Elvish Metrics

What enters your mind when someone asks you about elvish music? On different days, this produces different responses from me. Some days, I think of Enya and other Celtic music; specifically of Clannad and Enya's sister, Moire ni Bhraonain (Moya Brennan). Some days I think of Shakespeare's proud Titania, ill-met by moonlight, and her brooding spouse, Oberon – A Midsummer Night's Dream is surely one of the classics detailing the odd relationship between humans and faerie.

I think it is Julian May's fault when I think of the Londonderry Air, that infamous and terrifyingly sad beauty of a tune, whose most famous lyrics are found in the song Danny Boy. Tolkien, of course, is an inevitable comparison; but his music of the elves is hardly detailed, and composing in Quenya and Sindarin (let alone translating such compositions) is beyond most people.

Once in a while, you dig up the darndest things though. Here is an unusual poem. It seems to be written in some sort of 10.9.10.9 metric, much different from the Londonderry Air's lyrical 12.10.12.10. More interesting is the way the stanzas are chained; while there is a rhyme scheme of the abab sort, on closer inspection, it is actually abab bcbc cdcd dada, with the last line of stanza being echoed as the first line of the next. The last line is identical with the first, thus completing the chain.

Elves, it would seem to the anonymous author of this verse, are logical aesthetes; they craft beauty into objects with an internal logic, a recognisable structure with a fixed pattern. In like vein, it is interesting to look at the other works I've mentioned and try to figure out what kind of elves would have crafted such music or poetry.

Then again, you might end up with some sort of faerie vegetable. I speak, of course, of the awfully old chestnut: elvish parsley, king of rock-and-roll.