Ummm… Apologies for invoking thread drift again, David, but I just ran across this remark which I thought might be of interest to some, With Tolkien's approval, Donald Swann wrote the music for this song cycle*, and much of the music resembles English traditional music or folk music. The sole exception is the Quenya song "Namárië," which was based on a tune by Tolkien himself and which has some affinities to Gregorian chant.

I still maintain that I read somewhere that JRR wasn't keen on the idea of people setting music because he felt that they would get it wrong. Presumably he agreed with DS that if the tunes ran on the lines of folk melodies... But the piano, for me anyway, still isn't a ME instrument! Oh, and apparently the original album had Swann's cycle on side A, with JRR himself reading stories on side B. Never knew dat! Unfortunately, the only reasonably complete version I can find is this - unfolklike piano & operatic baritone. Alas, how un-Arda!

*The Road Goes Ever On is a song cycle that has been published as sheet music and as an audio recording. The music was written by Donald Swann, and the words are taken from poems in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, especially The Lord of the Rings.