Writing a Ballade (Non-musical)

By THLaird Colyne Stewart, AS 49 (2015)

Along with the rondeau and the virelai, the ballade is one of the formes fixes. Between the late 13^th and the 15^th centuries, ballades were often set to music.

The ballade is a verse form usually consisting of three 8-line stanzas, each with a consistent meter and a particular rhyme scheme. The last line in the stanza is a refrain. The stanzas are often followed by a 4-line envoi (concluding stanza), usually addressed to a prince. The rhyme scheme is usually ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC (the capital C being the refrain).

When writing my ballade one of the first things I did was settle on a meter. I went with iambic octosyllabic lines. I then wrote the refrain. I was dedicating this ballade to Duchess Adrielle Kerrec, so I wanted something that summed her up for me:

The heart, the soul, of Ealdormere.

In the first stanza I wrote about her service

So bright the deeds of northern maid,

The duchess bold her works well done,

as well as her well earned reputation for shenanigans and skill at the game of Tablero

Who with the cups has often played,

And ‘gainst her foes has always won,

Well known her mirth, her sense of fun,

Who with the folk can oft endear,

And cares about most everyone,

and ended with the refrain line. In the second stanza I switched focus to look at her former position as Baroness of Septentria

On noble ground her feet have laid,

Her realm the lands Septentrian,

as well as her martial activities (both fighting and equestrian)

Protected by her lance and blade,

In battle fought in rain and sun,

In which she made the foemen run,

Or catch them up upon her spear,

As trophies of the melees won,

ending again with the refrain line. In the third stanza I switched focus again, this time to her skills n the arts and sciences

Well many are the things she’s made,

The tunics sewn, the thread she’s spun,

And taught her students in the glade,

And yet her work is just begun,

As Laurel and as Pelican;

Her words on scrolls are sweet to hear;

Her skills so vast, second to none,

again ending with the refrain line.

For the envoi, I made a plea to unnamed princes to listen to my praise of someone who I find truly inspiring

So princes listen to your son,

And turn to me your gracious ear,

As praise I give to worthy one,

The heart, the soul, of Ealdormere.

In the end, the poem looked like this:

So bright the deeds of northern maid,

The duchess bold her works well done,

Who with the cups has often played,

And ‘gainst her foes has always won,

Well known her mirth, her sense of fun,

Who with the folk can oft endear,

And cares about most everyone,

The heart, the soul, of Ealdormere.

On noble ground her feet have laid,

Her realm the lands Septentrian,

Protected by her lance and blade,

In battle fought in rain and sun,

In which she made the foemen run,

Or catch them up upon her spear,

As trophies of the melees won,

The heart, the soul, of Ealdormere.

Well many are the things she’s made,

The tunics sewn, the thread she’s spun,

And taught her students in the glade,

And yet her work is just begun,

As Laurel and as Pelican;

Her words on scrolls are sweet to hear;

Her skills so vast, second to none,

The heart, the soul, of Ealdormere.

So princes listen to your son,

And turn to me your gracious ear,

As praise I give to worthy one,

The heart, the soul, of Ealdormere.

Sources

Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, New York, 1990.

Cushman, Stephen, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4^th edition. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2012.

Fischer, Todd H. C. “Medieval Poetic Forms, Genres and Devices,” 2015.

Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature, Seventh Edition. Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1996.

Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. Houghton Mifflin Publishing, New York, 2014.

Kupier, Kathleen, ed. Mirriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Mirriam Webster, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1995.

Kupier, Kathleen, ed. Poetry and Drama: Literary Terms and Concepts. Britannica Educational Publishing, New York, 2012.

Myers, Jack and Don Wukasch. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, 2003.

Preminger, Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1974.

Writing a Virelai

By THLaird Colyne Stewart, MArch AS 49 (2015)

One of the formes fixes, the virelai was often used in poetry and music (it was, in fact, one of the most common verse forms set to music from the 13^th to the 15^th centuries). However, by the mid 15^th century the virelai was no longer usually set to music.

If a virelai only had one stanza it was known as a bergerette.

Virelai written as songs in the 14^th and 15 centuries had three stanzas and a refrain that is stated before the first stanza and again after each one. Within each stanza the structure used is the bar form. Within this overall structure, the number of lines and the rhyme scheme varied. The refrain and the abgesang (part of the bar form) could be three, four or five lines each, with rhyme schemes such as aba, abab, aaab, abba, aaab or aabba. The structure often involved an alternation of longer and shorter lines. Usually, all three stanzas shared the same set of rhymes (which means the whole poem could be built on just two rhymes).

In the 15^th century, when the virelai was no longer always set to music, its structure varied widely. Two of these variants (which weren’t defined until the 17^th century) are detailed below.

The virelai ancient had no refrain. It used an interlocking rhyme scheme between the stanzas. In the first stanza the rhyme scheme is aabaabaab (with the b lines being shorter in length). In the second stanza the b rhymes are shifted to the longer lines and a new c rhyme is introduced on the shorter ones (bbcbbcbbc).

The virelai nouveau had a 2-line refrain at the beginning, with each stanza ending with a repetition of either the first or the second refrain verse in alternation, and the last stanza ending in both refrain verses in reversed order.

When I wrote the following virelai (called “MacFarlane”) I decided to use the virelai ancient form. I also resolved to try to keep the meter in iambic meter. As is usual for me, the first thing I wrote was the first line:

A shield, a sword, an axe, a lance,

I then came up with a list of words that could rhyme with lance, to make sure I could incorporate them into the theme (which was a praise poem for my knight, Sir Nigel MacFarlane). I was pleased with the words I came up with, as each could easily be incorporated into describing Sir Nigel. So for the second line I went with:

He takes with him to melee’s dance,

The following line was the first short line of the poem. It was also the first b rhyme, so I needed a rhyme rich word to end the line on (as the b rhyme continues into the second stanza). Nigel is known for his kit, so I called attention to it:

Upon his head his crest;

The following two line refer to his role in the Battle of the Thirty at Pennsic (where he is often the captain of the French side), and to his famous glare (also known as his ‘stink-eye’):

In tourney leads the folk of France,

In war he’s known for piercing glance,

In the sixth line I make reference to the heraldry of his household (House Arrochar) which includes a mullet (star) over his heart. This mullet represent his lady, Duchess Adrielle Kerrec, and ties into the last line of the poem:

And the star upon his chest;

I then spend two lines describing his skill at arms and his dedication to his kingdom, while in the last line of the first stanza I again call out to his lady:

In battle preaux, leaves naught to chance,

To brave protect the northern manse,

Love beats within his breast.

