Mi Contra Fa

Slight change in direction

...to support a KASF Persona Pentathlon entry.

The Cambridge Songs date from the mid-eleventh century; they're golliardic verses found in a book given to a Canterbury monastery.  Some are historical or novelistic; some are about spring.  A few are in the feminine voice, and this one is mostly blotted out with ink.  Words in brackets are part of a reconstruction:

Ven[i] d[ilectissim]e et a et o
gratam me [in]visere, et a et o et a et o
In languore pereo let a] et [o]
[venerem de]sidero let a et o et a] et o...
Si cure clave veneris, et a et o,
[mox] intrare poteris et a et o et a et o e.

(Come to me, dearest love.., visit me, and you'll
be pleased .... I die with desire... I long to make
love .... If you come with your key.., you will
be able to enter quickly .... )

This is reproduced in Clifford Davidson's "Erotic 'Women's Songs' in Anglo-Saxon England,' p. 452-462 of something else.  He cites:

The reconstructed text is essentially as given by Karl Strecker, ed., Die Cambridger
Lieder (Berlin: Weidmann, 1926), p. 107, with "Venerem" in 1.4 added from Peter
Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric, 2rid ed. (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1968), I, 274.

It should also be noted that these are not the later Cambridge Songs recorded by Gothic Voices; those were preserved with music while these were not.

A stab at a rhymed translation:

Oh come, my sweetest lover, and ah and oh
What pleasures we'll discover, and ah and oh and ah and oh

I'm dying with desire, and ah and oh
To love-making I aspire, and ah and oh and ah and oh

So with your key come briskly, and ah and oh
My door will open quickly, and ah and oh and ah and oh

I translated the "et" in the refrain as "and" instead of as a nonsense syllable.  Davidson calls it a nonsense refrain, which I think goes to a lack of imagination on his part.

Second couplet has an extra syllable; I'm thinking "to love" would be squeezed into the same metrical space as the first unstressed syllable of the other lines.  So, two eight notes if the others are quarters.

Approximate rhyme in the third couplet; I'm rethinking that one.

Since "key" is the answer to one of the double entendre riddles, I thought I'd try to add in the others, with mixed results on a first draft:

Your onion starts tears flowing
In my garden it is growing

I have a tight small helmet
I'd like for you to wear it

The butter churn is shaking
With all the treats we're making

There's some problems with meter, with rhyme, but most importantly with tense; she's supposed to be anticipating her lover and I could only fit present tense verb in couplets 1 and 3. 

Churn my butter

So, Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival is coming up and I'm hoping to pull together a Persona Pentathlon entry.  I'm going to hope that my Wulf and Eadwacer translation counts - it isn't something that a 10th century Anglo-Saxon woman would have had, because she would not have needed a translation - but it's an SCA A&S artifact of the era.  So nyeh.

I'm working on a tafl game, and I'd like to make a brocaded tablet-woven band.  That leaves two more entries.  Assuming I run out of time, I'll probably grab another poem I wrote in the last year - either the Lay of Storvik's Founding (although again - not something a real person in 10th cen. England would have had) or one of my praise poems.

But I think I can manage a new poem/song as well.  Since Wulf and Eadwacer is solemn, I think it should be something more irreverent, based on one of the bawdy riddles in the Exeter Book.  The "butter churn" one isn't as well-known as the "onion", and I prefer either to the "helmet" and "key" ones. 

I can feel that my brain already wants to write this up into a "Pills to Purge Melancholy"-esque eighteenth century song with a refrain going something like "Back and forth and up and down, the young man stirred it all around."  Nnnnnno.  Must keep it good and tenth century.  A little refrain might not hurt, with a nod to Deor and W&E, but that's almost more of a recurring end line than a full-on modern refrain.

In a similar (but not identical) vein, I came across this neat journal article about women's songs in Anglo-Saxon England.  Their main themes are separation and desire, and it might be fun to write a few.

New year goal-setting

Last year, I thought about goals-setting around the blog's anniversary.  I have done one of the two translations I wanted to make, but have made no progress on chansons de geste.  On the other hand, in the execution of my Poeta duties, I did learn a bit about Norse verse.  The lyre book is well underway.  Writing for Poeta took more of my time than I expected.

This year, what with the new year coming just before the end of my maternity leave and the end of my tenure as Poeta, I feel like looking at new goals now.  My resolution for the New Year is to not do so much.  Or maybe, not to expect myself to do so much.  If I get it done anyway, that'd be great.  But I have two kids, a full-time job, duties as an SCA Exchequer and some semblance of a family/social life.  It is not reasonable to expect that I'll cover acres of ground in my hobby research.

I received a generous Amazon.com gift certificate as a Christmas gift, and I bought a variety of nifty books: Early Anglo-Saxon Cloth and Clothing, The Heliand (a Saxon account of the Gospel of Mark), a book on early music, a book on Turkish oral poets, an Anglo-Saxon history and a Norman account of England in the 11th century.  Good stuff and I want to start reading it.

However, I am recognizing a lamentable tendency to put off doing performance until I've read and researched one more aspect of it: I need to read up on 8th century church music, I need to finish "Singer of Tales," I need to understand the epic poetry tradition.

Partly this is because of my academic tendencies; partly it is because practicing with instruments is hard (my toddler likes to help).  But I need to take what I already know - which is actually considerable - and put it into practice more often.  I'd like to practice Wulf and Eadwacer with the lyre enough so that I can perform it.  I want to do some poems with lyre or harp accompaniment, and set a few more of them to music.

So, that's really it.  I'll read my new books for enjoyment, but I want to turn out one to three new Anglo-Saxon performances this year, without doing more research as a precondition. In addition to giving me some new material, it'll be good experience to ground future research in.

Edit: I suppose it is Deeply Unfortunate, at best, to make my first real post after receiving a kingdom Arts award contain the phrase "resolution... to not do so much."  I wish to clarify.

I love my hobby research and intend to keep at it. However, in my head, I keep an impossible to-do list (well, impossible unless one is a university professor in this topic, I suspect).  This would not be bad, if I thought of this list as "things to work towards" or "future focus areas."  But no - it registers as "to do."  Today.  Being something of a perfectionist, I then get disappointed with myself that I didn't finish my list, even in a whole year.  (Never mind that these are areas that specialists can easily spend years, plural, on. A lifetime, even.)

So what I am aiming to do in the new year is to get rid of that ever-present, impossible list.  Looking back on my goals from last March... do you see "learn neume notation and Gregorian chant structure" on there?  I don't. But I've been beating myself up about not having learned it yet. 

That's what I want to "not do so much" of.

Welcome, MftBG readers!

Wow, some of y'all stopped by!

As promised, here's the miraculous dancing pork chop and putting the devil into hell.  More things I've researched and/or written can be found on the Original Work and Class Notes pages.

The dancing pork chop is from a 13th century Spanish devotional song, one of the Cantigas de Santa Maria.  The Cantigas are a collection of 400 songs in praise of or about the Virgin Mary.  More than a few have definite humorous aspects.

"To Put the Devil into Hell" is a poetic restatement of the Third Day's tenth tale in Boccaccio's Decameron.  The tenth tale of each day (after the first) is usually risque, and this is no exception.