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Commonplace Songs

So. Here’s the thing. I have a bad habit of skimming, especially when I’m reading rubrics. I don’t notice I’m doing it but it can mean I miss important bits of information, such as the part about your last entry being a 250 word retrospective. Luckily I am aware of this deficiency of mine so I tend to check my rubrics periodically to make sure I haven’t missed anything. So I wrote the post. But. Before I realized there was a set end to the life of this blog I still intended my own form of wrap-up. I decided to make a playlist with at least one song per reading from this class. Even after I knew I just had to write a lil paragraph I couldn’t get the idea out of my head so here is the playlist anyway. [Commonplace Songs] Obviously it would be a bit of a time commitment to listen to the whole thing, so this was mostly just for my own enjoyment, but I had too much fun not to share. Notes for each song under the cut.

Abbess Hild & Caedmon, & Caedmon’s Hymn - Sisters of Mercy - Leonard Cohen

This one was honestly one of the most difficult to figure out. I generally struggled most to find songs for the explicitly religious texts, but I think this one works pretty well if you think of it as being from Caedmon’s perspective.

The Exeter Book Riddles - The Riddle Song - Joan Baez | Scarborough Fair - Simon and Garfunkel

These are cheating a little I know, since they both have very old origins themselves. I did consider including Schubert’s Swansong as a reference to Riddle 7, but I’ve tried to stick with songs that have lyrics.

The Wanderer - Man of Constant Sorrow - Joan Baez

Man of Constant Sorrow is really a modern version of The Wanderer to me. An exile “bound to ramble” away from their loved ones, unable to see them again in this life.

Deor - This Too Shall Pass - Danny Schmidt

This one is obvious from the title, and she makes rings! What more could you ask?

The Wife’s Lament - You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me - Dusty Springfield | One Too Many Mornings - Joan Baez

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me really captures the tragedy of still being in love with someone who’s abandoned you. I think the desire for physical proximity really works with The Wife’s Lament. One Too Many Mornings works for the feeling of physical, but more importantly, temporal distance. The tortuous, and at the same time mundane passing of time, and the feeling of it being too late.

Wulf and Eadwacer - Farewell Wanderlust - The Amazing Devil

I struggled with this one. Another song considered was Better Man by Pearl Jam but I think Farewell Wanderlust works better even if it's less specific. It's got the anger, frustration, heartbreak, and defeat going for it. 

Dream of the Rood - The Becoming - Nine Inch Nails 

I decided no church music was allowed which made this one harder. I decided to lean into the slight body horror of the description of the cross shifting between bloodstained and bejewelled. Also: “He’s covered with scabs he’s broken and sore” just like Jesus! Obviously this doesn’t really suit the glorious tone the poem was going for, but I personally found the poem a bit unsettling.

Judith - Glory and Gore - Lorde | The Dismemberment Song - Blue Kid

Glory and Gore definitely fits the tone of the poem best, it's hard to explain why without going line by line, but trust me this one is exceptionally good for Judith. The Dismemberment Song is here even though it's not quite right, because it was suggested to me and it made me laugh. Content warning though, it is very clinically detailed about, you know, dismemberment.

The Battle of Maldon - Immigrant Song - Led Zeppelin

This one is pretty obvious right? I came so very close to including Waterloo by ABBA as well, but I do have some restraint.

History of the Kings of Britain - Set Fire to the Rain - Adele | Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears

Set Fire to the Rain is for Igerna. All that love, and vulnerability, and secrets, and distrust. This song is just about Igerna to me now, it's pretty perfect for her. Everybody Wants to Rule the World works really well for Arthurian legend. “Nothing ever lasts forever, everybody wants to rule the world”

The Mabinogi - Rhiannon - Fleetwood Mac | She’s Always A Woman - Billy Joel

Rhiannon is ludicrously obvious, I don’t think I need to explain. She’s Always A Woman is also about Rhiannon, specifically how Pwyll defends her and keeps her as his queen even though everyone is against her.

