"I have a guess or two."

"Oh?"

"Wouldn't know how to put it to words; I'm not very musical. But I think I could pick out some of the sad ones from your repertoire."

"If you want to know what they are about I could hazard summaries."

"That sounds like fun!"

"Do you have a favorite?"

"If I said 'the first one I heard all the way through, when you were singing in the garden' would that be enough to identify it—?"

"Yes! I have a very good memory. That one is a little sad but not really on a scale that tends to get to me; it's about a nightingale on Endorë encountering nightingale-scaled travails and eventually dying and Eru is able to notice most of them but by the end he's scaled down to a less obsessively birdwatching form and it dies by itself and no one pays attention."

...he laughs. "Wow. And that's 'a little sad', is it? What qualifies as outright tragic, in that case?"

"My favorite really tragic song is one about the invention of a - a thing, that we have, it's not magic but it might be simpler to understand it that way. The invention of a blessing that lets Elves look at orcs and see them as Elves. We have a hard time being around things that aren't beautiful and orcs were deliberately crafted to offend our aesthetic sensibilities; I can spend about a day in an orc city if I don't look at anyone too closely and know I'm going to go home to my husband and sing with him a lot, and I'm on the high end of tolerance. So if we invented such a thing it'd let us socialize with them a lot more than we currently do. And the song is about an Elf who in this way falls in love with an orc, so deeply that she manages to woo this orc and overcome general orcly annoyance with Elves, and they get married, and decide that since they are so in love surely, if she turns the blessing off -"

"Ouch."

"Yep."

"Are there any songs that aren't sad?"

"Sure. Festival songs are often cheerful. Songs that don't tell stories at all and are just about nature or something are perfectly non-tragic. People write songs about miscellaneous events and do not invariably prepare them for submission to one of Eru's contests."

"Do you have any happy favourites, or is that unfashionable?"

"I don't mind being unfashionable. My favorite happy one is a song about the flight to Valinor from Endorë when we first settled it."

"Oh, what was that like?"

"It was so exciting. Oromë found us - the Valar didn't know that there were Elves yet - and he made us ships with miniature ecosystems in each one and loaded us all up and brought us there and it took two and a half Valian Years, or twenty-five Endorë years - I'm not sure exactly how long yours are but I think closer to Endorë's. And we planned how we'd live in Valinor and I talked to Oromë a lot about Ainur."

"Miniature ecosystems? How big does a ship need to be for that—?"

"Quite large! Elves don't do well in confined spaces, to hold us without anybody dying of it for two and a half Years they had to have about as much area as this island."

"Wow. About how much of keeping them going was 'magic' and how much was 'interesting new uses of steel'...?"

"That trip it was magic. It can be done without, but it took us a long time to learn how. Largely because we require such large spaces to make such long trips; for a shuttle to the moon and back they can be much smaller."

"—that's not a hypothetical example, is it."

"It's not!"

"What's flying to the moon like?"