Now starting the second stanza, the b rhymes replace the a rhymes, while a new c rhyme replaces the b rhymes. In the first two line I again make reference to his determination and his fine kit:

On virtue’s anvil he would test,

While in fine raimments he is dressed,

In the third line I introduced the new c rhyme. To come up with the c rhyme I actually wrote the last line of the poem first:

All for his Adrielle.

Knowing where I wanted to end, allowed me to finish the first c rhymed line (taking a bit of poetic license with the first word in the line):

Dischivalry his hell;

In the following two line, while again referencing his skill at arms, I point out that he does win victory for himself, but for his teammates:

From the jaw of lose he’ll wrest

Victory for the sorely pressed,

I then point out that there are even more virtues I could praise in Sir Nigel:

And yet more I could tell;

The last three lines are dedicated to Adrielle, his inspiration in all things:

He clutches favour she has blessed,

Which drives him to his very best,

All for his Adrielle.

So in the end, the poem read:

A shield, a sword, an axe, a lance,

He takes with him to melee’s dance,

Upon his head his crest;

In tourney leads the folk of France,

In war he’s known for piercing glance,

And the star upon his chest;

In battle preaux, leaves naught to chance,

To brave protect the northern manse,

Love beats within his breast.

On virtue’s anvil he would test,

While in fine raimments he is dressed,

Dischivalry his hell;

From the jaw of lose he’ll wrest

Victory for the sorely pressed,

And yet more I could tell;

He clutches favour she has blessed,

Which drives him to his very best,

All for his Adrielle.

Sources

Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, New York, 1990.

Cushman, Stephen, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4^th edition. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2012.

Fischer, Todd H. C. “Medieval Poetic Forms, Genres and Devices,” 2015.

Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature, Seventh Edition. Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1996.

Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. Houghton Mifflin Publishing, New York, 2014.

Kupier, Kathleen, ed. Mirriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Mirriam Webster, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1995.

Kupier, Kathleen, ed. Poetry and Drama: Literary Terms and Concepts. Britannica Educational Publishing, New York, 2012.

Myers, Jack and Don Wukasch. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, 2003.

Preminger, Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1974.

Writing a Triolet

By THLaird Colyne Stewart, AS 49 (2015)

At Winter War in March AS 49, HRH Steinnar of Ealdormere made known his wish to fence with as many of the kingdoms fencers as possible. I wanted to write something to commemorate that moment and settles on the triolet.

The triolet was a 13^th century stanza poem of 8-lines, written in iambic tetrameter and rhyming ABaAabAB. The first, fourth and seventh lines are identical, as are the second and final lines (thus making the initial and final couplets identical as well). The triolet is related to the rondeau.

I first needed to settle on what my A and B lines would be. Since they would repeat, and form both the opening and closing of the poem they needed to be strong and meaningful.

For the A line I choose:

The heir alone with sword in hand

This identifies the poem’s focal point (the Heir) and makes note of the fact that as of yet he stands alone.

For the B line I identify exactly what he is waiting for:

Awaits to fight with rapier bold

From there it was simply a matter of filling in the remaining lines. For the third line I choose to explicitly state who it was the Heir wanted to face in battle:

Contestants from across the land.

The fourth line then repeated the first line. For the fifth line I reiterated the Heir’s desire, and used the sixth line to remark on his character:

Will glad cross blades on field and sand

And in his heart bright valour hold.

The seventh and eighth lines then repeated the first and second lines. So what I ended up with was:

The heir alone with sword in hand

Awaits to fight with rapier bold

Contestants from across the land.

The heir alone with sword in hand

Will glad cross blades on field and sand

And in his heart bright valour hold.

The heir alone with sword in hand

Awaits to fight with rapier bold.

Sources

Fischer, Todd H. C., “Medieval Poetic Forms, Genres and Devices”, 2015.

Geller, Conrad, “Poetic Forms: The Triolet”, http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/triolet.shtml

Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-triolet

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triolet

In-Persona Storytelling

By Duke Cariadoc of the Bow

One of my favorite activities at events is to wander from table to table at a feast or from campfire to campfire at a camping event, telling poems and stories. I know of no better way of pulling people out of the twentieth century, if only for a few minutes– especially if the story is presented as a medieval story told by a medieval storyteller. While I am telling a story, I am their environment–especially at night around a bardic circle, with nothing in sight that is obviously inappropriate to the twelfth century. A further attraction of storytelling is that it is an art with a real function in the SCA world, one that gets done not because someone has announced that we ought to promote the arts but because people want to do it.

By “in-persona storytelling” I do not mean telling stories about your persona, an activity I regard with considerable misgiving. I mean telling stories as your persona–from his point of view, not yours. This article is about how to do so.

Consider a simple example–a short period anecdote about the bird that is the world:

The Commander of the Faithful was sitting with his nadim, his cup companions. One of them said, “Commander of the Faithful, did you know that the world is a bird?” “No,” he answered, “tell me that tale.”

“Ah,” he said, “The world is a bird. Syria is its body; Iraq and Yemen are its wings. The Orient is its head–and the Maghreb, that is its tail."

Sitting among the cup companions there was a Maghrebi, a Berber of the Maghreb like myself.

“It is a true tale,” he said. “And do you know what kind of a bird the world is?”

“No,” replied the Commander of the Faithful.

“Ah,” said the Maghrebi. “It is a peacock.”

There are a number of things worth noting about that story–aside from the observation that neither ethnic prejudice nor one-upmanship is a modern invention. I do not explain what “Commander of the Faithful” means–because the information is not necessary to understand the story and because my persona would take it for granted that his hearers already knew. Nor do I explain where the Maghreb is. I do, however, make it clear that I am myself a Maghrebi, and thus make myself part of the frame of the story. All of these are ways in which I try to project the illusion that both I and my hearers are medieval people. I do explain, in passing, what “nadim” means, on the theory that my listeners are foreigners, and so, although they will of course recognize such obvious terms as “Maghreb” (the Islamic west–North Africa and Muslim Spain), they might not know what “nadim” means. And even in that case, my explanation (“cup-companions”) takes for granted the social setting–a ruler surrounded by his favorites.

More subtly, I do not explain the social context of the story–that the Berbers, being neither, like the Arabs, the originators of Islam nor, like the Persians, major contributors to Islamic civilization, are viewed as second class citizens, natural targets for other people’s denigration. That is implicit in the story–and is precisely the sort of thing that people take for granted about their own situation and are unlikely to explain to others.

