This Creature is Lore

- Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but I was startled and delighted to find that some tracks to The Hobbit score are apparently released already.  I reblogged "Radagast the Brown," and since I'm too confuddled and in a hurry to figure out where it's actually sourced from here's a link to my reblog. 
This is the first bit of Hobbit score I have personally heard.  It's so lovely to hear Howard Shore in Tolkien mode again!  I also love some of the quieter/more reflective parts of this track.  Radagast holds a certain poignancy to me, probably because I envision AIwendil as having been very delicate, birdlike, and able to glide back in the Blessed Realm; to go from that to a grubby terrestrial Man-form would bite.

- I've been kind of overly obsessed with "Trois Vierges" by Epica this week.  My pedantic muse is not terribly happy with this development, as the angsty lyrics seem to strike a chord with him (proof: portrait).  I don't suppose my testing my questionable soprano mettle on the song is helping matters either.

- For my future reference, google image search of "Atalanta Fugiens."  Yay bizarre and sometime creepy art.

For it is said indeed that being embodied the Istari had needs to learn much anew by slow experience, and though they knew whence they came the memory of the Blessed Realm was to them a vision from afar off, for which (so long as they remained true to their mission) they yearned exceedingly.
- UT, "The Istari"

I've been starting to ponder the ramifications of this for my fannish conceptions of the continuity of an Ainu personality.  "My" Ainur could not suffer memory loss or dilution, unless chained to a physical brain which has been conditioned to forget or to remember less.  This leads me to patently creepy conclusions.