Mi Contra Fa

New cat-egory of repertoire?

I dwell within the lands of fair Atlantia, between the mountains and the sea.  And as it happened one day, someone noticed that "Atlantia" was but one letter away from "Catlantia," and a virtual fellowship devoted to pet memes and sharing pictures of actual pets was born.  As the Bardic War looms, it seems to me that it would be good to represent Catlantia - as an Atlantian ally, naturally.  

"Pangur Ban" is a natural period piece to perform.  I have Henry Beard's "Poetry for Cats," and I already perform his "Grendel's Dog, from Beocat" often.  Geoffery Chaucer puts a parable about cats in the mouth of the Manciple.  And there's something about a possible Cattes Tale?  (Is this an academic joke? Signs point to yes).  And naturally, that granddaddy collector of animal tales, Aesop, has a few with cats.  And a few more.

And here is a lengthy ballad about a Mayor of London and how he gained his fortune by a cat, just post-period in 1612.  Alas that the cat does not play a larger, more Puss in Bootsy role - he just sells the cat to a king for gold.  And lo, a tune is given!  I need to check out the page a bit to see from whence the tune comes - at a guess, 18th cen at earliest - but it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Edits: But wait, there's more...

• The Wife of Bath compared to a cat
• Pseudo-Chaucerian cat poetry from Medieval Pets
• I wondered if cats featured in Reynard tales!  Evidently yes, but the story is not one a cat-lover would enjoy.

Working with themes: Home

In two weeks, I'm to teach a class on "Writing Poetry That Matters."  It boils down to "write poetry that is honest, that says something, that you care about."

In about 5-6 weeks, it will be Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival, with the annual Duke Gyrth Oldcastle Memorial Poetry Smackdown.  And the entry poem's theme this year is "home."  Nothing immediately jumped to mind, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice what I'll be preaching in class.

I had two threads to pull here: what home means to me, and what period verse form would be best to express what it means.  Anglo-Saxon alliterative is my preferred form, but I can work in others.

"Home" in Anglo-Saxon Verse

Most famously, Anglo-Saxon poets sing of the hall-joys: music, song, drink, warmth, friends.  These are sometimes compared favorably to the cold and wet of a sea-voyage (The Seafarer) or a subterranean cavern (The Wife's Lament), and unfavorably to the joys of Heaven (The Seafarer, if I remember correctly).  They are inverted when discussing Grendel and his mother, the outcasts whose dwelling places are the marshes and meres (Beowulf).

What is home to me?

The obvious approach would be to write up the SCA as the hall, and its fellowship as hall-joys.  Except I wasn't feeling it.  I do love the SCA, and I do remember that feeling of home-coming when I first joined, but there's a coziness and ease that 'home' ought to have that my time in the SCA doesn't.  Upon reflection, I think it's just being around people in general.  You have to watch how to talk, how you act, what you say, from angles that aren't always obvious to me.  I have to make sure I'm being adequately Peer-like, which means paying close attention to other people's needs and wants.  It's tiring.  It's good work, no mistake, but it's work for me.  It is not a relaxed 'home' sensation.

Well, what about mundane home?  We were lucky enough as children to travel once or twice a year, to places that were not relatives' homes, and my parents generally encouraged us to call whatever place we were staying "home."  Home is where your pillow and underwear are.  I wondered if maybe there'd be some Spanish picaresque form that would be helpful for capturing this sort of wanderer's sense of home.

Then, a few days later (yesterday), I went for a walk in the snow.  It was quiet and peaceful.  I had no to-do list, no chores, no one who needed anything from me, and I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders.  This was home.  I could just be, here, outside and alone, even if the wind stung my cheeks and made me turn my back into the wind.  

I compared it mentally to my actual home, with my actual family in it.  I love the house and the family, but they are not sources of rest.  Even leisure activities in the house involve voices - voices in books, on screens, words words words that chatter and chatter ceaselessly.  (I am the sort of reader who hears each word in her head.)  Only outside, with its open spaces, invited the kind of rest I was looking for in home.

Bringing the inspiration back to the form

This actually locked right in.  The poem will tell of a woman's search for home.  We will meet her on the ship bringing her to her new husband and kin.  She reaches the hall, but as its mistress, she is responsible for ensuring her husband's men are kept harmoniously, working constantly to soothe tempers and smooth ruffled feathers.  Retreating to her own cottage, she finds it full of more obligations, domestic chores like spinning and child-rearing.  When she leaves the cottage and goes to the wild mere, she finally feels the release and peace of "home."

