#balladries

[hl-obsessed]

2/5 down. at this rate we gonna get full ✨ bald direction ✨ by the end of the next year.

[historyartthings]

Does anyone have access to this primary source I came across?

There’s a section of a ballad in an article I read that goes:

‘Much ill cometh of a small note

As Crum well set in a man's throat

That shall put many other to pain, God wote;

But when Crumwell is brought a-low

And we read out the Christ Cross Row

Of K L M then shall we have news’.

(You can find this section in the archives in a letter from Norfolk to Cromwell)

But a book also mentioning it says it’s part of a longer ballad adapted from ‘Christ’s cross row’.

I’m pretty sure the author got the extended version - based on his citations - from ‘the defeat of the pilgrimage of grace’ by bush and bownes. Unfortunately I don’t have access to this, and altho I’ve requested it from the library as it’ll be useful for my dissertation, I don’t think they’ll get it in time for the seminar i need it for!

So if anyone does have a copy of or access to that book and the pages relevant to this ballad, I’d be very thankful :)

[fernmaddie]

introduction

hey folks! i wanted to give a little introduction to myself and my work, as this is my first time presenting myself publicly on tumblr. this is going to make me sound rather professional, but i promise i'm just here to do the regular ol' tumblr things: be silly, gush about things i care about, and not take myself too seriously. i hope you'll join me. :)

i'm fern maddie (she/her), a queer experimental folk artist, multi-instrumentalist, and balladeer based on abenaki land. through folk balladry and original writing, i perform songs and stories exploring themes of grief, trauma, and renewal.

***please note: my approach to folk music is adaptive, interpretive, critical, queer-feminist, and inclusive. white supremacists, "folkish" nationalists, terfs, or anyone who engages with english-language folk literature as a tool of western cultural "purity" will be blocked***

buy my music on bandcamp

listen on spotify

watch some performance on youtube

more about my work below the cut....

past projects

ghost story - my debut album, released in 2022. ghost story was named the #2 best folk album of 2022 by the guardian, and one of the top roots albums of the year from npr music. across 10 tracks, it explores the stories we inherit from the dead -- both our personal dead and cultural dead -- through a queer-feminist lens. includes a critically-acclaimed interpretation of the ballad "hares on the mountain" (roud 329), as well as the ballads "the maid on the shore" (roud 181), "northlands" (roud 21) and a queer re-framing of the scottish shepherding song "ca' the yowes."

north branch river - my debut EP, released in 2020. across 6 sparse tracks and spry banjo-playing, it explores the intimacy and pain of our tenuous relationship with the natural world. includes a re-interpretation of the ballad "the elfin knight" (roud 12), and the original song "two women," inspired by selkie folklore.

of song and bone - of song and bone is a short-lived podcast i produced a few years ago. there are only 3 episodes out, but they illustrate some of my scholarship about folk balladry and my own relationship to balladry as a literary tradition. FYI: i would probably frame a few things differently if i were re-recording the podcast today (ideas and language evolve!). perennially thinking about making more, but we'll see.

currently in development

way to live - way to live is my second studio album, currently in production. as of this writing, way to live includes 8 tracks, and similar to my previous work, combines original songs with folk ballads, though with a greater share of personal storytelling than my earlier records.

said the false nurse - this is a piece of adaptive short fiction i'm currently developing. it's a deeply sinister queer re-telling of the horror ballad long lankin (roud 6), set in the 1620s in the north of England. stay tuned for process updates!

adult children - this is a full-length original novel and associated concept album i'm developing. it's set in contemporary rural vermont, and focuses on a group of adult siblings, their dying father, their failing farm, and the new arrival who threatens their co-dependent bond. the associated rock opera will be written in a folk-rock style with digressions into folktronica and country.

[culpepers-wife]

Defining what is popular culture in early modern England is actually proving to be difficult.

What is popular culture? How do we define it? How far does elitism and source survival affect how we define it? What does popular culture tell us about early modern society?