In-persona storytelling, like other forms of in-persona activity, involves changing your normal behavior in two ways. The first is by omitting elements that positively identify you as a person born in the twentieth century–not, for example, preceding the story with the explanation that it is a medieval North African anecdote from the 14th c. Kitāb Mafākhir al-Barbar.[1] The second is by adding touches that identify you as a medieval person–ideally, as a particular sort of medieval person from a particular time and place.

My describing myself as a Maghrebi and telling the story with the obvious pleasure of someone on the winning side of the exchange is a simple example. Another occurs when I recite Malkin Grey’s poem “The Raven Banner,” based on an incident in Njalsaga. The poem contains a reference to Odin. While there is no strong reason why a medieval Muslim should not tell foreign stories–I have a period reference to one telling a story from India, and there are surviving records of Muslim visits to both east and west Norse–there are good reasons why a believing Muslim would have reservations about references to a pagan God. The beginning of the Muslim credo is “There is no God but God,” and while medieval Islam was a reasonably tolerant religion, there were limits. Hence when I tell that poem, I follow it with an explanation– that “Odin” is the name of a Djinn, demon, or some such creature that the Northmen, ignorant of the Unity of Allah (the Compassionate, the Merciful), worship as a god. In much the same way, a Christian storyteller telling an Islamic story might make some comment concerning the false doctrines of the Paynim. The point is not to start a religious argument but to make the teller’s world-view into a medieval frame for the medieval tale. This is a period device; both the Indian collections described below and the Nights are structured many layers deep, with stories inside stories inside stories.

As the example suggests, I also sprinkle my conversation with stock phrases that would come naturally to a medieval Muslim but not to a modern American. When I refer to God it is “God the Most Great,” or “Allah (the Compassionate, the Merciful).” Mohammed is “Our Lord the Prophet (blessings to Him, his Kindred, and his Companion Train).” Solomon is “Suleiman Ibn Daud, King and Prophet, God's peace and blessing upon him.”

What You Should Know and Where to Find It

In order to do this sort of story telling, you need three sorts of information:

1. You need to know what modern acts and words are inappropriate to your persona–and for the most part, you already do know that. It does not require extensive research to realize that a 12th century North African Berber would not introduce himself to people with “Hello, I am a North African Berber from the 12th century,” any more than I introduce myself to people mundanely with “Hello, I am an American of Jewish descent from the 20th century.” Some other examples are more subtle–I try, for instance, to avoid terms such as “O.K.” that have an obviously modern ring to them. But the more subtle they are, the less it matters if you get them wrong; if you don’t recognize a term as modern, most of your listeners probably won’t either.

A related point to remember is what things your persona does not know. David, for example, knows that by Cariadoc’s time (c. 1100) Muslim Spain has begun its long decline. Cariadoc’s view is that, while the Franks to the north of al-Andalus have been troublesome of late, they have been driven back before and will be driven back again– just as soon as the Andalusian princes stop fighting each other long enough to deal with them. And if the party kings don’t, Yussuf the Almoravid will. Again.

2. You need background information– information about how your persona would have viewed the world around him. The best way of getting that is to find readable primary sources from about the right time and place–books written by your persona’s Page 290 neighbors. Such books, in my experience, are both the most interesting and the most reliable source of information about past points of view. Of course, some of what they tell you may be false–Alexander the Great was not a Muslim, for instance, and did not, so far as I know, have a wise vizier named al Khidr–but the people who read the Iskandernama and told stories from it thought he was and did. What matters is not what is true but what your persona thinks is true.

3. You need period stories. You could make them up, but since you are not really a medieval person the stories you make up are likely to feel more like modern stories about the middle ages than like real medieval stories. That is especially likely if you start by making up stories instead of starting with stories actually told by medieval people and learning from them what sorts of stories they told. Hence my view, at least, is that most or all of your repertoire should consist of period stories. For sources, see below.

Learning to tell Stories

Most of us can talk much better than we can recite. Hence my approach to storytelling is to learn stories, not to memorize them. To learn a story, I read it over one or more times. Then I tell it. After I have been telling a story for a while, I like to go back and reread the original. Often it is a humbling experience–because I discover that I have misremembered some elements, or omitted details that make it a better story. The next time I tell it, I am a little closer to the original. I do not expect to ever end up with exactly the same words–nor is there any particular reason I should. But I do try to get steadily closer to the original.

One piece of advice I always give to new storytellers is to start with short stories. One reason is that it is easier to remember all of the contents of a short story. Another is that it is easier to do a competent job of presenting it. A final reason is that if you tell a short story badly, you only bore your audience for a short time. A long story, told badly, can come close to killing a bardic circle.

Start with very short stories, such as the example at the beginning of this article. Tell them to anyone who looks interested–not only around a bardic circle but waiting in line to get into Pennsic or when conversation flags around the dinner table. The function of storytelling is to entertain– especially to entertain people who would otherwise be bored. It is, along with singing, the most portable of arts; since you always have it with you, you might as well use it. If you find that people like your short stories– ask for another instead of politely holding still until you are finished and then remembering a prior appointment somewhere at the other end of the event–you are ready to learn longer ones.

Who Are You and Why Are You Telling These Stories?

There are a variety of contexts in which medieval people might tell medieval stories. Some story tellers may have been wandering mendicants, hoping to collect enough from their listeners to pay for dinner and a roof over their heads. Others may have been professional entertainers, supported by patrons. One of the most famous works of medieval Arabic literature, the Assemblies of Hariri, revolves around Abu Zaid, a gifted poet, storyteller and con man working his way across al-Islam. None of those fits very well with either my persona or my SCA history.

For an alternative, consider one of my favorite sources–al-Tanukhi’s Tenth Century Tabletalk of a Mesopotamian Judge. The author starts his book by complaining that the anecdotes told in polite company nowadays are not nearly as good as the ones he remembers from his youth–and proceeds to recount every story he can remember, presumably in the hope of improving the situation. The context is upper class men Page 291 entertaining each other with anecdotes, mostly about contemporaries. In a world without radio, television, or electric lighting, such casual storytelling must have played a much more important role than in our world–especially in a climate where sensible people rested during the midday heat and did much of their socializing in the cool of the evening.

There are a lot of places where period stories can be found. Some are collections of stories, others are histories, memoirs or long tales containing incidents that can be told as separate stories. Many of the sources are available in a variety of translations. Some can be found in almost any bookstore, others may require a search through a good university library or, nowadays, the web.