It starts off period-ish enough; the ending is wildly modern.  Old English poetry reinforced community values, and those emphatically did not include "running off to the mere to become a semi-aquatic monster."  A more period poem would have the woman looking to Heaven for her true home, perhaps in death or in a nunnery.  

Traps

It's easy to run into a bunch of "wild woman" cliches here.  "Aw, the suburban white-collar worker thinks she loves nature, how cute."  It's really more "Nature makes my anxiety shut up."  So I think I'll want to lean into themes of peace, quiet, solitude, calm, and serenity, rather than freedom, release, wild, untamed.  

The sea-voyage idea for the start is possibly too much added length for not enough added oomph; I will likely draft that bit and see how it goes.  

Signe's Lament

There is no place for me among the living

Long has the flame of vengeance burned in me
Burned for my father, struck down in ambush
Burned for my brothers, their white throats torn out
Burned for my twin, a wolf’s head in exile

Who avenges the Volsungs, sons of Odin?
There are only two, Sigmund and I, Signe
He forest-dwelling, bereft of best sword
The baneful glory-sword Siggeir longed for
New-made husband to me, my family slays
To lay his hands on Sigmund’s shining blade

There are only two, Sigmund and I, Signe
I, in the hall of my father’s slayer
I, in the bed of my brothers’ killer
I, so near yet unable to strike him

I, crafting weapons in my womb
Siggeir’s get sent to Sigmund, found too weak
Blades that broke on my brother’s hard anvil
I, in counsel with a volva, a witch,
I, my form exchanged for hers
I, to my brother’s forest dwelling
I, crafting weapons in my womb
Sinfjolti I made, Volsung blood in him
Inherit from mother and father both
Did not break on my brother’s hard anvil
Whetted needle-sharp to take Siggeir’s life

I, who opened the door of the hall to you
I, who returned your magic blade to you
I, who remembered her father’s dying
I, who created her husband’s slaying

Sigmund, brother, twin, last man of our line
I hear you call me out of the flaming hall
To rejoice with you in tonight’s vengeance
But too long have I burned with hot hatred
Fire consumed the sister you remember
Fair girl who warned Father against Siggeir
Who had not her sons slain nor twin deceived
She is years gone, and now I go with her
I will find her within the fiery hall

For there is no place for me among the living

 

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

I thought that I borrowed the line "There is no place for me among the living" from a translation of Volsunga saga, but if so, I cannot find which one now.  It's not in  "The Story of the Volsungs", translated by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson (Walter Scott Press, London, 1888), which is the easiest to find free edition online, at Project Gutenberg and sacred-texts.com.  Henry Adams Bellows, who is my favorite of the old timey online translators, doesn't seem to have done Volsunga saga, just Poetic Edda, which doesn't reference Signe.  It's not the Donald MacKenzie one on sacred-texts, either.   ...maybe it's in my Penguin edition?  Gasp, an actual book?!

This is a short re-telling of the story of Sigmond and Signe, from her point of view.  The form is very free, with alliteration applied liberally but not really according to any rules (except perhaps by accident).  Looks like there are mostly five stresses per line, but it's definitely not well-formed blank verse.

I wanted to see what would happen if I composed a poem a bit more freely.  Almost every time I perform this, I get compliments.

The gold standard, I suppose, is to write good poetry while following a form.  I've spent a lot of time developing technical proficiency with my forms, but I don't love a lot of my output.  My humorous poems are good, but the others... ehhh, some hit, some miss.  I wanted to give myself a little more room to find my unfettered voice and develop it, and then I can loop back to working more strictly inside a form.

 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

I got to participate in Bardic Madness Online yesterday!  I was in the "Oh no!" challenge, where you had to present a story/song/poem where there's a big "oh no!" moment.

The idea behind Bardic Madness is to stretch or grow as a performer.  So I took an initial leap into a poem in the style of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."  (Indeed, it is a much-shortened re-telling of the same.)  I did only a very little bit of work to try and understand the poetic form of the Alliterative Revival, and I did find an online copy of the original poem to try and get the meter for the 'bob and wheel' (the rhyming bit at the end of each stanza) about right.  They seemed pretty free with the unstressed syllables, but I didn't make a study of it.

