2023 The Lays of Beleriand (George Holmes)

Release Date: 2023.01
Reader: George Holmes
Language: English
Organization: Library of Congress
Publisher: American Printing House for the Blind
ISBN: n/a
Duration: 18 hours 0 minutes
Unabridged: Yes
Country: USA
Licenced: Yes
Formats: Digital
NLS Book Number: DB 113185

Produced by American Printing House for the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled service of the Library of Congress. This reading was made purely for eligible members of this special library service in the USA and not available for commercial release.

George Holmes has recorded well over 500 books in all genres for the National Library Service & commercially. In 2002 he won the Alexander Scourby Award (recognising excellence in talking book narration which he won for The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry). Since he recorded The Fall of Gondolin, he has performed all subsequent Tolkien readings for APH.

This recording ended the 37-year hiatus between The Book of Lost Tales, Part 2 (1986) and the rest of the series. George Holmes avoids a sing-song cadence, instead emphasizing the stressed syllables of the alliterative verse to mimic the “Old English” feel Tolkien intended.

Much of this book consists of the Lay of the Children of Húrin, written in Old English-style alliterative verse. This requires a narrator to emphasize the “stave” (the repeating initial sounds) rather than a rhyming end-sound. Conversely, the Lay of Leithian uses iambic tetrameter couplets. Production notes for high-level APH poetry recordings indicate that narrators like Holmes are trained to “read through the line”—meaning they follow the natural sentence structure rather than pausing at every rhyme, which prevents the reading from sounding repetitive or “nursery-rhyme-like.”

A significant portion of the 18-hour runtime is dedicated to the line-by-line analysis of the poems. Holmes uses a subtle shift in register – his voice becomes slightly more clinical during the commentary and more resonant during the reading of the Lays themselves. The final 35 minutes of the recording feature Holmes reading the full Glossary of Names. He provides a meticulous pronunciation of the phonetic roots.

The digital file is indexed with DAISY Level 2 and 3 markers, allowing a listener to jump from a poem directly to the specific commentary section that discusses that stanza. The APH utilized a pronunciation guide vetted by the NLS, ensuring that Holmes’s pronunciation of the “Gnomish” (early Elvish) names in the Lay of Leithian remained consistent with the later, more familiar Silmarillion forms.