nerdgerhl:

aviva0017:

hellofeanor:

sometimesophie:

argumate:

erai-crabantaure:

Okay, so if you’re only familiar with the movies, then you don’t know this, but in the Lord of the Rings books when Boromir dies, Legolas and Aragorn sing a song at his funeral (no Gimli doesn’t sing). Now when I read the books, I fell in love with this song, because it’s a beautiful poem, and you should go read it. 

Well I was thinking about it again today, and one thing that still impresses me, is that canonically, Aragorn and Legolas come up with this on the spot. There doesn’t appear to be any moment in which they sit down and write this, they just sing. And it can’t be a standard funeral song because it specifically references Boromir and their journey

Now the real reason the poem is so nice is because Tolkien was a poet and loved to fit as much poetry as he logically and illogically could into his works, and naturally he had plenty of time to revise this death-song and made it beautiful, but I came up with an in-text explanation as well.

So I’ve decided that clearly this is a well practiced skill for elves and people raised by elves. They obviously spend evenings sitting in halls coming up with spontaneous poetry which they then recite to the crowds. I am adamantly convinced this happens. Seriously, read up on Tolkien’s elves and tell me I’m being unrealistic.

But to the point, thinking about this, I decided that naturally most of the poetry we see from the elves is beautiful and flowing and elegant because that’s the style they’re familiar with. But if introduced to other styles of poetry, they likely could do quite well

So what I’m saying is, elves would be really good at freestyle rapping

damn, I was yelling Elvish rap battles! before I got halfway through the post

YES. ALL OF THIS. 

I only have two tiny things to contribute to this post: 

1. If you are like me and love the Lament for Boromir, you absolutely need to go listen to this version by @everywindintheriver. She does a lot of setting Tolkien poetry to music, but this remains one of my absolute favorites; it’s quite beautiful and haunting. 
2. Elvish rap battles are 100% canon. In Silmarillion version of “The Tale of Beren and Luthien,” there’s a bit where Sauron captures Beren and Finrod Felagund while they’re on a quest, and “Felagund strove with Sauron in songs of power” or, in other words, they literally had a contest where they sang poetry at each other and tried to destroy each other with their words, so. Elvish rap battles definitely definitely happened. 

So this one time at ALEP @mythwine and I were doing a drunk history type panel about the Silmarillion and we acted out the contest between Sauron and Finrod as a rap battle.

^I witnessed this and it was spectacular

ALSO! Aragorn becomes low-key bros with Bilbo in the seventeen years between the big Party and Frodo leaving the Ring Quest where Bilbo lives in Rivendell. And their favorite past time is writing poetry together: when Aragorn gets back with Frodo, Sam, Pippen et al, Bilbo is grumpy that he hasn’t been around to help him with their latest verse.