For the convenience of story tellers who prefer stories that their personae could have known, I include information on dates and places. It is worth noting, however, that stories traveled far and lasted long. Stories from the Indian collections appear in the Thousand Nights and a Night, the Gesta Romanorum, and the Decameron; the Gesta Romanorum was, in turn, a source for both Chaucer and Shakespeare. Similarly, Apuleius plagiarized parts of his plot from an earlier Greek work and contributed one story to the Decameron, published some twelve centuries after his death.

Sources

The Golden Ass by Apuleius. A lengthy and episodic story written in the second century.

Katha Sarit Sagara (aka The Ocean of Story). A very old and very large Indian collection, containing many of the stories found in the Panchatantra.

Panchatantra (aka Fables of Bidpai, Kalila wa-Dimna, The Tales of Kalila and Dimna). A very old Indian collection, possibly dating to 200 B.C. It was translated into Persian in the 6th century, into Arabic (as the Kalila wa-Dimna) in the 8th century, from Arabic into Greek in the 11th century and, a little later, into Hebrew, and from Hebrew into Latin in the 13th century. The first English translation was in the 16th century.

The Thousand and One Nights. The story of Scheherazade, which provides the frame story for the Nights, is mentioned by alNadim in the 10th century, but the surviving texts are considerably later, possibly 15th century. The Burton translation (16 volumes!) is a delight; Payne is also supposed to be very good. Anything under eight hundred pages and calling itself the Arabian Nights is likely to be an abbreviated and bowdlerized version intended for children.

The Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge, by al-Muhassin ibn Ali al-Tanukhi, D. S. Margoliouth, tr. Al-Tanukhi was a tenth century judge who found that the anecdotes people were telling were no longer as good as the ones he remembered from his youth, and decided to do something about it. The book is full of retellable stories, many about people the author knew.

An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah ibn-Munkidh, Philip Hitti tr. Usamah was a Syrian Emir; his memoirs, dictated in his old age, describe events during the period between the first and second crusades. They are entertaining and episodic, hence can easily be mined for stories.

The Travels of Ibn Battuta, H.A.R. Gibb tr. The author was a 14th c. North African world traveler who certainly made it to India, may have made it to China, and wrote an extensive account of his travels, some of whose incidents work as stories.

The Subtle Ruse: The Book of Arabic Wisdom and Guile. (Raqa’iq al-hilal if Daqaiq al-hiyal, author anonymous, Rene R. Hawam, tr.) Anecdotes about tricks, classified according to their perpetrators: God, Satan, angels, jinn, prophets, Caliphs, Kings, Sultans, Viziers, Governors, administrators, judges, witnesses, attorneys, Page 292 jurisconsults, devout men, and ascetics.

The Shah-nameh of Firdausi, the Khamseh of Nizami, the Sikander-nama. These are all famous works of Persian literature, and should have bits that can be excerpted as stories. I do not know them well enough to recommend particular translations.

The Tutinama, “parrot tales,” is a 14th century Persian collection of stories based on an earlier Sanskrit work. Imagine the 1001 Nights with Scheherazade replaced by a parrot.

Mohammad’s People, by Eric Schroeder. A history of the early centuries of al-Islam, made up of passages from period sources fitted together into a reasonably continuous whole. It contains one of my favorite stories (the death of Rabia, called Boy Longlocks).

The Book of The Superiority of Dogs over many of Those who wear Clothes by Ibn alMarzuban. A 10th century collection of Arabic dog stories.

The Bible. It was extensively used as a source of stories in the Middle Ages.

The Koran.

The Travels of Marco Polo.

Gesta Francorum. An anonymous firsthand account of the first Crusade, extensively plagiarized by 12th century writers.

Gesta Romanorum. A collection of stories with morals, intended to be used in sermons; the Latin version dates from about 1300 and the English from about 1400. Its connection with real Roman history is tenuous at best.

The Mabinogion. A collection of Welsh stories written down in the 13th century, apparently based on much earlier verbal traditions.

Boccaccio, The Decameron. 14th century.

Chaucer, Canterbury Tales. 14th century.

Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur. 15th century.

Marie de France, The Breton Lais. Popular 12th century poems, based on Celtic material.

Njal Saga, Egil Saga, Jomsviking Saga, Gisli Saga, Heimskringla, etc. Histories and historical novels, mostly written in Iceland in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. All of those listed, and no doubt many others with which I am less familiar, contain incidents that can be excerpted as stories. My own favorites include the killing of Gunnar, from Njal Saga, Egil’s confrontation with Eric Bloodaxe at York, from Egil Saga, the avenging of Vestan by his young sons, from Gisli Saga, and the encounter between Harold Godwinson and his brother Tostig just before the battle of Stamford Bridge, from Harald Saga (part of Heimskringla).

The Tains: Written sources for the Irish romances go back to the eleventh century, but much of the material is clearly much older. One of the most famous is the Táin bó Cuailnge, whose hero is Cuchulain.

The Life of Charlemagne by the Monk of St. Gall (aka Notker the Stammerer), included in Two Lives of Charlemagne (Penguin). This is a highly anecdotal “life” written in the ninth century and covering many subjects other than Charlemagne.

The Chansons de Geste. French “songs of deeds.” The Song of Roland, the earliest and most famous, dates from the late 11th century; the translation by Dorothy Sayers is readily available from Penguin and very good. Other chansons include Ogier the Dane and Huon of Bordeaux. A version of the latter by Andre Norton was published as Huon of the Horn.

Orlando Innamorato (1495) by Boiardo and Orlando Furioso (1516) by Ariosto. A single story, started by one poet and completed by another. They are a Renaissance Italian reworking of the Carolingian cycle, the stories of Charlemagne and his Paladins. The story (and characters) jump from Paris to London to Tartary, with or without intermediate stops. The tale is well supplied with magic rings, enchanted fountains, flying steeds, maidens in distress, valorous knights, both male and female, and wicked enchanters, also both male and female.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A source of Greek and Roman myths for Renaissance writers.

De Nugis Curialium, by Walter Map, an English courtier of Welsh origin, is an entertaining 12th century collection of anecdotes with the feel of an after dinner speech to an audience not entirely sober.

[An earlier version was in Tournaments Illuminated, No. 81, Winter 1986. This version of the article is from A Miscellany, 10^th edition, by Cariadoc and Elizabeth (David Friedman and Elizabeth Cook), 2011.]