This is a first draft.  I overall like it, but it needs some polish. 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (the short, short version)

To Camelot at Christmastime came a knight
Great in size, in green arrayed, gruesome to see
His horse all green; in his hands - holly and a huge axe
A game he’ll play with gentle Gawain, Arthur’s nephew
Gawain to strike his sinewy neck, sever his head
Then to Green Chapel go, a like chop to choose
It’s fine
Thinks Gawain, to play this strange game
I will go to his shrine
Quite safe, In a year and day
If today I sever his spine

Gawain claims the axe and the green knight kneels
Heavy axe held high, hewing strongly down
Blood bright and red befouls the floor
Green head rolls, its eyes look around
Guenievere screams as the giant stands, grabbing his head
Mounts his strong steed and straightaway leaves
Oh no
Thinks Gawain, I didn’t expect
He’d get up from that blow
Now I’ve a quest that leads to my doom
How I’ll live, I don’t know

Through woods he wanders, from winter to winter
Searching for the stranger’s sacred spot
He encounters a castle, carefully kept
Home to brave Bertilak and his beautiful wife
He can rest and recover in one of their rooms
They know of the knight, and his chapel is near
His host holds a holiday hunting game:
His prey he’ll place in Gawain’s hands, and Gawain will pay
With whatever whatnots he’d gained the while
All right
Thinks Gawain, thought it’s a bit odd
I’m not sure what this knight
Thinks that I’ll get to give in trade
Perhaps he’s not too bright

First day, he dutifully delivers to Bertilak a kiss
The lord’s wife wished to give it, though he wanted it not
Next, two kisses, and the knight asks no questions
For the ground rules of the game do not grant them
Third day, three kisses she presses on that thane
And gifts him her girdle, gold and green
With magic made, to maintain his life
A ward against the weight of warrior’s axe
Oh no
Thinks Gawain, what should I do?
To host this belt I owe
Without it, though, I’ll surely die
My blood all over the snow

He’s bussed Bertilak thrice and kept the belt
And gone to the Green Knight’s grove of holly
At first, he flinched, and the knight forestalled it
Making mock of mighty Gawain for his fear
Second stroke, he stopped again, his spirit to try
Gawain was steady, and growled to get on with it
Third time, a thin line of blood the axe-edge drew
Gawain leapt up, grabbing his sword, ready to engage
One blow
Said Gawain, is the term you set
My blood you’ve made to flow
If you yet try to take my head
I guarantee your woe

The Green Knight guffawed, gave a loud laugh
Fear not, my friend, I’ll fight you not
Poor host, I, were I hateful and harmed you
Bertilak am I, masked in Morgan le Fay’s magic
To test and to try the truest knight of Arthur’s court
I gave you that scratch for the girdle you were given
You kept it not for lust or greed but love of life
A small sin, and you’d paid your penance for it
Best knight
Go forth in peace, your fame you’ve earned
It always shall burn bright
Your many deeds the bards shall sing
And all the poets write

Eilmer of Malmesbury - first presentable draft

The millennium had just gone by
And Eilmer of Malmesbury wanted to fly
He studied the sky and the stars and the birds
See, Eilmer the monk was kind of a nerd.
He got him some wool, and some wax and some rope
A whole bunch of feathers, two handfuls of hope
He made him some wings. They really were neat!
He tied them both on to his hands and his feet

Then Eilmer climbed up to the top of of the church.
He gave a great leap, and took off from his perch
At first he was fallin’, then spread his wings wide
And Eilmer of Malmesbury started to glide
O joy! It worked! He soared through the air
With the sun in his face and the wind in his hair
Young Eilmer flew off o’er the roofs of the town
Then he made a mistake - you see, Eilmer looked down

When Eilmer looked down, he knew terrible fear -
The ground was down there, but he was up here!
When he lost control, he was near the earth,
But all the same, this was going to hurt
“O Lord, please save Eilmer!” the old abbot begs,
And Eilmer survived (though he broke both his legs)
Poor Eilmer cried out, “I was doomed to fail!
I'd made the wings well, but forgotten the tail!”

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

True story, bro!

