The Venerable Lutes is a light poetic form, originating in The Unbridled Dale. The rules of the form are applied by poets to produce individual poems which can be recited. The poem is divided into two to four tercets and a series of ten-line stanzas. Use of assonance is characteristic of the form. A form of parallelism is common throughout the poem, in that certain lines often contrast underlying meaning. Each line has sixteen syllables.