On Behalf of the Band by lonelyvisitor

Headington, Oxfordshire, England, 1966 C.E.

crossposting from ao3! this was a feanorian week '21 production, for maglor.  every since i read whatever tumblr post that pointed me to the fun fact that the beatles wanted to make a lord of the rings movie i have been mulling over this lil maglor-in-history concept. if it's been done before it's been done before!!  subjects in which i claim zero expertise: jrr tolkien's life and manner of speaking, the chronology of when the beatles were doing what in the mid-60s, indian classical music, linguistics, the silmarillion and legendarium at large...

Read Headington, Oxfordshire, England, 1966 C.E.

Headington, Oxfordshire, England, 1966 C.E.

There’s an Elf climbing through the garage window.

Worse than an Elf: a Mod.

One eye still fixed on his work, the Professor watches the struggle unfold from across a piled desk: long legs spidering through the aperture, encased in comically tight trousers. The intruder is limber, and determined, and by his years and experience, supposedly very wise. Yet the opening is quite a small one, and the Elf-Mod quite tall (if not the tallest of his brood, though he is the last extant). It is some long, awkward moments before he manages to fully flop in, narrowly avoiding a thrashing from the lawnmower.

Yet he springs up like a cat and removes overlarge sunglasses, patting the dust off a full ensemble of discomfitingly close-fitted tweed.

The Professor looks on patiently, and speaks in greeting:

“Hail, Kanafinwë Fëanorion, Gold-cleaver, long-wanderer of the Earth…”

“Tollers!”

The Elf clasps harpist’s hands. The Professor disapproves altogether of their number of rings. (One for marriage is enough, he’s always thought; seconds and thirds will only lead to grief.) He has already begun a litany along such lines, the Elf smiling upon him as he breaks from the high tongue and sets to mumbling.

“—would have provided a proper reception, if you’d minded sending any word you were coming, and what on Earth is it you’ve done with your hair…?”

A deplorable fringe has been made of his dark locks, shaggy like the lot of them mincing round the streets. But then the Elf has always kept up appearances. In 1916, he’d appeared as a very popular officer in the Staffordshire training camps, known for regaling the troops with his ragtime renditions on the piano: someone from whom the future Professor had steered clear.

That was, until the Elf stepped in stride with him one morning, asking if he’d had breakfast yet in a decidedly vernacular version of a language that heretofore had only existed in the pages of private notebooks.

Now his terribly fashionable visitor sweeps aside some meticulous pile of mess, to take the seat across the desk that has been long-empty of any visiting students.

“Oh, come off it,” he says. “You sound like my father.”

At this the Professor allows a chuckle. He settles his hands over his waistcoat.

“Well? What business has an Elf, then, in Oxfordshire?”

The Elf raises his undeniably charming brow.

“The music business, John Ronald.”

He extracts a folded paper from the inside of his jacket.

“As well as—what are they calling it these days? The cinema industry. Bit of both, song and sight together. I think we were the ones who started that, but, ah, humanity…” He grins. “They do catch on.”

Now the Elf opens his paper with a flourish.

“My friends,” he says, “would like to make a film of your work, with original music.”

The Professor harrumphs, or perhaps harooms.

“And who might your friends be, this decade?”

The Elf sets the paper atop scattered others: a ledger, he notes at a glance, of his own genealogy, displaced playing cards, an inquiry regarding the Sindarin word for “wolverine,” a newspaper crossword sketched over with an intricate pattern of leaves.

“Four industrious Northern lads. I do hope you’ve heard of them, or I’ll be concerned you never leave this…garret.”

The Professor pulls reading-glasses from his pocket. “The word you’re looking for is ‘garage.’”

“Ah, of course. Both from the French: guerite, garir…”

The Elf has spent altogether too much time in France.

“From the Middle English on the one side and the Old Norse on the other. Varask, garite; the Gallic interlude we need not…oh, good heavens, no.” The Professor looks up from the letter. “Preposterous. The impudence of these young men—”

“Well, I thought it was quite polite. Paul dictated to me; since he’s to be Frodo I think he considers himself the creative director, but being on more familiar terms with you I did add my own flourishes—”

“—‘a psychedelic head-trip of the highest order, from the groovy dens of Hobbiton to the far-out fires of Orodruin.’ Is this your idea of a lark? Someone called Ringo playing the part of Samwise Gamgee?”

“Wasn’t there a hobbit called Ringo in your first drafts?”

“—irritants, proliferators of senseless noise; they’ve a band of imitators, you know, practicing just down the street from here. Can’t get a moments’ peace once they strike up. We all must submit ourselves to cacophony, this so-called rock and roll…”

“I thought you’d rather like the term. Assonance, alliteration, a Germanic thrust, rukkōną…ah, though I suppose it’s that troublesome French again, tempering the effect. Rollen, roller, rotulare. Any word so undulate must have its roots squarely in the Romantic.”