So this one - I ran across some notes I made about Eilmer a long time ago.  I thought this little historical snippet was interesting and wanted to turn it into a story.  Alas, I could not figure out a framing that was actually compelling.  "And then he crashed. The End."  There was not an uplifting (ha) ending, nor an obvious moral.  There was a small punchline, but it wasn't up to carrying the story's purpose.

Then all of a sudden, Charlie Daniels is drawling, "The millennium had just gone by, and Eilmer of Malmesbury wanted to fly," in my head, as if it were taken out of "Uneasy Rider."  I started composing the thing as I was driving, and I couldn't quite remember "Uneasy Rider"s structure, and by the time I got to "two handfuls of hope" we were firmly in Shel Silverstein-esque territory. The meter has definite bobbles in places, but I actually rather like them.  Particularly "Oh joy! It worked!" - going from... what are they, anapests? to iambs... sort of opens up the metrical space, just like Eilmer is flying high and free.  It's the definite climax of the poem.  Some of the other places, it's less intentional, but it still serves to keep it from being too tumpitty-tumpitty-tump.  I think.

I don't know if I like the "See" at line 4 - I put it in to regularize the line's meter, but it really isn't necessary.  Also not sure about "nerd" - I mean, I think it works and it's funny, but it's a very very modern slang term, so it's a little jarring.  This miiiight be a 'kill your darlings' line.

I was trying to make it a song - because who doesn't like songs? - but it really seems to want to be a spoken-word poem.  So here it is.

 

Sources:

Archive.org's copy of William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England, where Eilmer's flight is first recorded.

USAF memorializes Eilmer incorrectly as the first manned flight.  There are earlier Chinese and Arabic sources claiming gliding flight from towers.

Another short article.

There are several articles and maybe a book by Lynn White Jr that get into the technical details of how Eilmer could plausibly have actually done what William says he did.  This is an early version of the work - I think the latest is from 1978 and might contain more info.  I cannot recommend anyone re-creating Eilmer's flight as part of an A&S project, though!

Malmesbury, in England, has a small website for Eilmer.  The spot where he is said to have crash landed is now an alley called Oliver's Way.  (French chroniclers miscopied his Saxon name as Oliver at some point, and it stuck.)  The abbey bookstore doesn't seem to have an online presence, but you can buy their pamphlet secondhand.

Composing for alliterative poetry

Sigurth and Brynhild came out really well.  I decided to make it singable, and want to lay out the process as I'm currently exercising it.

Write the Poem

I still compose poetry on paper, not orally. 

Memorize the Poem

The next few steps go much more easily if I've got the poem in memory. Also lets me work aloud and in the car.

Recite the Poem Aloud

I tried to pay close attention to my vocal pitches, as used in recitation.  Where were the natural lifts and falls, and could I use that to guide the melody?

Visualize the Stresses

Recitation didn't unlock a perfect melody.  I turned to an older idea I had.

Alliterative verse (English and Norse) contains four stresses per line, with unstressed syllables placed according to several templates.  The meter is defined, but not regular. So my approach is to assign four pitches - one per stress - and then use linking notes to fill in the unstresses.  Pickup notes appear and disappear at will.  Generally, after I work through the poem, a general pattern emerges.

I could definitely do this on the harp, visualizing the placements of the notes by looking at/playing the strings.  Since I was using commuting time, I imagined the notes. I started with a "high, low; high, low" pattern for the first line of each quatrain.  That sounded too firetruck-siren-y, so I modified my image of the pattern to "high, low; medium, low."  Suddenly, it came out sounding much better.

Interestingly, it also suddenly took on a home-and-away character, entirely unintentionally.  I thought maybe I was doing "re, la; fa, re."  Turns out it was "la, re; mi, re."  "re" is my home/tonic in Dorian mode, so its dominant is "la" - I expect them to go together.  "Fa" is in their family too. The associated "away" is do-so, with "mi" associated.

Get the Repeated Melody Pattern

Since the Norse verse uses quatrains, I thought I'd have four lines of melody.  Well, three - I intended to have the melody for line 1 and line 3 be the same.  I came up with a pattern that seemed to work.

Start to Practice It. Work Out the Details.

Practice shakes out a bunch of things.

