Revision with unchanged content. Explaining the meaning or affect of a piece of music is by no means an easy task. However, some success has been found through the work of Philip Tagg, whose technique consists of breaking down a musical example into minimal units of musical meaning (called musemes), comparing those units to other musical examples possessing sociomusical connotations, and demonstrating a transfer of musical affect from the music possessing socio­musical connotations to the object of analysis. This work expands Tagg's techniques in an attempt to analyze the musical affect of Howard Shore's film score for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. After a discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien's description of the cultures of the inhabitants found in Middle-earth, this work dissects the thematic material of Shore's score, focusing on his incorporation of the music and