Lanval - Who is She? - I Monster | Come Wander With Me - Jeff Alexander

I feel like a magical woman appearing out of nowhere to be your girlfriend would actually be pretty trippy, hence Who is She? Come Wander With Me is a bit more suitable tonally. Have fun wandering off, never to be seen again, Lanval!

Ancrene Wisse - Agoraphobia - Deerhunter

As you might expect, from a song called Agoraphobia, this works well for anchoresses. The lyrics match the actual daily life of an anchoress surprisingly well.

Middle English Lyrics - Luck Be a Lady - Frank Sinatra

With regard to The Lady Dame Fortune is both frende and foe

Sir Orfeo - Frozen Pines - Lord Huron | Word Spins Madly On - The Weepies

Frozen Pines captures the frozen-in-time-ness and its about seeking a lost loved one in the woods. It's perfect. World Spins Madly On works because time has also very much not frozen, and they are apart from one another, knowing, and at the same time not knowing, where the other is. Honourable mention to Nothing Takes the Place of You by Toussaint McCall, which just wasn’t quite right, but has a maturity the other two lack.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I - Family Friend - The Vaccines

Poor Gawain is the only responsible adult at court. Jokes aside, this is a really good character song for Gawain.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight II-III - All in Green Went My Love Riding - Joan Baez

I’ve mentioned this one before. It's too perfect not to include.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight IV - Little Lion Man - Mumford and Sons

Another character portrait for my favourite boy Gawain! This also works for him in Morte d’Arthur. He tries so hard, and always comes just a little bit short, and then blames himself mercilessly.

Canterbury Tales – General Prologue - Prologue: Into the Woods - Stephen Sondheim

I’ll be honest, I had no idea what to do for this one, but I committed to a song per reading. It does work well in a way. They are both prologues that introduce a billion archetypal characters at once, tell you what they want, and make fun of the a little. Sondheim could have done a kick-ass musical adaptation of The Canterbury Tales.

Piers Plowman – Prologue - Land of the Believer - The Weather Girls

Club music perilously close to gospel music, I wouldn’t be surprised if this genuinely was about Jesus and religion. I considered skipping Piers Plowman because we didn’t actually go over it in class, but I’m a completionist.

Chaucer – Canterbury Tales – The Miller’s Tale - You Give Love a Bad Name - Bon Jovi

Oh Absolon… I considered going with Tainted Love, but I needed a ridiculous song for a ridiculous story.

Chaucer – Canterbury Tales – The Miller’s Tale - Put the Blame on Mame - “Rita Hayeworth” Anita Ellis

On the other hand, Put the Blame on Mame is about a beautiful woman being blamed for disasters both natural and human, but which is supposed to, in my opinion, make you think about how ridiculous it is to actually blame a woman for that kind of thing.

Julian of Norwich – A Revelation of Love - Space Age Love Song - A Flock of Seagulls

I love taking songs that aren’t supposed to be about Jesus and making them about Jesus, and Jesus in the role of alien girlfriend is funny to me. That said, it does work really well for the transcendent vibe of medieval mysticism.

The Book of Margery Kempe - Crazy - Gnarls Barkley | Policy of Truth - Depeche Mode

I found it a bit difficult to take Margery seriously at first, because she is patently a ridiculous person, but is she really crazy just because others think she is? Trying to think of songs for her is actually what made me take more seriously what her life was like. She experienced many dangers and a lot of persecution for living her truth, hence Policy of Truth.

The Book of Margery Kempe - Sad Eyed  Lady of the Lowlands - Joan Baez

A singular, and shockingly untouchable woman.

Second Shepherd’s Play - Mack the Knife - Ella Fitzgerald | Sheep - Pink Floyd

I admit, these are both kind of joke songs, but they do work! Mack because Mac, sheep because sheep.

Second Shepherd’s Play - Under Pressure - Queen and David Bowie

The slightly more serious choice for this play. It matches the complaining of the shepherds at the beginning of the play, and it has references to prayer, and a desire for change that works given it is a nativity play.

