Oh Dúnedain, the Rings, the Rings Are Calling is a filk parody of Danny Boy (sung to the traditional Londonderry Air, with words by Frederic Weatherly). It runs the whole arc of J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium — from the making of the world to the passing of the Ring — as a single defiant address to the Dúnedain, the surviving people of the West. The opening and closing verses answer each other: at the start the Rings are calling and are refused; at the end they call no longer.
It draws on:
Verse is the frame. The Dúnedain (“Men of the West”) are the descendants of the Númenóreans who stayed faithful; Aragorn is one of them. The Rings of Power still “call” — the temptation of dominion never quite goes away — and the singer’s answer is refusal. “No Ring shall bend our will” anticipates the song’s thesis line in verse 34.
Verse is the Ainulindalë, the creation myth. Before the physical world, Ilúvatar (the One, the creator) sets the Ainur (angelic spirits) to sing a great Music. Melkor, the mightiest of them, tries to weave in themes of his own and breeds discord.
Verse : rather than silencing the discord, Ilúvatar answers it — three times — with new themes, and Melkor’s rebellion is taken up into a greater whole he never intended. This is the pattern the whole song turns on: evil can mar, but it cannot seize authorship.
Verse : the Music was also a vision. In it the Ainur were shown the history of the world that the Music would become — grief and glory alike — before Ilúvatar gave it being. Everything that follows in the song was, in a sense, already foreseen.
Verse : the world made, Melkor descends into it and is thereafter called Morgoth (“the Black Enemy”). His marring of the newly-made world is the discord of verse 2 now worked out in stone and flesh.
Verse : Fëanor, the greatest of Elven craftsmen, makes the three Silmarils, jewels that hold the light of the Two Trees of Valinor. When they are stolen he swears a terrible oath to recover them — “the oath that darkened into night” — which drives the tragedies of the First Age, including the slaying of Elf by Elf.
Verse steps back to name the double edge: the same beauty that inspires great making also wakes the wish to own, and possession turns to ruin. It is the Silmarils’ lesson, and it is about to be the Rings’.
Verse : Ungoliant, a monstrous spirit of devouring darkness in spider-shape, helps Morgoth destroy the Two Trees and drinks their light, leaving the world in the dark. She is the ancestor (verse 26) of Shelob.
Verse : before the Trees died they bore one last silver flower and one last golden fruit. These became the Moon and the Sun — the light of the Trees was diminished and hidden, but not wholly lost.
Verse : at the end of the First Age Morgoth is defeated and cast out. The Men who fought beside the Elves against him — the Edain — are rewarded with the island kingdom of Númenor.
Verse : the palantíri were Seeing-stones that let their holders look across great distances. But seeing is not understanding: in The Lord of the Rings both Saruman and Denethor are ensnared through a palantír, shown just enough truth to lead them to despair or treason.
Verse is the Downfall of Númenor. Grown proud and afraid of death, and goaded by a captive Sauron, the Númenóreans assail the Undying Lands; Númenor is drowned. The Faithful, led by Elendil, escape by ship and found the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor in Middle-earth — “where their kingdoms dwell.” (“Damnation” is almost the literal sense: Akallabêth means “the Downfallen.”)
Verse : in the Second Age the Elven-smiths of Eregion, led by Celebrimbor, are taught Ring-lore by a fair-seeming stranger who calls himself Annatar, “Lord of Gifts.” He is Sauron in disguise, and the “secret purpose” is the One Ring (verse 17).
Verse : the Three Rings were made by the Elves alone, and kept hidden from Sauron. Their purpose is preservation — holding off decay and keeping what would otherwise fade — not power over others.
Verse : the Seven went to the Dwarf-lords. They worked on Dwarves differently: they inflamed greed and swelled their treasure-hoards, but the Dwarves proved “stubborn” — Sauron could not turn them into slaves the way he did the bearers of the Nine.
Verse : the Nine went to mortal Men. One by one they faded out of the living world and became the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, wholly bound to Sauron’s will — the fate the Dwarves escaped.
Verse : Sauron forged the One Ring in secret, in the fire of Orodruin, and poured much of his own power into it so that it could master the others and their bearers.
