A Fantasy Trope in the Making: The Song

[Vorondir]

The Song

Way back in the distant 2009, the video-game Dragon Age: Origins came out, featuring a vast and epic fantasy storyline. Now, here's the interesting part: at a key moment during the story (perhaps three-quarters in, right before the climax) the bard in the party, going by the name of Lelianna, sings a gorgeous Lament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAANKFPchtA

Now, this game's developer, Bioware, had often paid for the rights to use a song that someone on the team really liked to play during the credits, but this is the first time, as far as I know, that anyone commissioned a full scale song to appear as an in-world creation of some character within the narrative. It didn't stop there. Bioware kept featuring songs like that in every sequel they produced (such as the particularly catchy tavern ditty 'Enchanter come to me'; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gtFtH3sW-M) and other companies started taking notes. Bethesda featured a couple of bard songs of their own in, their juggernaut of a fantasy game, Skyrim. Somewhat more recently, CD Projekt Red , when they were making, their Magnum Opus, Witcher 3, they featured this very clearly Lelianna-inspired ballad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=823yuWz0lto

Which, in turn (and in my humble opinion), must have inspired the Netflix adaptation to feature Dandelion's 'Toss a Coin to Your Witcher':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waMkFIzvDpE

Pish posh, you say? Hogwash? Balderdash? Hah! Then how do you explain, that when I watched Amazon Prime's Wheel of Time last Friday I ran across THIS?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSOmKtBdV2w

Now, the only thing remaining is for us to speculate what will the big Song be in the Lord of the Rings TV Series? What would you like it to be? What do you expect it to sound like?

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Vorondir: Well I have a song that I like very much. >>Passing of the Elves full song<< That stands for me what Lotr could be. I have a bit of passion for the elves, so leaving ME is not what I ever really liked.

[Androthelm]

Not sure how helpful this is, but the presence of songs in the ASOIAF books and, by extension, the TV show may have contributed to this developing trend. Thinking of "Rains of Castamere" for instance, or "Bear and the Maiden Fair".

[Fuin Elda]

I mean lets face it Pippins Song in the Return of the King also very much helped in this, and we had Hey HO to the pub we go in the Two towers and Aragorn singing the song of Luthien in the extended edition of Fellowship (I don't remember any other songs sung by characters in the first) - I think this was the first times I'd seen written songs added to the films from a book. That said before 2001 I'll admit I wasn't so into high fantasy enough to know if songs were being pulled into films so it may be from before then as well but for me it was PJ that started this trope in terms of new media representations of song in high fantasy.