For what is essential a brief paragraph in my introduction it is taking a lot of my energy as it turns out the full thesis is dependent on me giving a good definition.

[bui1ding-dreams]

it'll be gone. soon.

just like the novembers.

as quick as the time passed by

in galleries and shops for caffeine;

in travels with skins colliding

and eyes were met, then.

after dawn.

not more than the sunset.

it'll be gone. soon.

This is not about the sun.

[cruelsister-moved2]

hey kind of weird question but i saw a post of yours from a couple years ago while searching some random tags and you mentioned having some opinions about anais mitchell (presumably her recorings of the child ballads?) and the whole coffee shop au-ification of balladry (particularly tam lin) and that resonated so hard with me so i just thought i'd ask you to elaborate more on that because i genuinely want to hear what you have to say. also i fucking love angela carter

oh man... I mean first of all I just reject the term 'child ballad' out of hand nowadays because like fjc was some random racist eugenicist middle class american academic borderline-hobbyist who never even heard a folk song in the wild and basically just compiled stuff other people had already written down. so even if I pretend to subscribe to the ownership of the collector, which I don't, we never refer to 'sharp ballads' or 'percy ballads' or even 'burns ballads', despite the fact that burns was actively re/writing his. add to that the fact that like a third of child's collection came from a specific, named woman (Anna Gordon/Mrs Brown of Falkland) and you start to get angry at the anonymisation&dehumanisation of 'the folk', especially when you learn that child's ballads made him rich yet socially humiliated mrs brown. she (along with numerous other women + burns as a kind of anomalous man) was working actively from inside a tradition, but we instead default to the authority of the prejudiced outsider because of romantic beliefs about the naivety of 'the folk'. (if anything, child actively harmed the tradition with his completely arbitrary subjectivity + not collecting any fucking tunes...)

the very notion of folk music as just this organic wellspring that just emerges naturally from a people-group is a victorian/edwardian fantasy concocted by nationalists in order to reclaim said material, both for profit and for nationalism reasons. objectively speaking, someone or several someones composed that material & many of them were most likely women. the idea of claiming that folk music 'belongs' to all of 'us' (and 'us' at least in its original intention meaning white english people or white people of english extraction) because several generations of performers put their own spin on it is like saying the beatles' copyright really belongs to all of us because lennon & mccartney co wrote them. I'm not arguing for copyright law here but like the recognition of folksong ownership is completely broken in popular conception and it's v much a case of the idea that something belongs to 'everyone' is erasing the actual individuals/groups whose cultural property it is. (+ the living folk tradition regularly accepts new songs of known authorship, and operates a paradigm of collective ownership that is really ill served by the modern idea of intellectual property that can only make something a specific someone's or no one's at all)

so in THAT context, the girlbossification and uwuification of balladry by an outsider (who believes themselves to be an insider) is just kind of grotesque. firstly you're working from a canon which was selected and heavily modified by a victorian man to suit his delicate sensibilities, and then projecting like modern western feminist sensibilities on them. I've seen like 'feminist reworkings' of songs which lament women's helplessness, or exist for mothers to warn daughters about sexual assault. this is where the angela carter comparison comes in bc shes like the patron saint against the 'feminism is when women slay' school of folklore retelling and also someone who was both working really hard not to claim ownership of the stories she collected or to claim thematic ownership with her interpretations, but also writing her own 'folklore retellings' that actually comprehend and work with the deep themes at play rather than being like hm it's kind of problematic that the prince couldn't remember what cinderella looked like (fwiw most cinderella-esque stories are explicitly about the resourcefulness of the girl, and the prince - w his attached status+possessions - is literally just there to be her reward lol kind of a win for feminism idk..)

it's the belief that everyone in the past, especially if they were illiterate, was stupid. not to Survivals Theory but I recently saw this song from an irish traveller woman who claimed it was in the bible which everyone found funny but it literally heavily resembles a story from the apocryphal infancy gospel of thomas, which incidentally was extant as old irish poetry c.700 CE. like the anais mitchell girlies always have this approach that they're the first ones to recognise how great this repertoire is, or something. and her approach is very like oh I've discovered this lost hidden tradition etc although ironically she herself is part of a historic tradition of north americans ripping off martin carthy LOL 🤭

sorry this is like a huge thing for me and i kind of ran out of steam to get into it all but i appreciate the question n i hope at least some of that means something to you<3

[pentagramcityradio]

Musical Munday

//This week's ballad is called Frankie and Johnny, although it goes by numerous other titles, including Frankie and Albert. It is about the 1899 murder of Albert Britt by Frankie Baker. Contrary to the lyrics, Frankie was never tried for the crime and lived out the majority of her life in a psychiatric facility. This is a rare instance of a published song with a known composer becoming a folksong. There are over 300 documented variants of this ballad.

Some things may be lost on a modern audience, so some clarifications:

1.) "Paid out $100 for a suit of Johnny's clothes." $100 in 1899 would be the equivalent of $3591 today. So that is definitely noteworthy.

2.) "A bucket of beer" does literally mean a bucket full of beer. Not bottles, just beer. This was actually incredibly common at the time. In large cities, drinking water was often hazardous. But the process by which beer is made kills the organisms that cause various water-borne illnesses. It was also much less alcoholic than beer today.

3.) "Bring out the rubber tired buggy, bring out the rubber tired hack." These are both types of horsedrawn vehicles, although the rubber tired buggy may also refer to a horseless carriage. Cars as we know them did not exist at the time. In the song, the speaker means these to refer to a hearse and police vehicles.

[muzicpromotionclub]

Get Ready to Enjoy The Rhythmic Grooves Of The Latest Track 'You Are Not Alone' Created by Queensland DJ Christian Krauter

[mythickind]

The Twa Corbies

I'm going to go ahead and start us off with a ballad about my kithtypes. I'm crowkith and ravenkith and the term corbies can refer to either. This is a Scottish ballad dating back to at least the 1700s

The lyrics are a bit difficult if you're not used to balladry or Scots. Below I have a line by line of those lyrics in American English.

As I was walking all alone I saw two [crows/ravens] talking The one to the other did say Where shall we go and eat today?

It's in behind the old dyke [a wall] over there I know there lies a newly slain knight Nobody knows that he lies there But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair

His hound is for hunting game His hawk to fetch the wild birds home His lady has taken another lover Say we may make our dinner sweet

You'll land upon his skull And I'll peck out his pretty blue eyes With many a lock of his yellow hair We'll fix our nest where it's grown bare

There's money to be had for the one who tells But none will know where he has gone Over his white bones when they are bare Wind will blow forever more

[reeseykins]

I saw and loved a post that was musing about how Astarion and Halsin would probably actually get along really well, and honestly that is exactly what makes me feral about this pairing. Don't get me wrong I love some good enemies to lovers, but I like to think that even though they are very different they aren't at all antagonistic towards each other when they first meet. I just visualize these two traumatized elves tromping through Faerun not even sure who the fuck they are anymore and finding someone they can somewhat relate to simply because they are the two oldest members of the group.

Halsin's like, "it's so hot today, this reminds me of that summer 150 years ago when everyone in Baldur's Gate had to sleep outside to keep cool," and Astarion is like "I REMEMBER THAT I was so miserable I actually spent a few days in a dirty wine cellar because I thought I was going to melt" and then they are just smiling quietly and enjoying the fact that someone else was around that long ago and remembers the same shit as them.

Astarion is mulling things over one night around the campfire and asks Halsin, "Did you ever see so-and-so play the lute years ago? They were absolutely divine." And Halsin laughs and admits he slept with them and they were so awkward in bed you wouldn't even think they were the same person who captivated audiences with their balladry.

And when they finally kiss it's actually kind of hesitant and gentle and then they pull back from each other and they just smile and are quiet together enjoying just being near each other.

[thesinglesjukebox]

LADY GAGA AND BRUNO MARS - "DIE WITH A SMILE"

14 years after "Grenade," Bruno finally found someone who would do the same...

[5.70]

Kayla Beardslee: Hey, when is that Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars collab being released? [5]

Ian Mathers: Mars and Gaga are both skilled at their craft in a way that often seems like a throwback to an earlier era of the art/industry, taking the biggest swings possible in terms of seeking mass appeal without feeling like they're compromising or calculated, talented mimics and style chameleons when they want to be. Working together on a big, heartfelt, suitable-for-all-occasions ballad actually feels perfect along those lines. The result is the kind of sturdily good (or "good," depending on your sensibilities) song that, if it catches you at the right moment in your life, might make you bust out crying. [7]

Joshua Lu: This collaboration would've been unthinkable in 2010; now that their careers have somehow converged, the outcome feels weirdly predictable. The emotional heft, vocal runs, and vague nostalgia are there, even if all it does is fill that "Perfect Duet"-sized hole in pop radio. "Die With a Smile" can't help but feel underwhelming in the context of their career trajectories — the kind of corny balladry that Bruno's outgrown and that Gaga mostly uses just to recapture the general public — but it's impossible to wholly reject when it's this nicely crafted. [6]

Grace Robins-Somerville: Most Obamacore song of 2024, hands down. "Die with a Smile" is this very specific meld of the era when you couldn't go to the supermarket without hearing a Bruno Mars ballad and when Gaga was doing a country pivot (although this is far blander than anything on Joanne). It's been a while since I've heard such blatant Grammy bait. [3]

Jackie Powell: Entertainment Weekly's Joey Nolfi wrote that “Die with a Smile” is a song that recalls “the emotional bravado” of “Shallow,” the Grammy- and Oscar-winning smash from Lady Gaga’s A Star Is Born. He’s correct. “Die With a Smile” thrives upon accented and intentional dynamics while making vague and simple lyrics mean more than it they do on the page. That’s also what made “Shallow” so convincing. The difference on “Die With A Smile” is that Bruno Mars is more Lady Gaga’s equal than Bradley Cooper ever was. Mars has more to sing on a song that has Gaga’s name billed first, but both artists shine without the other having to sacrifice. Gaga’s part, which begins at around a minute and a half until the song's end, transforms this from a Silk Sonic B-side into something that’s much more memorable, emotionally resonant and cinematic. It's a song that makes me wish I had someone to sing it to.  [9]

Katherine St. Asaph: So old-fashioned that YouTube's preroll ad recommended me Botox, and so definitively a Bruno Mars song that I'm genuinely unsure why the credits are in the order they're in. It works, albeit in an unexciting way, because Bruno and Gaga have practiced melodrama for years -- see "I'd take a bullet straight to my brain" and "not even the Gods above can separate the two of us," respectively -- and have also practiced singing pretty then belting big. [7]

Jeffrey Brister: When it comes to Bruno Mars, I want immaculately executed genre pastiche, something that sounds like the past but keeps a thrilling modern affect. Gaga, for all of her artsy subversion and slight avant-garde leanings, has just as much of a traditionalist impulse, if not stronger; under the right circumstances, the results can be explosive. That alchemy is present here: two artists synced up and bringing out the best in each other’s performances. There is absolutely nothing new here, but it’s polished and perfectly executed. I’m a mark for that sort of thing. [7]

Jonathan Bradley: It's not right to say Bruno Mars is so adept with pastiche that he transcends it; pastiche is his artform, his milieu, the genre that this genre artist seeks to perfect. "Die With a Smile" has two ideas: the first being the familiar terrain of the Bruno Mars ballad, and the second being "What if a Bruno Mars ballad was Jeff Buckley?" Even a few years after the 1994 release of Grace, pop music seemed like it only had room in its past for an artist like Buckley: a soulful and beautiful singer-songwriter who leaned toward rock-god charisma rather than folkish introspection. Mars has Buckley's swooning fragility as well as his stormy squalls of guitar, but for all that Buckley represented the last of something, he never sounded like he was going over someone else's territory. That fundamentally does not work for Mars's attempt to recreate the sound; navigating someone else's territory is Mars's entire point. If "Die With a Smile" has a third idea, it's the addition of Lady Gaga, who is herself no stranger to pastiche (see the Madonna-isms of "Born This Way," the heartland rock of "You and I," or the way she slipped effortlessly into the Hollywood prestige turn that was "Shallow"). Here, she delivers only competence, as if she'd been asked to sing backup on a new recording of "When I Was Your Man" and found out at the last moment that the assignment had changed. [5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Once you get past the surprise of "Die With a Smile" being a Jeff Buckley impression, it's remarkably insubstantial. "If the world was ending I'd wanna be next to you" sounds clunky and hyper-literal next to, say, "I'd catch a grenade for you". At least the harmonies are nice. [4]

Iain Mew: Bruno Mars's progression makes it a fruitful idea to go back and invert "Grenade" from a distance. Back then, he took the prospect of death as an opportunity to bitterly prove his unmatched love. Now he meets no less than the end of the world with smooth certainty that it's a chance for mutual togetherness. Lady Gaga's way with projecting intensity and sincerity in the most extreme contexts makes her the perfect foil, and for two lines after she comes in, it's transcendent. Then Mars comes back in, and not only is there not enough space for Gaga to shine, there's barely any space at all. Maybe the old anxiety hadn't gone away completely after all. [7]

Alfred Soto: Bruno Mars hasn't sounded this convincing a love man in years, if ever. Too convincing: Gaga is a backup singer on her own single. Mars sure would fuck himself if he could. [5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Someone pointed out recently how absurd it is that Lady Gaga's Twitter bio is literally advertising for the HBO Chromatica Ball special, Haus Labs cosmetics, Joker: Folie à Deux, and now "Die with a Smile." That sums up my feelings toward this entry into the Gaga canon: random and indicating a certain directionlessness—or perhaps overdirection?—in her career. She sounds great, and the bridge is perfect TikTok fodder, but she and Bruno Mars sound like they have as much sexual chemistry as brother and sister.  [4]

TA Inskeep: Mars and Gaga sound nice enough together, but there’s no frisson, no spark; they’re just two famous singers, singing a duet for you to stream and buy.  [5]

Scott Mildenhall: To the song's great benefit, the annihilatory proposition is underblown. Instead, its precise lilt is folded and finessed throughout, heading hither and thither without over-accelerating or escalating. It's a fine balance between ostentation and undulation. There's minimal vocal chemistry, but the blend is happening elsewhere. [7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I was with family over the weekend, and my brother asked “who is this??” like it was two stunning new artists on their debut single. Upon learning it was Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, his excitement dissipated. Only Andrew Watt could make two of pop’s best vocalists sound anonymous (don’t get me started on that weightless drum sound he's inexplicably made his signature). I can’t tell where Gaga ends and Bruno begins, which is a horrible mental image. [5]

Taylor Alatorre: The drums treat every other measure like it's a climax because the entire song, or more precisely its billing, is one undifferentiated climax. Which means no build-up, no peaks or valleys, no memorable grooves or meaningful sense of release. It's just those two names together on a lighted marquee, a chart-watcher fanfic straight out of 2012, What Could Be measuring short against What Must Be, which in this case is the greatest common denominator of softer-than-talcum piano balladry. At least "Grenade" had cartoon bloodletting on its side, and "Shallow" had the benefit of context. "Die with a Smile" reaches for that old doomsday rhetoric out of sheer reflex, even when the prophesized end is painted in washed-out watercolors, like a dream whose outlines dissipate five seconds after waking. Andrew Watt's approach to retromania is less playful than the Smeezingtons' was, but also strangely less reverent, since if you truly revere the music of the past then you don't try to half-seriously Mandela effect yourself into its hit parade. [2]

Nortey Dowuona: Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga getting to coast by cornering the market on having both vocal talent and a modicum of charisma -- you know, the old-fashioned model -- would be frustrating, but at least Watt's patient hand is keeping this over there next to the white Broadway crowd. Anything but more Bruno funk. [7]

Mark Sinker: Obviously I want to claim I’m only onboard with Bruno as a project at last thanks to Gaga’s in-video cigarette — casually centred, disgustingly compelling — but I have to admit it’s something entirely more wholesome: the actual topic, the actual melody, the actual delivery! He got me in the end! (Also, I like thinking of him as a little monster. He is a little monster….)  [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Would be a [6] with flipped Mars-Gaga ratio, but even then this would not quite get to the force of melodrama that would allow it to reach exit velocity and escape the great and depressing middle ground of tasteful 20th-century pop pastiche. These two have taken enough stabs at staid, boring pop songs for all occasions that they have become the legacy acts they once aspired toward and collaborated with. Good for them; bad for us. [4]

Kristen S. Hé: As much as I wish this Venn diagram had produced something more adventurous, it's arguably harder to write a song like this -- one that'll probably be on radio rotation for decades, and that I'll never object to hearing in any context. I've often found Bruno's schtick cloying and insincere, but here, I'd believe it even without Gaga's added star power. Bruno, please stay in this lane forever. (Gaga, please don't!) [7]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[sassafrasmoonshine]

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (British, 1872–1945) • The Little Foot-Page • 1905 • Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England

The work is based on the story of Burd Helen, a tragic heroine from Scottish balladry, who dressed as a boy page to follow her cruel lover on foot while he rode on horseback. After bearing him a child, she was finally acknowledged by him and they married. Here she is shown secretly doffing her female attire and cutting her long hair, in preparation for her journey. Within a few years of the exhibition, modern female art students were cutting their hair in "page boy" style.

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

EVANESCENCE'S AMY LEE HAILS SLEEP TOKEN: "I'M BLOWN AWAY"

Sleep Token are Revolver's Artist of the Year, and their towering instant-classic Take Me Back to Eden is our No. 1 album of 2023.

So yeah, you can say that we here at Revolver HQ are big fans of Sleep Token — and we're hardly alone in that.

Beyond their devoted cult of worshipers, the anonymous, masked band have earned glowing praise from many of their fellow musicians in the heavy-music world. In fact, one of their most famous fans is Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee.

In the 2000s, Evanescence spearheaded a captivating mix of heavy-rock bombast and moody, ethereal atmosphere. On their debut album, Fallen, Lee and Co. demonstrated how explosive metal surges ("Bring Me to Life") and melancholy piano balladry ("My Immortal") could coexist harmoniously.

So, in a way, Evanescence were tapping into Sleep Token's sonic wavelength while Vessel was possibly still inhabiting a past life. Unsurprisingly, Lee is over the moon about Sleep Token's shrewd songcraft and jaw-dropping ambition.

"I love Sleep Token. I'm blown away," Lee enthuses to Revolver. "How do they do it? How do they go so many different directions and call it one song?

"It took me three listens of ["The Summoning"] to realize that when they do that whole psychedelic section at the end, that it's actually the same chorus as it was before, only in a completely different way. And I love it even more for that.

"I thought they just went a whole new direction and wrote a new part, and then I was like, "Wait that's the same… but not at all."

She continues: "I love it. I think as a musician, music like that gets your brain tingling. It's exciting. It's like, wow, anything's possible. It's inspiring. I like them a lot."

While Lee has been the very public face of her band for the past two decades, Sleep Token are, of course, fastidiously anonymous. Yet despite the very different approach, the Evanescence frontwoman is quick to affirm Vessel's choice to remove the cult of personality from his project and put all the focus on the music.