The Professor removes his spectacles. “You may tell your insect friends ‘no.’”

The Elf spindles his legs again, draping one over the arm of the chair. Had a student ever taken a posture so disrespectful, the Professor might have smacked them with their own lecture notes.

“This is most disappointing, Professor Tolkien.” And now he’s pouting, the fop. “That George Harrison has some charming ideas about the Wizard Gandalf carrying a tambura and singing spells in the Carnatic style. Having spent not a short while in the company of Venkatamakhin while he was writing his Four Pillars, I thought I might assist the young chap in creating something less derivative…as it stands, I think his concept of raga would be an affront to my old friend’s sensibilities….”

“I’ll tell you of an affront to sensibilities,” mutters the Professor.

The Elf fixes suddenly gleaming eyes on him.

“And yet is it not music that binds your world together?”

There is a thread of threat in his speech—in the voice that had, once, perhaps been set to help shape his father’s words, and the doom of all his people. Sealed his own fate, of desperate wandering, for it hasn’t all been jolly traipsing about the subcontinent and Savile Row. Oftentimes on their encounters the Professor has found him far more brooding; it is refreshing to be in the presence of a merrier Elf, if his merriness has taken a turn for the menacing.

And so the Professor lets the poet weave his persuasions, or is perhaps held captive by them.

“A true representation of your work would have to have a great deal of Song. For what is Eä, that is and was, but the continuous chanting of the Theme? What holds your great heroes to their tales? What would you have seen, without my singing it to you?”

The Elf does not sing now. Yet it seems, for a moment, that the Professor is very young again, and a stranger who somehow speaks the secret tongue is sitting before him with an ancient chant on his lips—set to no accompaniment, impossibly incorporating a dozen interlocking harmonies—a record of history, a nursery rhyme, a dance-tune, a dirge…

“You owe everything to the Music, Professor,” his visitor incants. “And the Music will not stop for you, and your particular tastes, for it is ever evolving, taking new forms as it sees fit. This century the forms are multiplying—amplifying. Can’t you see? The Music will move on without you, and with it the world.”

The Elf’s beguiling oration frays, at the end, with that old sorrow.

How long had he walked the western edge, clinging to his own compositions and their memories of a hidden past?

The Professor speaks kindly, but to the point: “Are you quite done?”

The Elf sadly reconfigures his posture. When he has come to sit like a normal person again, he sighs.

“I suppose this was a fool’s errand. The lads are going to be very disappointed.”

“Hmph. You’ll thank me for not allowing the work to be lowered to their standards. Our work.” The Professor is digging about his desk-drawers. “Now, while I have you, there are matters on which you might shed some insight…”

“I deem that hardly fair!” objects the Elf.

“…if I can find the blasted—oh, where does everything get to…it was concerning the last High King of the Noldor-in-Exile…”

“If you’d like me to tell you who Gil-galad’s father was, then you can kindly dial the number on that letterhead and let them know how much you’re looking forward to John Lennon’s interpretation of Gollum.”

“…scarcely an even trade, the desecration of The Lord of the Rings for a minor genealogical detail…”

“Is it minor?”

The Professor lowers a stack of papers. “And what is your implication?”

Yet the Elf only leaps from the chair, donning his ridiculous sunglasses.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

The Professor scoffs.

“…a hindrance and headache, you are—‘go not to the Elves for counsel,’ indeed…”

“Love you, too, darling.”

There is a very tender press of lips to his wrinkled brow—a gesture to which the Professor, in fact, has no objection. Theirs has been a very long acquaintance. So much that it might, perhaps, be called a friendship.

And this is the last they will see of each other, in this world or any. He knows it somehow, through the parting kiss: a small and silent thread of song.

When he looks up the Elf is making his way back toward the window.

“Wouldn’t you rather go out the usual way?” calls the Professor. “You can open the garage, there, with the pulley.”

The Elf looks back over his tweeded shoulder. “I have a reputation to maintain for strange disappearance. Norwegian Wood was about me, you know.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about …”

“No? We’ll have to send you a pressing, then, for your gramophone.” A heart-piercing snatch of his singing: “I was alone, this bird has flown…After John wrote that, I said to him, have you ever watched a woman turn into a bird? It’s not a romantic sight.”

The Elf continues his entrancing hum as picks he way through garden-trowels and rakes.

“So, I lit a fire, isn’t it good…you know it really ought to have been Telerin wood.”

He sighs, coming to stand with his hands on the windowsill, and says mostly to himself:

“Gods, but I’ve seen too many years of this Earth.”

The Professor feels a stirring in his chest—something of gravity, something of guilt.

“Namárië,” he says. “Nai hiruvalyë Valimar…”

“Yes, yes, and all that.” The Elf hefts himself over the ledge, improbably as he’d come. “Maybe even I shall find it.”

---

Chapter End Notes

the Prof quotes from his/Galadriel's Namárië:

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar --> Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar.
Nai elyë hiruva. Namárië! --> Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!