O sing hey for the good old days--

[bellatrys]

Going through one of my notebooks, the ones I carry around for jotting down whatever crosses my mind or eye or ear, I found a marginal note of a song's lyrics that I chanced to hear in one of our three Irish pubs when I needed to get out of the wind on my walk home one night this winter, halfway - this one run by the son of one of the Chieftains,

Comments

[mrowe]

I've known that one for years *g* Remind me to rip the Christy Moore version to mp3 for you ;-)

Thanks - I found the Planxty one on Rhapsody

[bellatrys]

but that seems to be their *only* version of it, which is kind of surprising, and the Christy Moore one I found on YouTube is very poor quality.

Re: Thanks - I found the Planxty one on Rhapsody

[rikibeth]

Ah, but "Famous Flower of Servingmen" isn't trad, it's neo-trad, Martin Carthy wrote it as a sort of distillation of ballads, or so I've heard.

[shininghalf]

I find this kind of darkly fascinating in terms of, er, women's sexual agency and historically skewed perception thereof? Like, his version of what will happen to her (seven years burning in hell) seems to assume that she's an incestuous slut, and AFAIK women have often and unto this day been dumping grounds for all kinds of inconvenient sexual agency in such a manner, but it would actually (again AFAIK) be much more likely for a woman with that history to have been a repeated rape victim, and her version of what will happen to her has perhaps more of a survivor's tone...?

It also seems like a lot of older lore, particularly from Celtic cultures, wasn't so tightly plot-arcked and pedantic like fiction is now, that it tended to have more open-ended, fragmentary, unsettlingly ambivalent qualities.

Ambivalent is the word

[bellatrys]

It also seems like a lot of older lore, particularly from Celtic cultures, wasn't so tightly plot-arcked and pedantic like fiction is now, that it tended to have more open-ended, fragmentary, unsettlingly ambivalent qualities.

Partly this is the result of things being kludged together from various sources, from bits being forgotten and new bits patched in or made up, but lots of old stories, songs, legends are like that, all the world over. As you say, there was evidently a higher tolerance for uncertainty in past eras.

and her version of what will happen to her has perhaps more of a survivor's tone...?Based on my past experience of ballads of the Child ilk, and Gaelic legends, and medieval cantigas, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to understand that the gentleman/peddler/pilgrim of the story is actually Auld Hornie himself, or at least a Duke of Hell, similar to in False Knight on the Road (popularized by Steeleye Span) or House Carpenter and that audiences of old would have understood him to be trying to tempt the woman to despair

Re: Ambivalent is the word

[threeringedmoon]

I've always wanted to know the backstory of Edward, Edward myself.

Re: Ambivalent is the word

[rikibeth]

How came this blood on your right hand, that Edward?

It seems to be an English song preserved in Ireland

[deiseach]

I know Christy Moore says he got it from the singing of a traveller (itinerant, or tinker as used to be called) and it's an old song; these notes say that

As Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes say

[deiseach]

in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches