Inspired by our family conversation at our meal time tonight — we have three boys who are already big Lord of the Rings fans — I decided to put ChatGPT to some edifying use.
I want you to rewrite the following song, Christ the True and Better Adam, by Matt Boswell / Matt Papa / Keith Getty, which compares Jesus to Old Testament figures. I want a new version which compares instead to characters from Lord of the Rings. It should include references to the different things they did, and how Christ is the better version of them. It's important to keep the lyrics in the same meter, so it could be sung to the original tune. Here is the original song:
Here's your rewritten version comparing Christ to characters from The Lord of the Rings, keeping the same meter so it can be sung to the original tune.
Honestly, I think it pretty much nailed it. It exactly captures the way the original song works, and the better you know the LOTR stories the more you appreciate some of the details. Even the scanning is better than I hoped - there are just a couple of places that would need fixing if you wanted to sing this.
I particularly liked the verse about Samwise, which I wasn’t expecting — the other characters have more obvious parallels to draw on — and at points it’s really quite touching. ChatGPT presumably is drawing on a large and wonderful corpus of hymnody that helps shape its output, but it’s done a pretty good job of pulling all that together.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed!
Updates
Some fixes I would make:
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v2 Instead of “Left His throne to seek the hopeless / Now we rise at His redeeming” which doesn’t fit the story of Aragorn and also doesn’t scan, maybe something like:
Passed the test and claimed his birthrightProved by hands that healing bringor:
Tested, tried and proven worthy,Known by hands that healing bring -
v4 Instead of “Loved beyond what we could send” which doesn’t exactly make sense, I would put:
Well deserves the name of Friend! v1 My wife points out that Frodo doesn’t really conquer, he stumbles at the end, where Christ did not. I don’t know how to fix that.