1. I lost my second line of melody and started using a melodic couplet, repeated, for each quatrain.  I am still not sure how I feel about this. My test audience of one did not find it too repetitive/cloying, but I am not sure.
2. I found where my literary ways sabotaged me.  Syllables that I designated as stressed in the written poem did not always come out stressed as I sang through it.  English being what it is, in all cases but one, I can shift emphasis without putting a stress on an obviously unstressed syllable.  Example: I was singing "THAN my own LIFE," when I needed an m-alliteration.  "than MY own LIFE" is what was meant.  That's a valid way to stress that sentence - it's not like my old "pork CHOP, pork CHOP" problem.  On the other hand, I should not have alliterated "aMEND" with "misTAKE".  It sneaks by on paper, but becomes very obvious when sung.
3. I found the places where I wanted to vary the melody, mostly for dramatic emphasis.  One of the nice features (? I think it's nice?) of this style is that I can vary the notes for my unstresses to keep it from being too monotonous.  (I'm sort of thinking of the runo music I've got... the structure of that is probably a different post.)  But there are a few verses where I just entirely replaced the first line of music.

Add Color, If Desired

Brynhild is angry in this song.  I sing her lines in an angry voice.  Someone using the traditional ballad performance style (very little emotion expressed) would skip this, obviously.

Add Harp, If Possible

I just got to this stage.  I first try to find my melody on the strings - that's the only way I can figure out what the accompaniment should be.  I still use very simple open fifths - "re la" underneath those parts that operate at "home," and "so do" under the "away" notes.  Mostly.  The short excursion to "away" in the first melody line doesn't seem worth trying to cram an accompaniment shift - there's a little dissonance but that's okay.  The second melody line goes "do so do re" - it's entirely "away," until the final stress brings it home.

I'm still new to singing with the harp, so this part is challenging.  I'm working on pacing the accompaniment so it lines up with the stresses in the melody.  Also, the first time through, it made it weirdly difficult to perform the "variant" melody lines I mentioned in bullet 3, above.  Hoping some practice clears that up.

Brynhild and Sigurth

Written for the Sir Gyrth Oldcastle Memorial Poetry Smackdown at KASF 2018. I drew on the Volsunga saga and the Poetic Edda for the material. The verse is allegedly the Norse eddic fornyrðislag .

 

Guthrun’s words wound Brynhild

Sigurth played false the shieldmaiden

Enraged, she goes to room, to bed

Speaks to no one silently plots

 

Husband Gunnar her health he fears

Gunnar’s sister Guthrun fears evil

Both beg Sigurth her spouse, his friend

Go to Brynhild bring her some peace

 

To bedside goes Bane of Fafnir

Valkyrie stares unseeing past him

He recalls love what lay between them

Musters his strength and speaks to Brynhild

 

What illness strikes strongest of women?

Why to her bed does Brynhild go?

I wish you well would help if I could

Tell me if aid I can render

 

Do not pretend tenderness

Towards me, Sigurth - I know secrets

Fond heart for me have you not

I, scorned and spurned by Sigemond’s son

Guthrun told me you tricked me

Took Gunnar’s form the fire to leap

A fearless man must I wed

Oath-bound was I to agreed to the match

 

Sigurth, you swore on sword of father

To return to me take me as wife

But you gave me to Gunnar

Lesser man than the lord I loved

 

I am guilty of grave wrongs

The words you say sing with truth

Brynhild, hear me hard words I speak

There is more to it than you know

 

Grimhild in cup carved ancient runes

Guthrun’s mother made me forget

Bespelled my mind my spirit confused

All our oaths erased from thought

 

So I agreed Guthrun to marry

Blameless that girl guilty her mother

When you were wed wife to Gunnar

Then to my mind memories came

 

I love you more than my own life

Painful for me   to be parted from you

Happy at least your hall to share

Let us be friends and find peace here

 

You should have spoke sooner, Sigurth

Much evil perhaps avoided could be

It is too late my love of old

My heart is hard with hate from hurt

 

Brynhild, I beg be not wrathful

I will amend mistakes past

Set Guthrun aside I will

Marry you make you my wife

 

You cannot have in hall two kings

Husband have I to him I vowed

You should have spoke sooner, Sigurth

It is too late our love to save

 

Go, Sigurth to Gjuki’s daughter

Leave me here like you  left before

My pride requires your punishment

We part, beloved, as enemies

The Fortunes of Men

"The Fortunes of Men" is a bit of gnomic wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon Maxims.  In brief: "Some people will die horrible deaths (like these); some people will have awesome lives (like these).  You get what you get and you don't get upset."  Michael Drout, of Anglo-Saxon Aloud, translated it.

