It doesn’t have a name, really. It’s just a nice tall hill in the Green Hill Country (so, ipso facto, one of many such hills). But we started calling it Two Tree Hill when we held Ales and Tales there last night. It does get tedious to repeatedly explain “You go south out of Frogmorton, through the apple orchard across the road, and then up the hill till you find the spot with two trees standing alone. That’s the stage.” In other words – one of our more rugged and obscure Ales and Tales locations, but as beautiful as only the Shire can be!
And as you can see from that picture, with Harperella on vacation, Locney and Lennidhren acted as hosts again. This is fun!
Guess what song Casinthelion played?
Dringil played “Morning has broken,” if I remember correctly (I really ought to write down song titles and not just take screenshots for these reports…), fittingly, just as the sun was rising after Lennidhren’s tale of doom and gloom!
Laerlenn and Gaiagil played a beautiful duet on harp and flute.
(…and I’ve totally forgotten the importance of taking pictures during the actual song, haven’t I?)
The Book Club Band presented a song of the dwarves from The Hobbit, chapter 15.
We had a lovely solo from Hanniel…
And guess what I forgot to take any pictures at all of? I’ve transcribed another song from The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle: a setting of Tolkien’s poem “Errantry.” It’s a fast and furious, merry and quirky tune that took me quite a bit of practice with the solo version to manage to time the singing of the lyrics just right. And as a result, when Lennidhren sang “Errantry” at Ales and Tales this week, with Old Winyards providing the music, not a single snapshot did I grab! Oh well, we shall just have to perform it again sometime. But maybe not in a week when I am also singing for Book Club Band *and* telling a story. Lennidhren needs throat lozenges after last night…
At the Fall of Gondolin storytelling event on Elendilmir, we discussed how much fun it would be to have the tales of our little epic told at Ales and Tales – as a serial story, one chapter or partial chapter a week. So this week Lennidhren started it out with the tale of Rog and the Fall of the Hammer.
Gaiagil directed Old Winyards this week, with a beautiful dance set to which we set a circle dance…
A line dance…of varied sort; I fear my directions to arrange the lines were not as clear as they needed to be in such a grassy spot.
And we finished with a pair of partner dances!
Here’s Tinki passing out the ale and pipeweed at Nibbles and Nobs, near the apple orchard, while Rosiee plays a tune for the crowd.
And finally, I hear there was some incident with my co-host while Lennidhren was down the hill a ways organizing the musical mentoring (for which, where have all our minstrels gone? We only had three available to teach last night…). Alas, of this I have no screenshots. Someone hopefully got a few? Or can at least tell me the story?
A very lovely spot for an event. I love the Shire