Mi Contra Fa

KASF Report

There's a devil of a choice to make at KASF - stay by your own work to talk to people about it, or wander around to see everyone else's.  I tried to do a bit of both.

I was feeling a little down about my display for a while.  Compared to some of the excellent work at KASF, it seemed a bit underwhelming.  Then someone asked me a music question, and I started yakking, and I remembered: Oh yeah, this is what I actually do and where my depth of knowledge is.

I met Wyglaf of Stierbach again; he also does Anglo-Saxon research, and he had entered the Persona Pentathalon with a 6th century Anglian entry.  He's learning Old English and did some C&I based on Kells and Lindisfarne - stuff I've been meaning to get to, and haven't.  His other thrusts - woodworking and metalworking - are totally out of my wheelhouse.  I thought the bow and arrows he made were really nifty!  He's also interested in my lyre class, if I ever teach it. (Note to self: Make more student lyres.)

I had heard that Jocelyn d'Outremer made books but had never seen one.  Finally saw one.  HOLY SCHNICKIES.  That's some awesome book-binding there.

Also saw a lady who does enameling - she made a replica of... gah, it's a gold-and-garnet eagle and I can't recall if it's Anglo-Saxon or Frankish or Vandal or what.  Shoot, all my event notes are at home; I'll have to update this report later.

There was so, so much stuff that was beautiful and amazing that I'm not mentioning. 

One lesson learned: Make sure to have note cards with me when I venture out.  Talk more.  Leave comments.  Get out of the Introvert Zone a bit.

The Duke Gyrth Oldcastle Memorial Poetry Smackdown was awesome!  My poetry was well-received, which was nice, but I think the standout piece had to be Master Dunstan's object lesson on why "A&S" must always  be carefully enunciated.  I owe Master Bran copies of my entries, come to think of it...

Feast was deee-licious!  I sat with Gratiza, the other Storvikii remaining on-site, and some lovely ladies of Bright Hills.  Very convival supper.  Then - clean up.  I took off my bling for chair-schlepping duty, and I'm not sure if all of it made it home.  I'll check my pockets and pouches one more time, then hope the autocrat reports a lost and found. :/

Travel note: It may be better to get a hotel near the site for the night before the event, and then leave the event, drive until I'm tired and find a hotel there in the future.

 

A Brief Satire

Naturally, as soon as I decide to hang up that hat, it figures itself out.

An arm as weak as brittle straw
A strike as slow as a frozen stream
A love as hollow as the body of my harp
- This fate to them who abuse the movement of the righteous Spirit

When it was proposed to alter Corpora to explicitly permit the participation of same-sex couples in Crown, a virtual army of strawmen appeared, claiming that some nefarious people might abuse the new rule to give their household twice the chance of gaining the throne: that Sir A and Sir B could fight for each other in the lists.  Or perhaps the boogeyman would be that Sir A would fight for Sir B one list, and then Sir B would fight for Sir A in the next?  I confess I'm not exactly keen on the rules for who may fight, past "current sitting King may not."  But the gist of it was, Sirs A and B would be straight men taking advantage of a rule meant to allow same-sex couples to fight for the ones they hold most dear.

I devoutly hope that no one in our chivalrous and courteous Society would be so brash and so grasping as to twist the rules in this fashion.  If so, this curse be upon them.

Information on early Irish verse isn't easy to come by.  It was apparently very complicated and may not translate well into English forms, but alliteration, consonance and assonance were said to play roles. I think I hit some of that.  The Comic Irishman's second chapter, The Masque of Satire, gives some further examples of early curse-style satire, and the rule of three seems to be in effect.

Looks like class notes on early Irish poetry.

Bibliography and links on medieval Irish poetry.

CELT's page of Irish medieval poetry.

JSTOR article on Praise, Satire and the Early Irish Poet.

 EDIT: Changed out 'righteous' for 'generous.' 

KASF Smackdown 2

In years past, as much as I am aware, the 'smackdowns' have generally been good-humored take-downs, either of good friends present (who knew it was in jest) or else of historical figures that no one really cared if they got smacked down or not.

I actually have a topic I wouldn't mind writing a genuine satire on.  I should probably check and see if that'll fly.  Don't want to harsh the mellow.

But here's my linkarama:

Cairpre Mac Edaine's Satire upon Bres Mac Eladain, "the first satire in Ireland."

(book chapter) 'Irish Satire' in A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern.

The Land of Cockaygne, a 14th century Middle English satire written down in Ireland.

Satirical Narrative in Early Irish Literation, link goes to a PDF of a PhD thesis.