[1] Quoted in H.T. Norris, The Berbers in Arabic Literature. Longman 1982

Missive to a Young Bard: Sonnets

By Master Hector of the Black Height, 2003

Edited by THLaird Colyne Stewart, January AS 49 (2015)

This article is based on an email that Master Hector sent to me when I first began to wade into the bardic arts. At the time I was particularly struggling with a sonnet.

When you talk about wrestling with sonnets and when I read your work, I see two specific and disparate areas on which you need to focus.

The first is rhythm. You are trying to write in iambic pentameter but you seem to have problems sticking to the rhythm.

Let’s talk about the basics.

An iamb is a two-syllable block of rhythm within a line, with the heavier beat on the second syllable:

ba-DUM.

This is, among other things, the rhythm of your heartbeat and we’ll touch on that later.

The line you’re using is a ten syllable line, so there are five iambs of two syllables each in the line; thus the line is called iambic pentameter (as opposed to trochaic pentameter, which would be five trochees to the line, but I digress). Iambic pentameter: ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM. Above all else it’s regular. If it’s not, it isn’t really iambic pentameter.

When we look at the rhythm of the line, let’s also remember to look at what’s NOT written. The line reads

ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM

but when you cobble it together with other lines, it really doesn’t read

ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM
ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM

It doesn’t read that way. Honestly it doesn’t.

It actually reads

ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM (pause)
ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM (pause)

and so on. The pause is for breath usually. It’s the natural hesitation that says to the listener (remember, poetry is an aural art), “Attention please, the line is ending right about… here.”

Even when we enjamb a line and run the sentence into the next line (poetry being this wonderful, complex amalgam of the mechanics of language -- sentences, clauses, even phrases  -- and the building blocks of poetry -- the beat, the line, the stanza) there needs to be sensitivity to the fact that the poetic line is over, even if the sentence grinds on. The reader needs to know when a line ends, even when the line enjambs with the next, so the reader and/or listener can savour the line as a whole, complete thing unto itself, as well as the line’s part in the sentence (and the last word’s part in the rhyme scheme). That is why reading poetry aloud is itself an art, one we can and should discuss at another time.

Let’s look at a specimen line of iambic pentameter, plucked at random from amongst the creakings of the windmills of my mind:

With all my worldly goods I thee endow

That’s ten syllables. The natural rhythm of these words fits the iambic pentameter line like a glove.

with ALL my WORLDly GOODS i THEE enDOW.

As the Bard Himself would have said, the words flow trippingly from the tongue. That’s what’s supposed to happen. There is no fight with the rhythm, you can go with the flow.

Here’s another line:

The windmills of my mind, how loud they creak!

Same rhythm scheme:

the WINDmills OF my MIND, how LOUD they CREAK

There is a theory that iambic pentameter is in fact the natural metre of the English language (complete with the pause of approximately one rhythmic beat at the end of the line, so you can breathe), which is why it has become so popular within the vernacular English poetry and prose communities over the past four centuries or more, at least until Ezra Pound decided it was tyrannical. Then again Pound was a pretty unrepentant fascist so what did he know about tyranny and the lack thereof? But I digress.

Remember I commented that an iamb is the rhythm of your heartbeat? Some theories include this as one of the instinctive criteria that draws us as people to iambic verse. This is what being alive sounds like, in a primal sense. It just plain fits us, the same way we count in base 10 because of our fingers.

Don’t worry about the whys and wherefores, just acknowledge that iambs are iambs and iambic pentameter is a fundamental rhythm scheme in English verse. The trick is to fit the words to the rhythm scheme you’ve selected for use, and in this case that’s your challenge.

Do you read your verse aloud as you write? That’s the only reliable way to tell if the words fit the rhyme scheme. Declaim your verse aloud and then you’ll see (did you notice “Declaim your verse aloud and then you’ll see” itself is a line of iambic pentameter?) if it flows trippingly from the tongue. If it flows evenly and smoothly from your lips, you’re where you want to be. If something feels forced, if the words come out awkwardly or to make the line work you have to place undue emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle, then you have to re-work the words (different word sequence, perhaps different word selection entirely. I can write iambic pentameter with little or no conscious thought; a side effect of this seems to be that in day-to-day use I split infinitives like a butcher) to restore the regularity of your rhythm. Anything looks good on paper and the silent voice between your ears doesn’t necessarily give you a fair depiction of the actual sound of the words. Sound and its production are mechanical processes; you must speak each line, each iamb, aloud to see if it really works.

A solid grasp of this rhythm scheme should come with practice and lots of declaiming, probably in the acoustically perfect little poet’s room in your home. Just don’t flush while reading, it overloads the acoustics.

Please note you can break these and other rhythmic rules when writing; I have done so from time to time, deliberately (or at least consciously). Breaking the rules can force the reader to focus on a specific word or syllable, it can force the reader to slow down the reading and pay more attention, sort of an aural speed bump. However, those are exceptions; first you need to learn the rules before we go breaking them -- and while the ghost of Ezra Pound calms down just a little.

Now let’s get to your second disparate problem; the use of the sonnet form itself.

If you read the rather fulsome praise for the form in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, you’ll discover that some (I confess I am among them) consider the Shakespearian sonnet (hereafter referred to as the sonnet, for sheer laziness; we’ll touch upon alternate versions later) to be the ultimate accomplishment of short poetic structure in English. It has it all, in just 14 lines. The trick is to use the form to its full extent.

Form fits function and ultimately the sonnet is a dialectic structure. It is designed to shape logical analysis of a problem, to provide a venue for dynamic argument and resolution and then to guide the writer through to a conclusion, and if you do it right it’ll make some art in the process. As a form the sonnet consists of two main blocks of text, the octet (first eight lines) and the sestet (last six lines). As a general rule, the octet splits into two four-line quatrains, defined by the rhyme scheme. The sestet splits into a third quatrain and a final couplet. Thus the fabulous sonnet rhyme scheme,

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

that probably was beaten into you at some stage of your high school education.

If you want to look at the sonnet as a poetic syllogism, the octet sets forth the thesis. The third quatrain that opens the sestet sets for the antithesis and then you sum up in the last couplet, the synthesis.

Let’s consider a concrete example of a sonnet that uses this form to achieve its dialectic aim, the poem I sent Viscount Gemini de Grendelus to celebrate his knighting.