The Ring carries a verse, engraved in Sauron’s invented Black Speech, describing the One Ring’s power over the others. The letters are normally invisible and appear only when the Ring is heated — how Gandalf confirms Bilbo’s old ring really is the One.
Verse : Gollum (Sméagol) murdered for the Ring, and it kept him alive and twisted for five hundred years in the dark under the mountains, hating it and loving it and calling it his “precious.” But — and Tolkien never explains why — the Ring’s hold never made him a servant of Sauron. Corruption without obedience.
Verse : the Ring was made to rule kings, and it ends up in the hands of the least powerful people in the story. Cut from Sauron by Isildur, lost in a river, found by Gollum, then found by Bilbo and passed to Frodo — “by chance, was fated” is deliberate: in Middle-earth, chance is often something more.
Verse : the hobbits. Frodo and Sam carry the Ring to Mordor to destroy it — not warriors or lords, just “small hands” on which the whole outcome turns.
and : the Ents, the ancient tree-herds of Fangorn, march on Saruman’s stronghold of Isengard. He had cut down their trees to feed his war-machine and never reckoned with the forest itself. They break his works (largely by flooding them) and leave the tower of Orthanc standing but besieged, with Saruman trapped inside — “only Orthanc remains.” (Shortly after, his ex-servant Wormtongue throws the palantír of Orthanc down at the company from a window, not realising its value.)
Verse : the Riders of Rohan reach the Battle of the Pelennor Fields at dawn. Théoden’s charge shatters the enemy line; then his horse Snowmane, one of the noble Mearas, is struck, falls, and crushes him.
Verse : the Witch-king of Angmar, chief of the Nazgûl, boasts of an old prophecy: “not by the hand of man will he fall.” He is then killed by Éowyn — a woman — with help from Merry, who is male but a hobbit, not a Man. A Delphic loophole: the prophecy’s wording was true and its meaning was misread.
Verse : black ships come up the river to Minas Tirith, and the defenders despair, taking them for the Corsairs of Umbar come to reinforce the enemy. Instead Aragorn has captured the fleet and sails in under the banner of Elendil with the men of the southern fiefs — another expectation turned inside out.
Verse : Shelob, “the last child of Ungoliant,” lairs in the pass into Mordor. She stings and webs Frodo; Sam drives her off with the sword Sting and the Phial of Galadriel — another creature of great power that badly underestimates the gardener.
Verse : Frodo and Sam reach Mount Doom (Orodruin), the one fire that can unmake the Ring.
Verse : at the very edge, Frodo does not destroy the Ring — he claims it for his own. Gollum, who has followed them all the way, bites it from Frodo’s hand and, in his joy, topples with it into the fire. The Ring is destroyed by an accident of obsession, not an act of heroism.
Verse : with the Ring unmade, the power Sauron had invested in it is gone. Barad-dûr falls and his armies break and flee.
Verse : Denethor, the ruling Steward of Gondor, has been driven to despair by what Sauron let him see in the palantír. Even with the enemy breaking he will not accept the return of the King, and burns himself on a pyre. The last obstacle to the restoration is not an enemy but an office that has forgotten its purpose.
Verse : Faramir, Denethor’s son and the new Steward, is drawn back from death in the Houses of Healing by Aragorn — “the hands of the king are the hands of a healer.” Recognising the King by that, he yields up the white rod of the Stewardship. The House of the Stewards is redeemed in the son.
Verse : the White Tree of Gondor had stood dead in the courtyard for generations. Aragorn finds a living sapling — a scion of the old tree Nimloth, itself descended from the Trees of verse 6 — on the mountain above the city, and plants it. The oldest thread in the song is picked up again at the end.
Verse looks back over the whole song. In every age a tyrant rose — Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman, the Witch-king — and each time it was someone the powerful had discounted (a wizard’s discarded enemy, a woman, a hobbit, the trees) who turned the tide.
Verse is the thesis. Domination always overreaches and never finally holds — “chain and throne and crown shall hold them never.” The last line, “No Ring shall rule while hearts yet remain free,” is the song’s load-bearing line; the opening verse states it in the Dúnedain’s own words and this verse gives it in full.
Verse answers the opening. Now the Rings call “no longer”: the One is unmade, the Shadow is broken, and what the singers vowed to guard has come to pass. Same tune, same rhyme-words as verse 1 — opposite meaning.