Definitely an interesting exercise.  Early Irish satire isn't much like Jonathan Swift.  It's more like curses.  The PhD thesis is purporting to show that there is an unexamined narrative tradition, one that sets out a tale of general outrage rather than just saying how stingy some dude is, so I'll be interested to see what I can glean from it.

If the Irish don't pan out, there's the Romans.  But I've been meaning to get a grip on Irish satire for a while.

 

No, Really: Keep a Logbook

True Story: I've been assigned a data analysis task at work. Based on an ancient (4 years old!) email chain that happened to get re-forwarded to me, I saw that I had apparently written software for this very task in 2008.  I do not even remember doing that.

A search of my hard drive has turned up some supporting software, but nothing like a "main" file.  And the files were in unexpected locations - tiny subfolders with obscure names, nothing to indicate they contained analysis code.

Hoping against hope my 4-years younger self had a clue, I hauled out my lab notebook from 2008 and flipped to the spring.

"Data by hand: "

"Data by automated analysis: "

SELF! What program? Located where on your computer? HOW DID YOU DO THE ANALYSIS?

Notes. Good ones. Take them.  *facepalm*

Beginner's A&S Class: Notes/outline

The notes from my BotB class.

If you're in the Storvik area, I'll be teaching the class again at our A&S night, October 17.

Battle on the Bay: Report

No written feedback on the lyre display, but folks seemed to think it looked good (and in truth, the most obvious bit of ugly is the reverse of the tuning pin bar, and you don't see it unless you flip the instrument over and look for it).  A few people got the joke of the documentation title ("Stoppiaþ! Hamor tīma!" for "Stop! Hammer time!")

I brought my Silvershell lyre along and played a good bit.  A few people were interested in seeing how it was played, and I was happy to oblige with a quick demo.

The class, "A&S Research for Beginners," had no beginners.  I kibitzed about performing A&S research with Richard Wynne for a bit, then a Caidian Minister of Arts and Sciences asked to hear my basic schpiel.  If I hadn't needed to run back home right after the class ended, we might have had a discussion on A&S, documentation and competition - she started to say that she would have structured the class by teaching the judging sheet, to my consternation.  I had consciously avoided linking authenticated research to judging, as if that were the only reason to do it.  I suspect there was some confusion on my part, but I had to run before we could really get into it.

Roland: Tunes

Remember this page of Norwegian folks songs?  #10 on that page is our song.  Click through to find two different tunes given.  The first tune is the one used by Trio Medieval and Glitterind.  The second tune is the first one given in that Danish 1908 book of Faroese tunes; there are four tunes total given.

They are similar but not the same. Most notably, in the second and fourth lines, the more modern contour proceeds through scale degrees 5-3-4-1-3-2-7-1.  The dance tune proceeds 5-3-4-3-1-3. (EDIT: Scale degrees are for Dorian mode.  Add 1 to all the numbers to get the scale degree for the major scale.)

The "2-7-1" cadence is a major folkie thing, IMO.  The Faroese dance does give an alternate tone on degree 2 for the very final cadence; it gives 3-5-1, with a smaller note on 2 written under the 5.  Harmony on a fourth?  A variant? I'm not sure.  And some of the other tunes at least do use scale degree 1, although not that I noticed in that particular telling pattern.

I'm not surprised that I had a hard time telling that the tunes were in fact different at first look.  But now I know why the video of the Faroese dancers didn't quite sound like the other performances.

I'll have to give a more careful listen to some of the Faroese tunes.  It's sort of a philosophical question - all the tunes under consideration are only documentable to the 20th century, but the Glitterind tune with that cadence sounds even more 20th cen to my ears.  But it also sounds good.

Tablature for comparing the two tunes under the cut.

Roland: Revision

"Olivant" in the original was not "Oliver" but rather "oliphant," the elephant ivory horn.  I was wondering why Oliver was blowing Roland's horn!

The original has "blaumen" (blue men?) for the Moors.  Okay, the religious war theme is tricky enough already without going there.  I just call them Moors for the most part.  I use 'heathen' a few times, hopefully understood as a descriptor and not a pejorative?

I saw in the Faroese songbook that their version has masculine rhyme, too.  So nyah!

Tidied up the scansion in verse 3, corrected a few typos.