Noah’s Flood - Rain on Me - Lady Gaga (feat. Ariana Grande)

Okay, hear me out. I know it's a club song, but it's actually perfect for Noah’s wife. I can’t go line by line, but it expresses disappointment with a relationship, be it with God or Noah, but it also expresses gratitude for being alive, even though they wish they were “dry” , a reference to rain, and alcohol.

The Crucifixion - Blowing’ in the Wind - Joan Baez

This one was really hard without just choosing a song literally about the crucifixion, which would be cheating. Blowing in the Wind is about ignorance and apathy to human suffering, which is also what characterises the Roman soldiers. Also, yes, I will pick the Joan Baez version of every song I can. Thank you for asking.

Mankind -  WWJD - The Axis of Awesome | Out of Touch - Hall and Oates

Mankind - Send Them Off! - Bastille

WWJD is another joke song, but you can’t tell me a group of demons in a morality play wouldn’t sing this. Like the demons in the play, it humorously pokes at a question people would really be asking about how they are supposed to ever live up to Jesus. Out of Touch and Send Them Off! are more straightforwardly readable as Mankind singing to/for Mercy.

Morte d’Arthur, book 1 - Tower Song - Martha Wainright | In the Blood (feat. Ashley Barrett) - Darren Korb

Tower Song is my other song for Igerna. It works along the same lines as Ste Fire to the Rain, but it's a little more vicious. I was torn about including In the Blood, even though it works well for Arthur, because of course it does, I transposed one young hero who is the future of his people, onto another. I still think the Arthurian angle changes the way the song reads enough for it to work, though.

Morte d’Arthur,  book 8 - Happy Ending - MIKA | Heavy Crown - Trixie Mattel

For Happy Ending, please see my previous post on Lancelot and Guinevere. Heavy Crown is for Arthur, “Winning’s losing with a couple strings [...] Gotta be the last to know”, I think it suits the melancholy of all the lost glory Camelot, and how inevitable the whole thing felt to Arthur the second he was confronted by Agravaine and Mordred about Guinevere and Lancelot

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This class was about medieval literature and I learned about medieval literature.

Taking this class clarified some things I knew in theory but not in practice. I have been taught by other classes, and by the learning I do for fun, that the middle ages, which span 1000 years according to some metrics, were not homogeneous. I was mostly aware of the differences in fashion, governance, and technology. I hadn’t really considered how the artistic output would change over time. Also, particularly in pop-history, the vestiges of the progressive ideas of history are still present, and there is still often an implication that the high and late middle ages were more refined than the early middle ages. Reading literature spanning from the early to the late medieval period has proven that wrong pretty categorically. Priorities were certainly different, but the early medieval poetry is by no means primitive.

The class was also an exercise in interpreting pre-modern literature as pre-modern literature. Speaking very generally, reading and critiquing modern literature works somewhat differently because modern books are written within modern frameworks. People can and do impose modern frameworks like the hero’s journey or bildungsroman onto older forms of literature, but, while there were repeating patterns in stories that medieval authors could draw on, they weren’t working with codified sets of instructions the way we often do now. So, while I could impose the structure of the hero’s journey onto Gawain and the Green Knight, fit the story beats to the necessary stages and use it as an interpretive tool, that technique would not quite be engaging with the work for its own sake, and the baggage of the hero’s journey might obscure certain themes that don’t fit within its structure. Obviously, I can’t actually get myself perfectly into the mind of a medieval writer or reader, as though they would have a homogenous interpretation to begin with, but trying to read medieval literature as having their own internal context, both with regard to individual works, and how they related to each other, changed the way I was reading them over the course of the class.

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“you should be the bigger person” absolutely not. i’m cursing his entire bloodline.