When dark descends and all look to the dawn
For hope, for light, for warmth drawn from the sun,
All know the dismal dark first must be gone:
And thus the race with darkness must be run.
Why run that course, when daylight that we crave
Must follow, sure as age shall follow youth?
Why challenge darkness? What need we to brave
When sun must shine, when brightness must bring truth?
There always shall be darkness, it is true,
And in such shadow beasts seek out their prey.
If we are better than those beasts we rue
We’ll fight to make the dark as safe as day.
Of stars that pierce such darkness, none deny
The brightness in the night named Gemini.

Okay, let’s get the tombstone data out of the way. Indeed, it’s a sonnet;

1) 14 lines

2) standard sonnet rhyme scheme of
- ABAB (dawn/sun/gone/run)
- CDCD (crave/youth/brave/truth)
- EFEF (true/prey/rue/day)
- GG (deny/Gemini)

3) iambic pentameter lines.

That’s great, we’ve defined the corpse; any life in its bones? Let’s break it down and see.

First the octet:

When dark descends and all look to the dawn
For hope, for light, for warmth drawn from the sun,
All know the dismal dark first must be gone:
And thus the race with darkness must be run.
Why run that course, when daylight that we crave
Must follow, sure as age shall follow youth?
Why challenge darkness? What need we to brave
When sun must shine, when brightness must bring truth?

You can look at the octet as a single thematic block and it works fine that way. Indeed, in this octet the narrative flows from the beginning to the middle and thence to an ending of sorts, the big rhetorical question. This narrative block in turn breaks down nicely, consistent with and emphasized by the rhyme scheme, into two quatrains.

When dark descends and all look to the dawn
For hope, for light, for warmth drawn from the sun,
All know the dismal dark first must be gone:
And thus the race with darkness must be run.

Why run that course, when daylight that we crave
Must follow, sure as age shall follow youth?
Why challenge darkness? What need we to brave
When sun must shine, when brightness must bring truth?

Let us look closely at the first quatrain and what it actually says.

When dark descends and all look to the dawn
For hope, for light, for warmth drawn from the sun,
All know the dismal dark first must be gone:
And thus the race with darkness must be run.

The first quatrain sets forth the whole premise of the poem; the race with darkness. Light good, dark… not good; philosophy by Gronk in his cave. The archetype is at the heart of this; dark is dismal and undesirable, but it’s inevitable. It is to be endured. In this poem, darkness is the rain on life’s parade.

Now that we’ve set forth that premise we can see the dialectic unfold. The second quatrain sets forth the fundamental issue at hand; “why fight the problem?”

Why run that course, when daylight that we crave
Must follow, sure as age shall follow youth?
Why challenge darkness? What need we to brave
When sun must shine, when brightness must bring truth?

This is the voice of cowardly reason, the appeaser submitting to the inevitable, though when you look past greeting-card truisms the logic is horribly, cynically faulty. The logic here is flawed in terms of ethics. The unduly optimistic faith that age must follow youth is reflected in the assuredness that brightness must bring truth. This is philosophy by Pollyanna, standing on a street-corner waiting for a mugger to give her a seminar in realpolitik.

Okay; the octet has set forth the fundamental issue being addressed (quatrain 1) and has posed a possible, pathetic solution (quatrain 2); do nothing, go with the flow, assume like Annie that tomorrow is only a day away and Daddy Warbucks will take care of things in general. This is a weak but sadly credible premise; it assumes that we are passengers in life, that we do not make our own destinies or our own choices. Leave it to someone or something else (in this case the movements of the heavens), it’ll all work out okay. This is the voice of appeasement making its segue to ethical surrender. It also describes the easy path. We all know this is the path many (most?) people take, every day. It’s the path that calls to us. It may not be spiffy, it seems to say, but who cares? The sun will come up and it’ll all be okay. Does it really matter if there are beasts out there when we know they will slink off at dawn? This reaction is insidious; it also is terribly human.

And then, like the next movement of a symphony shifting to a major key, the poem shifts gears as it enters the sestet and we get the response, starting with the third quatrain.

There always shall be darkness, it is true,
And in such shadow beasts seek out their prey.
If we are better than those beasts we rue
We’ll fight to make the dark as safe as day.

The first line of the quatrain acknowledges the thesis of the octet and the second line transcends it. In the second line the true nature of darkness is revealed, a means to the ends of malevolence. Darkness is not just the absence of light, it is the medium in which beasts lurk and flourish (or, far more perplexing ethically, are allowed to flourish by people like the narrator of that second quatrain). Then comes the challenge to the appeaser which one hopes is rhetorical; “If we are better than those beasts”; if we are no better than the beasts then we have surrendered. Doesn’t the second quatrain sum up as existential and ethical surrender, the abrogation of personal responsibility? The third quatrain looks the second quatrain in the face and, in the final couplet of the quatrain, spits in its eye.

Yes, light will come; yes, light is good. That doesn’t mean we have to sit still and accept the darkness and its fellow-travelers. If we accept the darkness passively, the third quatrain says, we are no better than beasts; surrender may seem human but it actually makes you less than human, it renders you bestial. That’s a pretty strong ethical and philosophical response to the fundamental thesis set forth in the octet. Are we men or beasts?

And then we come to the couplet. The GG rhyme serves as punctuation for the poem, the period at the end of the sentence. After the longer flow of quatrains we suddenly have this wonderful, thumping rhyming couplet followed by silence, which hammers home those last words in the mind and memory of the reader or listener. I’m short! I rhyme! Nothing follows me! Look at me! Read me! This is the good stuff!

And in this case, indeed it is the good stuff.

Of stars that pierce such darkness, none deny
The brightness in the night named Gemini.

The poem tells you that there is someone named Gemini, someone who pierces the darkness that so intimidates the octet and that the third couplet holds in such contempt. In Gemini there is one who does not appease, does not submit, does not go quietly into that good night (I hope Dylan Thomas would have liked this poem). Note that the light doesn’t filter through, it doesn’t just happen. The light pierces the darkness. It’s active, it’s aggressive. It is a conscious act of defiance.

Gemini is neither sun nor moon, he is not shattering the darkness; that would be facile and life isn’t facile. Rather he is playing his part, one pin-point among many -- and yet too few; it’s still dark, isn’t it? -- in the darkness, struggling to deny those beasts the freedom they need to flourish. He is but a pin-point; even so, among those many pin-points, this is a special one. That’s blatantly obvious to the observer; “none deny” -- not even the beaten voice of the second quatrain, perhaps? -- there’s something, someone, special here.

