Birds that have become proverbial for the elaborate songs they sing in flight as the night comes to an end and the Sun rises. Though no lark is directly seen or heard in any of Tolkien's tales, it is clear that they were known in Middle-earth. In particular, the song of Lúthien with which she greeted the spring and brought an end to winter is consistently compared to the high song of the lark greeting the rising Sun. It was on hearing this song that Beren revealed himself to her, though he gave her the name of another bird, calling her Tinúviel, 'Nightingale'.
A meeting with some broad similarities to that of Beren and Lúthien is described in The Later Quenta Silmarillion in volume X of The History of Middle-earth. At the meeting of Indis and Finwë in Valinor, Indis was said to sing 'like a lirulin'. Lirulin, literally meaning something like 'trill-singer', is the Elvish word used in that text to represent a lark.
Notes
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There are about one hundred different species of lark to be found around the world but, in context, when Tolkien writes of a 'lark' he is probably thinking of the Eurasian skylark. Not only is this by far the most common kind of lark to be found in the British Isles, but Tolkien writes several times of the bird 'rising'. This describes the display flight of the skylark, in which it flies upward from the ground following an almost vertical path.
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- Updated 4 November 2024
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