One of the coolest details in the Caradhras scene is that Saruman and Gandalf are speaking different Elvish languages.
Saruman chants in Quenya, the ancient tongue of the High Elves. After the rebellion of the Noldor and their return to Middle-earth, Quenya was largely banned by King Thingol in Beleriand and eventually became a language of lore and ceremony rather than everyday speech.
Gandalf answers in Sindarin, the language that survived and became the common speech of Elves throughout Middle-earth.
It’s a subtle piece of worldbuilding that fits both characters perfectly. Saruman reaches for the language of ancient knowledge and lost grandeur, while Gandalf speaks the one still alive in Middle-earth.
(Video by: yanad_durinul on YT)
In Spain, there’s an 800-year-old tradition called La Tuna, which began with poor medieval university students who played music in public squares for food and coins.
Today, these lively student fraternities dress in traditional Renaissance attire. They wear black doublets, puffed breeches, and a colored sash showing their academic faculty. Their long, sweeping capes are adorned with vibrant ribbons gifted by loved ones or collected during their musical travels.
Musicians play acoustic guitars, lutes, and high-pitched bandurrias. They perform energetic folk songs like pasodobles and romantic boleros. You can easily catch their spontaneous serenades in the historic plazas of Salamanca, Santiago de Compostela, and Seville.
🎬 La Leyenda del Beso - Tuna Universitária de Barcelona https://t.co/HISqx09hI6
The most famous religious song in the world was not written as a prayer.
You have heard Ave Maria a thousand times. Everyone assumes Franz Schubert wrote it as a setting of the ancient Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary, but he did not...
This melody was never composed for the Latin prayer at all.
In 1825, at the age of 28, Schubert was working his way through a German translation of a poem by the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake. It is an adventure story, set among the warring clans of the sixteenth-century Scottish Highlands. In one scene, the heroine, a young woman named Ellen Douglas, is in hiding with her father in a mountain cave. Alone and afraid, she sings a song asking the Virgin Mary for help.
Schubert set seven songs from that poem to music. Three of them were sung by Ellen, and this was the last of her three. He called it, plainly, Ellens dritter Gesang — 'Ellen's Third Song.' Its opening words were the two she would naturally cry out in her prayer: Ave Maria.
That was all it took...
The melody was so achingly beautiful that, in the years that followed, people began fitting the full Latin text of the actual Hail Mary prayer over his music. The fit was so natural, and the result so moving, that in the popular imagination the song became the prayer.
Schubert died in 1828, at thirty-one. He had written more than six hundred songs, and much of his work was still unpublished and little known beyond a small circle in Vienna.
He never knew that one melody, written for a fictional girl in a cave, would become one of the most beloved pieces of music in human history.
It is a strange and beautiful thing. The most famous prayer ever set to music began as a song about someone who was simply afraid, and reaching, in the dark, for something to hold onto. Perhaps that is exactly why it has never stopped moving people. It was a real prayer before it was ever a holy one...
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#VisitaPapaRTVE | La Orquesta Sinfónica de la JMJ y el coro de 400 voces interpretan el 'Salve Regina' al finalizar este acto multitudinario en la plaza de Cibeles de Madrid
This message is for those who appreciate the finer points of the English language...
His Lordship was in the study when the butler approached and coughed discreetly.
"May I ask you a question, My Lord?"
"Go ahead, Carson ," said His Lordship.
"I am doing the crossword in The Times and found a word the exact meaning of which I am not too certain."
"What word is that?" asked His Lordship.
"Aplomb," My Lord.
"Now that's a difficult one to explain. I would say it is self-assurance or complete composure."
"Thank you, My Lord, but I'm still a little confused about it."
"Let me give you an example to make it clearer. Do you remember a few months ago when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived to spend a weekend with us?"
"I remember the occasion very well, My Lord. It gave the staff and myself much pleasure to look after them."
"Also," continued the Earl of Grantham, "do you remember when Wills plucked a rose for Kate in the rose garden?"
"I was present on that occasion, My Lord, ministering to their needs.
"While Will was plucking the rose, a thorn embedded itself in his thumb very deeply."
"I witnessed the incident, My Lord, and saw the Duchess herself remove the thorn and bandage his thumb with her own dainty handkerchief."
"That evening the hole the rose made in his thumb was very sore. Kate had to cut his venison for him, even though it was extremely tender."
"Yes, My Lord, I did see everything that transpired that evening."
"And do you remember the next morning while you were pouring tea for Her Ladyship, Kate inquired of Will in a loud voice,
'Darling, does your prick still throb?'
And you, Carson, did not spill one drop of tea ?
That, Carson is complete composure, or aplomb."