really – not because we so desperately need to preserve the memory of war in art, but because it gave us something to sing about besides love and death.<\/p>\n
There are exceptions though. What might a modern song of man and deed look like? It could look like this wonderful song, ‘Sailing to Philadelphia’, written by Mark Knoffler and featuring James Taylor. It draws on the 1997 historical novel Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon about the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, astronomers and surveyors in the mid-1700s. What a curious topic for a song today, but gosh is it fabulous on many levels. It may be about scientists on the American frontier, but it feels closer to a lay about Helm Hammerhand than anything else you might stumble upon on pop radio.<\/p>\n