For whatever reason, I decided it would make a good song. Maybe it's all the dying, just in time for Halloween?  Quite a lot of the phrases are right out of Drout's translation, but it was still some work making the meter and rhyme work.

Anyway. First draft. Syllables in (parentheses) are pickups or extra unstresses at the end of a line.  They're "good enough for folk music" but I'm still trying to clean them up.  The chorus has a tune, but not the verses yet.

The Fortunes of Men

Often it happens, a child is born
Into his mother’s fair arms
Teach him and tame him until the time comes
Trying to keep him from harm
Clothe him in colors, and care for him well
While at your full breast he clings
Nobody knows while the young child grows
Exactly what winter will bring

Chorus:
These are the fortunes of men, of men
These are the fortunes of men
Some are raised high, and some are cast low, and
Death comes for all in the end

Hoary-heath stepper, the wilding wolf
One man will kill and will eat;
Hunger another fells, mother will mourn
Son had no meat nor no wheat;
Loss of the light of the eyes for this one,
Feet which are lamed for that man;
One in the war in a red pool of gore
Dies for his lord’s last command

Featherless, falling from treetop on high
He seems to play in the air
Spirit departs, goes away from this world
(When he) falls on the tree roots all bare;
Wolf-head another, his misery cold
Treading an alien track
Friendless is he, has no lord to provide
(No) brother he has at his back

Bloody bone-coffin all broken on gal(lows)
Raven takes eyes from his head;
One at the mead-bench, he’s slain by a sword
Wine-words he should not have said
Steward serves the mead, and a man drinks his fill
Drinks it again and again
(Men) call him self-killer, his mouth slurred with drink
Angers his lord, is condemned.

Not all men’s lives are all toil and pain
Given to some is great good
Mead-cups and treasures, his wealth beyond mea(sure)
Hall made of stout and strong wood;
Battle-fame loud, or a master of war
Skill with the sword or the bow
Talent for table-games, played in the hall
Winning the dice with a throw

Wonder-gift given to goldsmith the skilled
Maker of glittering bands
Often he ornaments mail-coats of kings
Kings give him prizes and lands
Falconer trains the hawk proud on his hand
Slaughterer-sparrow he tames
Does on the jesses and feeds him in fet(ters)
Princes will give him word-fame

One man amuses his brothers at board
Brings to men cheer at their beer
At the lord’s feet, the old wise harper sits
Nails on the strings ringing clear
Song leaping out for the men in the hall
Tales given tongue when he speaks
(Of) all of these fortunes that someone might find
This is the fortune I seek

The dance weaves under the firethorn

Crown Tourney has a Tempore Cultura Atlantia trifecta going on - French, Norse, 16th cen.

Here is a list of 16th century Danish ballads.  (Norse, 16th cen)

Here is a "Medieval Scandinavian Encyclopedia" saying that ballads are derived from medieval French verse forms. (French, if you squint.)

Here is an Old Danish/modern Danish translation of one of the 16th cen ballads.

Here ("Elvir Hill," 2/3 the way down) and here (page 225, "Elfer Hill") are English or Scots-dialect translation of said ballad. In summary: young man pauses to rest on a elf-hill. Two elven maidens come out, sing and dance, promise him knowledge and prowess if he will dance with them. He stays silent, they threaten to kill him, but the cock crows and he is saved by the dawn.

And here is most of Sir Bela of Eastmarch's (Poul Anderson's) poem from his short story, "The Queen of Air and Darkness." Like the translations above, it leaves off the ballad's refrain (which is found handily in the post title).  And do you know, if you took out the references to alien plants and animals, it's more or less the same story.

Observation: Sir Bela's poem is much more... poetic.  He uses lots of very original and vivid imagery, whereas ballads tend to be formulaic.  "With starlight in her glance" is not a phrase you will ever see in a traditional ballad.