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Also, I maintain that Mordred is the villain because he doesn’t repent. The fact that he has so many opportunities and doesn’t take them is evidence in favour of his guilt rather than against it. Because pretty much all the other major players also make decisions that make things worse, but they all, even once mortally wounded, get a chance to say they regret it, and to try to make amends with those still living. Arthur, Gawain, Guinevere, and Lancelot all get that chance. Mordred is the only one who still dies a sinner. Not only does he not change course when he gets real chances to, but when he is mortally wounded, unlike everyone else who pulls back and gets a long death speech and last rites, Mordred pushes forward, allowing the spear to pierce his skull for the sake of killing Arthur. He is essentially committing the deadliest sin according the medieval perspective: suicide.

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I must say I really love that Lancelot and Guinevere survive. As far as they’re concerned, their illicite love affair caused ALL this mess and all the deaths of the people they cared about, and they have to live with it. They don’t get to die in each other’s arms like Tristan and Isolde, they don’t get to live together either. There is no catharsis to their ending and it is that much more tragic for it.

You could of course interpret it another way. Because they survive, they have a chance to repent and absolve themselves of their sins, allowing them to got to heaven when they die.

However, I am not a Christian, I am a Romantic, and to me, Guinevere and Lancelot having to spend the rest of their days reckoning with how much their love cost, how much they sacrificed for it, and having to do so apart from one another, is the far greater tragedy.

[florilegia-or-what-you-will]

Thank you Malory for giving Merlin the necessary ✨Wizard Energy✨

Sure in The History of the Kings of Britain he cast the necessary spell on Uther, but he didn’t otherwise have ✨Wizard Energy✨, he just had normal advisor energy. Malory’s Merlin was found in disguise for some reason, cast the spell on Uther, made him do the Arthur Foster Subplot without explaining why, set up the sword in the stone and then just left everyone to it. Probably there’s a reason given for why he isn’t involved in the morte d’Arthur part of Le Morte d’Arthur elsewhere in the story, but as far as I’m concerned he just chose to go on ✨Wizard Vacation✨ right before everything started because for once in his life he explained the future and told Arthur that marrying Guinevere would do this, and now it is categorically Not His Problem.

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Also I would like to note that I put Lorum ipsum as my header text when I was initially creating this blog because I thought the cod-Latin would be funny for a medieval lit course. I added the Mankind quote in the description only after I read the play because it was such a good coincidence of humour. Just think of it. The playwright and I nodding sagely to each other from across the centuries because we both find cod-Latin funny. It really warms the heart :)

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Randy Feltface is… Mankind

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One thing I like about Mankind is when Titivillus is messing with Mankind and his grand scheme is to stick a plank of wood under the ground where Mankind is going to dig. Its so low rent but so concrete and I love it. No waving his hands and chanting an incantation to freeze the ground, which what any modern, cool demon would do nowadays, its a lot more akin to medieval sympathetic magic, which is fun. Its also great that it works. Mankind gives up immediately, no point moving a few feet to the right, better just go to the pub and start a murder spree. To be fair though, if I were Mankind (and I am), I too would give up on doing work at the first opportunity.

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The soldiers in The Crucifixion are just like me trying to build IKEA furniture

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(Then Noah beginneth to build the ark.)

Because it’s just that easy

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Last time I read The Second Shepherd’s Play it made me want to listen to Maddy Prior Christmas carols. That has also proved true this time

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I read The Second Shepherd’s Play last term. That version was I think untranslated? At any rate, I question the choice of this translation to not name any of the shepherds? They have names! Why are you just referring to them as the first, second and third shepherd? It’s just confusing, it creates the false impression that the second shepherd is the main character because of the title of the play, when it’s really just called The Second Shepherd’s Play because there are two plays about shepherds in the manuscript. I understand that having a character named Gib and a character named Gill could be confusing, but having characters just called the first, second and third shepherd isn’t less confusing

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even this will pass. nothing is forever.

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How on earth was everyone in England apparently able to recognize Margery Kempe on sight

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20 minutes in

I am reading Margery Kempe and I have not checked but I think she may have gotten in Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives. If her donkey starts going backwards and her beer loses its head then I’ll know for sure.

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HELL YEAH

I am reading Margery Kempe and I have not checked but I think she may have gotten in Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives. If her donkey starts going backwards and her beer loses its head then I’ll know for sure.