If the third quatrain, in defying the second quatrain, asks us if we are men or beasts, I think the couplet makes one thing clear; Gemini is the antithesis of the beasts. This is what it is to be a Knight (and yes, the pun is both deliberate and fortuitous but hey, bloom where you’re planted), this is what it is to be a man, this is what it is to blaze forth in the darkness. You may not win but, dammit, you’ll know you tried and afterwards the darkness will have nightmares about facing you.

The last couplet hammers home the message of defiance and hope. That last word rings in your ears like a bugle call to battle; the beasts do not merely approach, they are here, and right now, right here in the darkness, this star is ablaze. The challenge is implicit; Gemini is one special person but he is a person like we are, neither sun or moon, just another pin-prick. If he can transcend that and be so brilliant, what’s your excuse and mine?

That’s what a sonnet’s form lets you do; frame the question, pose a possible solution, then shoot that first solution down in flames and from the ashes of those flames hold up for final consideration a jewel, a nugget of image or wisdom or hope. Debate, discovery, dynamics, dialectic; all that in 14 lines, 140 syllables.

Damn, I love sonnets!

And to go back to the first issue, let’s look at the role of rhythm in the creation of the sonnet; beyond mere mechanics, beyond punching a categorical ticket, it contributes to the end product by highlighting certain words. Take the third line of the sonnet above:

All know the dismal dark first must be gone.

Let’s break down the rhythm of that particular line:

all KNOW the DISmal DARK first MUST be GONE

So far so good?

I could have written that line two ways:

All know the dismal dark **first must*** be gone

or

All know the dismal dark ***must first*** be gone

Both versions work within the framework of the poem, neither fights the rhythm scheme. Let’s look at the variable, the placement of those two words within the iamb.

The poem could read “first MUST” or “must FIRST”. Which is stronger? I think placing the emphasis on “must” is stronger. It hammers home that there’s a necessity here. The dark MUST leave. Either permutation would work technically, but the emphasis provided by the rhythm renders the one I chose a stronger version. It is a little thing that makes it a better poem.

This last analysis is fine-tuning to the point of navel gazing, gentle friend. However I hope it emphasizes to you the synergy that is at the heart of poetry. Poetry is the amalgam of grammar and rhythm, of prosody and musicality. It’s all the pieces working together to make the names ring, the messages shine. It’s art, dammit! This is the good stuff!

The Spenserian form doesn’t thunder out such a thumping ending. For Spenser, as for Shakespeare, the octet was the same pair of quatrains. Rather than its last sestet being that wonderful, punctuated EFEFGG, it’s a far more gentle and balanced EFGEFG. You don’t get that last KABOOM couplet. Instead, the form begs you to make a balanced argument, two halves set against each other. It’s a more subtle ending. And we could cloud the issue further with Petrarch’s variant, too.

However, one thing at a time, gentle friend. Start with the ultimate machine, the Shakespearian model. We can look at alternate choices later.

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Ten syllables per line, each line five iambs, “ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM” and that instinctive pause at the end of each line.

Use the form, explore challenge and response. Give the reader the question, the answer and then that percussive, brilliant last couplet to sum up, to make the point, to make sure the reader and listener don’t miss what matters. It’s got dynamic tension, conflict and resolution, yin and yang. It is how people think, aspire and define. It’s all there for you.

emgd

Childish Writing Isn’t Easy

Creating really, truly medieval song lyrics

By Master Hector of the Black Height

I decided to write a song. This in itself is not unusual for me. What was unusual was my determination to write a song in the style of the Child ballads. This has nothing to do with children, by the bye. Francis J. Child was a 19th century American scholar and folklorist. His five volume collection, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (published between 1892 and 1898), is a remarkable collection of 305 folk songs in language very close to our present vernacular. Given that his was one of the first attempts to capture this material, it’s as close to a “primary source” as we’re going to get on British folk/popular music going back towards our period of interest.

For more information on Child and his ballads, please refer to Compleat Anachronist (CA) #91. There are numerous web sites on the Internet with information on Child and the ballads in his collection.

CA 91 documents four of the 305 Child ballads to before 1650, though others may precede the SCA’s cut-off date. While, as noted in CA 91, “The Child ballad is a late-period phenomenon, by SCA standards. Such ballads may or may not have been sung as far back as the fifteenth century. They were certainly being sung by the sixteenth century, but not many of them were being recorded. Our good records don't begin until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...” So balladry of this style is period.

I find the style distinctive, so much so that I have not been able to emulate it until now. To me, the narrative line of these ballads is sparse to an extreme. My usual writing reflects a very different poetic, with far more emphasis on fleshed-out narrative. I had not been able to achieve the stark, sparse quality I found in the Child ballads; they were just too different from my usual style. And then I achieved an interesting insight.

One of my interests is the literature generated by the Vietnam War. Some remarkable novels have been written about that conflict, as well as non-fiction prose. One of the most interesting works (acknowledged to be both fiction and non-fiction) is Michael Herr’s Dispatches. First published in 1978, its stark prose has almost become a cliché, reflecting the disparate, almost surreal events and effects of that conflict. Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s film “Full Metal Jacket” (based on Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers) and wrote narration for Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”. Michael Herr gave both films their distinctive narrative quality.

For me, the ultimate, stark prose in Herr’s Dispatches is this excerpt, taken from the opening of the book.

But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it.

“Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.”

I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story...

(Michael Herr, Dispatches, Knopf, New York 1978. Page 6)

So what, gentle reader?

I was thinking of Herr, how he captures a story in so few words, and then I thought about the Child ballads. I find great similarity in the two styles of narrative. There is a story but you don’t necessarily hear much of it. This leaves vast holes for your imagination to fill.

I wonder, does this reflect a reality of the lives of the people who wrote and sang those medieval ballads? I tend to write lengthy, detailed narrative. I try to paint the whole picture. I feel a need to carry the story-line along from beginning through middle to the end. I want my vision to be your vision and I don’t want you to miss anything interesting. The balladeers didn’t worry about that. They painted their minimalist picture and left the holes for you to worry about or not.

Much like Michael Herr.

Take a well-known example of a Child ballad, #26, “The Three Ravens”:

There were three rauens sat on a tree

Downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe

There were three rauens sat on a tree

With a downe

There were three rauens sat on a tree

They were as black as they might be

With a downe derrie derrie derrie downe downe

The one of them said to his mate, / Where shall we our breakefast take?

Downe in yonder greene field, / There lies a knight slain vnder his shield

His hounds they lie downe at his feete, / So well they can their master keep.