If I were going to Crown, I would looooove to perform this as an entry (if I could find the music).  It's by a Scadian - one of the Founders, in fact! - and it adheres very closely to a period source as far as narrative and even structure go.  (The Danish ballads evidently nearly always have refrains, while the English ones do sometimes, but it's hardly expected.)  

But I'm not going to Crown, so I'd have to write an original poem and send a non-performing art along.  I'm poking at the idea, looking for an angle that's more than a rehash of Elfer Hill, and also not a ripoff of Sir Bela.

 

Kalevala Runo 3: The Singing Contest

My resolution to practice my harp again has mostly been working.  Keeping it very very limited in scope seems to have helped me actually do it.  So hurray!  Now to see if I can keep it up through the rest of the holidays.

My approach was to take one new period (or in this case, period appropriate) song to learn, and one of the ap Huw song structures to learn.  And the song I picked was "Vaka vanha Vainamoinen," from Lani Thompson's My Kantele Is My Teacher.  (I sneakily thought that a 5-note kantele tune on harp might then also get ported over to lyre.)  It's a Kalevala tune.

The Kalevala is the national folk epic of Finland.  It was collected and collated in the early 1800s.  No single singer ever sat down and performed the Kalevala, start to finish. Rather, Elias Lönnrot (the collector) gathered the songs of many poem singers and shaped them into a single coherent whole - sort of like what Thomas Malory did for the Arthur legends.  

Thompson helpfully included some of the lyrics for the tune - in Finnish.  I Googled them, and came up with... more Finnish lyrics.  But a touch of Google Translate helped me correlate the runo to John Martin Crawford's 1888 translation over at sacred-texts.com.  It appears to be Runo 3, about a young hotheaded rune singer who challenges the hero-god figure Vainamoinen to a musical duel. The translation isn't alliterative, like the original, nor rhyming, but it does scan in the original meter.  So I could sing it to the music that I have.

Now it also happens that I have The Kalevala Heritage, which contains old recordings of Kalevala singers (some were recorded on wax cylinders!).  And track 9, "The Singing Contest," is the same tune as the kantele tune I have.  The lyrics are not identical with the "official" Kalevala, but I'm not surprised by that.  Lönnrot included one "authoritative" version of the runo, but naturally it exists in different forms and lengths in the wild.

So I'm fairly well convinced that I've correctly matched the tune to the poem.  Next problem: Thompson gives three lines of a melody, each line 32 notes/syllables long.  Each line matches a Kalevala verse.  So I could sing three verses to the music I have.  Do those three verses have to all be part of a larger uber-verse?  That would really limit the ways in which I could cut down and re-organize this for performance.

Facebook to the rescue!  The Atlantian Bards and Performer's Guild page got me in touch with Hakon of Ponte Alto, who has also been studying Kalevala performance.  He said his impression was that you'd just keep cycling the verses through the available melodies, without worrying about matching groups of three verses.

After that, reading some of the liner notes to "The Kalevala Heritage" and also the notes on "From the Land of the Kalevala," I learned some more about the performance of the runos.  They were performed by pairs of singers, a master and an apprentice (more or less - a more and a less skilled performer).  The master would sing a verse, and the apprentice would repeat it - giving the master time to recall the next verse and possibly plan variations on the melody (as is done in other folk oral epic traditions, and I really need to write up my references for those). I listened carefully to my recording of "The Singing Contest," and it actually seemed like the three lines of music collapsed into one or two lines of music by the end.  I'll have to listen a few more times, but it may be the first verse Thompson gives was only sung once, at the very start of the runo (at least, by this particular singer for that particular performance).

Finally, lyrics.  The Crawford translation ran 16 pages when I put it into a Google doc.  I began cutting.  There was a definite tension - repetition is a huge poetic feature of the Kalevala, and yet repetitions are also the easiest things to cut!  I tried to leave a few in for flavor, but removed most.  I removed most of Joukahainen's lame attempts at wisdom (because that seriously went on for pages); I removed his mother warning him not to fight Vainamoinen; with sad heart, I removed the verse where Vainamoinen pretty much calls him a little punk and a bad driver, and to get off his lawn/road.  But after I got it down to 45 verses that I thought told the whole story, I went back with a razor and managed to get it down to 30.  That's about where my "Matty Groves" comes in.

Aaaand that's when I realized that this had gone well past "harp practice" and was becoming "major performance development project" and thought I should put up a few notes on what was going on.