-----------------

"Six of my earls will stay at home to guard the rings of gold
The other six in heathen lands are swinging their iron cold"

CHORUS
Ride they out from Frankish lands on horses finely saddled
Blow the horn Oilphant at Ronsavollen      (or Roncevaux, dealer's choice)

Raised they up their silken sails high upon the masts
Sailed they to the heathen lands before two weeks had passed

Oaken oars and anchors strong then touched the clean white sand
Next was Roland, king's own friend, the first upon the land

Slaughtered they at Roncevaux for two days and for three
On Roland's sword the Moors did die; a scythe they could not flee

The sun in the sky was blotted out as Moors their spears did throw
A frightened fellow Frankish man asked Roland his horn to blow

He set the horn to his bloody mouth, the blast heard o'er the fray
Over mountains went the sound; it was heard three days away

Charlemagne the mighty king cries with grief and woe:
"What has passed with my own dear friend that he sounded such a blow?"

Charlemagne the mighty king came to the heathen land
Dead lay Roland, king's own friend, his sword still in his hand

Buried at home were the mighty earls and many a tear was shed
Their ship was full of gems and gold and the heathens were left for dead

Roland: More help from Sweden

J.S. from Sweden confirms that the Trio Medieval/Glitterind tune for "Rolandskvadet" is a popular, common tune to sing in Norway.  He provided fifty Norweigan variants on the lyrics, as well as a link to this page.  Of the contents of that, he says:

[I]n the 1840s, Norwegian folk song collector Magnus Brostrup Landstad found 27 stanzas of the Roland song in a handwritten songbook of Laurantz Groven from ca 1800, but there were pages missing in that book, so that the first "complete reconstruction" of the Norwegian version was published in 1890 by Moltke Moe who "reconstructed" it by filling the gaps with his own poetry and changing the order of stanzas to make it more congruent with the Karlamagnús saga. Moe's lyrics are those which are most often sung in Norway today.

The same website says that there exists only one tune from Norway to this ballad which was collected by Hans Seeberg and Olea Crøger in the 1840s from a singer in Seljord in the Telemark region. However, it is seldom used; the Norwegians mostly sing the ballad to a Faroese dance melody which was introduced in 1934 by Klara Semb in her songdance circles. Since the Faroese ballads usually have much longer refrains than the Norwegian ones, the Norwegian lyrics were not long enough to fill out the melody, and so Hulda Garborg translated the Faroese refrain to Norwegian.

Which Faroese song?  J.S. points to this Danish collection of tunes, published in 1908.  Songs 54a-d on pages 124-125 are all variants of the Faroese "The Battle of Roncevaux," and their refrain is exactly the one used in the popular Norwegian version of the song.  And here's a YouTube of the Faroese dancing that dance. 

It's... doesn't sound quite the same, except the cadence on the refrain, but when I look at the transcribed sheet music, I definitely see the very strong similarities.

Trying to find that 1840s tune, I turned up some field notes preserved in... a national library?  I don't see this ballad on those leaves, but the library assigns it the title "Ludvig Mathias Lindeman: [Folkemelodier II]. 'Melodier fra Thelemarkeni."  Seeberg and Crøger are recognized as 'Creators' but Lindeman is the 'collector.'

Lindeman! We've seen him around here before.  "Melodies from Telemark."  Another page of music, with the Ramund that confounded me  before.  Searching for Lindeman's book brings me back to the same collection I examined before, and could not find any Roland in.  Either the referenced website is in error, and there is no tune for Roland in Lindeman's collection, or I'm just not recognizing it.  (Or there's another collection, possibly entitled "Melodies from Telemark," that's not available digitally.)

Anyway!  I think that runs the song's provenance pretty much into the ground.  So what do I do with it?

I'd be lying if I tried to pass it off as "Anglo-Saxon."  It's Continental, in subject matter and in poetic form. 

The tune is as neo-medieval as anything I'd come up with myself.  It's got a narrow melodic range (a fifth) in D-Dorian, and has a simple contour with lots of flat spots.  Guido d'Arezzo would approve of the construction, I think.  And the tune is catchy.  The subject matter is period.

I think it'll make a good performance, albeit an "SCA appropriate" rather than a period one.  But despite its range fitting exactly onto my lyre, I think it should be done a capella or else with harp.  I'll think that over, because of how tempting it is to do epic material with an instrument that probably accompanied epics, but the rhyming form is just plain later than the instrument. 

Flute Research

I got my copy of Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn in the  mail yesterday!  Flipping to the section on bone flutes, I found...

Fipple flutes?

Fipple flutes.

Sigh.

I have an ILL out on some of Graeme Lawson's reports on Anglo-Saxon bone flute finds. No offense to Arthur MacGregor, but if there's only two such bone flutes cited in his book, I may as well check them out in the original archaeological reports and see what the musicologist has to say about them.  Then I go back to the bone book to figure out how to make the thing.