His haukes they flie so eagerly, / There's no fowle dare him come nie.

Downe there comes a fallow doe, / As great with yong as she might goe.

She lift vp his bloudy hed, / And kist his wounds that were so red.

She got him vp vpon her backe, / And carried him to earthen lake.

She buried him before the prime, / She was dead herselfe ere euen-song time.

God send euery gentleman, / Such haukes, such hounds, and such a leman.

What about the Knight’s heraldry? Where’s his horse? Who slew him and why? How and where was he wounded? There are so many questions left unanswered! This is, for me, one of the distinctive, difficult facets of the ballad style that I have great difficulty emulating. I now am conditioned to seek and to provide detail.

Maybe this lack of answers is a medieval phenomenon, echoed by Herr to capture the impersonal -- incomprehensible? -- nature of the Vietnam War for its participants. It’s not our experience, though. Today we have CNN. We have 24 hour coverage of every story. We have background pieces, we have in-depth research. We will be told all the details, more than we need to know and perhaps more than we want to know. We will be subjected to this deluge of data. We will have all the details handed to us, nay, forced upon us.

Not by Herr. Not by the balladeers whose work is captured in Child’s collection. Maybe theirs is art of their times and places, where the culture(s) they reflect didn’t have all the answers. Evidently the balladeers accepted that. “Three Ravens” doesn’t ask futile questions about things that will never be answered. It addresses the here-and-now.

The knight is dead.

The dog keeps him company.

The hawk keeps him company.

The doe carries him away and buries him.

The doe dies immediately thereafter.

That’s all there is, folks. Draw your own conclusions.

I appreciate the metaphoric quality of the doe. I understand the role of the ravens as harbingers of death. Underlying all that suggestion, those layers of meaning and interpretation, is the narrative line, utterly stark in its elegance. Much like Herr’s first-person protagonist in Dispatches, we are told a story in a few lines. We get beginning, middle and end, even if we don’t recognize it as such until it sinks in (much like Herr’s experience cited above). Maybe it’s not a complete story from the perspective of people familiar with the Victorian novel, but that’s a value judgment. “Three Ravens” tells its story and, given its survival for several centuries, apparently it’s an adequate rendition.

As I write this, it’s only a few weeks after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon its return to Earth’s atmosphere. In this tragic event we saw the mighty engine of Western media working at full throttle: asking questions, handing us fact upon fact, hypothesizing on top of the facts to satisfy our conditioned need for answers. When new facts were unavailable, the media re-ran old facts. Again and again we were fed -- force-fed? -- detail upon detail. There was no background factoid too obscure, no biographical datum about the dead too insignificant.

That is not the balladeer’s way. I can’t help wondering how a ballad about the loss of the Columbia would have been written by a 15th Century artist. Perhaps the structure would be something like this?

There was a tire in the middle of a field.

Nothing else was around it.

It was burned. It smelled bad.

There were no tracks or paths.

No one claimed it.

Sounds almost like Herr’s writing from 1978, doesn’t it? No assumptions. No hypotheses. Mere acceptance of what is. There may be implicit tragedy in the situation. There may be implicit acknowledgement of the source of this oddity (eliminate all the other options and the tire must have fallen from the sky. Wow). Those deductions are for the listener to draw. That’s a very different style from the information deluge we live with today.

I am not trying to generalize the great period writers into oblivion: dark ages and medieval literature include lots of detail and lots of directive narration. Examples that pop to mind include Chaucer, Boccaccio, the Beowulf poet and so on. By no means do I deny the art of Chaucer and the rest. I merely am coming to accept that there’s room within the sweep of medieval literature for the balladeers, the Michael Herrs of their times and now ours. It’s a style worth exploration and experiment.

I offer this as my first experiment in the ballad style, clearly inspired by “Three Ravens” and its derivative, “Twa Corbies”:

Two Ravens

(a ballad after Child, after Snowed Inn, 15 February A.S. XXXVII)

Two ravens flew beside the inland sea:

The scarlet shines beside the white.

Two ravens flew beside the inland sea:

The scarlet is our life-blood dear.

Two ravens flew beside the inland sea:

What fate awaits for such a pair as we?

The scarlet shines beside the white,

So bright it shines.

The pair did spy a sorely wounded beast:

The scarlet shines beside the white.

The pair did spy a sorely wounded beast:

The scarlet is our life-blood dear.

The pair did spy a sorely wounded beast:

How came it thence to found the ravens’ feast?

The scarlet shines beside the white,

So bright it shines.

No wolf did hunt, no ram its horns did wield, / No hare did kick, no boar its tusks revealed.

The beast had left its dark and dismal lair / To steal cubs from the mighty Northern bear.

The beast was found out in its wicked plot: / The cubs were safe, the beast its lesson taught.

Two ravens feasted by the inland sea:

The scarlet shines beside the white.

Two ravens feasted by the inland sea:

The scarlet is our life-blood dear.

Two ravens feasted by the inland sea:

The bear’s spoils make rich such a pair as we.

The scarlet shines beside the white,

So bright it shines.

Yes, there is a metaphoric and symbolic quality to this: the symbol of the House Galbraith is the raven and when I wrote this Corwyn and Domhnail Galbraith had just stepped up as Baron and Baroness of Septentria (which Barony’s heraldry is a white bear on a scarlet field). Yes, all the other animal references are to heraldic or other totem beasts of other components of Ealdormere. But consider the narrative line for a second, simply on its own merits.

There’s a dead beast.

Those various other animals didn’t kill it.

The bear killed it.

The beast tried to steal bear cubs.

The beast failed. It’s now raven food.

What exactly was the offending beast? I don’t know. I really had no clear picture when I wrote the lyrics. In fact I resisted, consciously and carefully, the temptation to write in some detail there. What about the cubs? Not much is articulated. What was the plan, where were the cubs before the beast tried to steal them? I have no idea. These details, and any others you come up with, are the holes your imagination can fill, or not, as you deem necessary.

What about the chorus lines? What is the scarlet and white? Septentrian heraldry? Meat and bone? Blood on snow? Something else? Again, if you care, the answers are in your imagination. And if you don’t care, these lines are a notch up the complexity scale on “Downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe”, but that’s about it.

Writing this simply, this starkly, is a departure for me. I am very pleased with my first real attempt at balladry of the Child style. Maybe I’ll write some other ballads, when I‘m in the mood to leave that many big holes in my work and can resist the temptation to write additional verses to paint the whole picture.