"I think it's amazing," she says of Sleep Token's secrecy. "I think too much these days the focus is on everything but the music with a lot of the mainstream. And for me, if there's not the music then what are we doing? That's what this is supposed to be about. I love it. I think it's awesome. It's creative. It's really cool."

[bui1ding-dreams]

until when? til when?

til the sun's up, and orange—

when it stays the room

a haiku about today.

[holdharmonysacred]

So, you wanna prep for Lostbelt 6 by reading a bunch of fairy lore for background information. Luckily for you, I’m a turbo nerd when it comes to this particular brand of folklore. In this post I’ll be compiling links to assorted text and audio sources of information and entertainment related to all the real-world fairy lore that pops up throughout the chapter. I’m gonna try to avoid just wikipedia links as much as possible, so some of the text sources are gonna be a little dense, but that’s ye olde texts for you. This will be semi-ongoing as things pop up, so you can keep an eye out if you want!

Note: I’ll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, but there will be possible spoilers as to what’s in the chapter ahead, so watch out!

Without further ado, here’s the list under the cut:

HUGE MASSIVE CONTENT WARNING: Many of these texts are going to have adult themes and triggering content, particularly sexual assault, rape, and general non-consent in romantic or sexual relationships. I’m going to start including individual warnings for texts where I know it comes up, but even if I don’t note it, please proceed with caution and take care!

A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures by Katharine Mary Briggs - Exactly what it sounds like on the tin. Here’s where you can read about all the different fairies and creatures that tend to be more in short folktales, from baobhan sith to barghests to Ainsel and beyond, all in alphabetical order. If you find a fairy name you want to look up, it’s probably going to be in here somewhere.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare - I mean c’mon man. C’mon. There could always be a first for someone though, so if you are that someone - this is the most famous work featuring Oberon the fairy king, and the big one that F/GO and basically all other post-Billy Shakes media works pulls from. If you’d rather watch a staging of the play instead of read a script, here are some performances by Rice University and the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, and if those two in particular aren’t your jam I guarantee you there’s going to be a staging somewhere you can watch. As a bonus, here’s an absolutely lovely musical arrangement of “Philomel, With Melody” (AKA the lullaby Titania’s fairy servants sing to her) by the band Caprice. It’s not the most relevant, I just want to share it because it’s nice. WARNING: The crux of the play revolves around a love potion plot, so there will be themes of manipulation, non-consent, and potential sexual assault played for laughs and romance. It’s arguably mild compared to some of the other texts on here, but I would still be careful!

Translations of Melusina (Melusine) stories by D. L. Ashliman - D. L. Ashliman’s got a massive online treasure trove of folktales and folktexts, it’s always a fun time to go on a rabbit hole through his(their?) site. If you want stuff specifically relevant to Melusine though, here’s the page for her.

Versions of the Tam Lin ballad compiled at Tam Lin Balladry - this one’s going to be relevant because of the extremely high likelihood that NA will follow the JP merch labels and localize the “Fairy Knight” title as Tam Lin. Because it’s a ballad, there’s plenty of audio versions put to song, the most textually accurate one I can currently find being by Bob Hay & The Jolly Beggars. Besides that however, there are also versions by Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Tricky Pixie, and my personal favorite, the one by Anaïs Mitchell of Hadestown fame and Jefferson Hamer. If you want a more standard audio adaptation, the Tales of Britain and Ireland podcast will have you covered. WARNING: The start of the ballad is explicitly about sexual assault, with Tam Lin having been a rapist prior to meeting Janet. Janet’s own encounter is usually portrayed as consensual, she’s apparently a weirdo who heard the warnings and went “So that means FREE SEX?”, but some later versions do change her encounter into rape as a bizarre way of censoring her having sex out of wedlock. In addition, the ballad deals with themes of abortion. Basically, if any of this stuff is a trigger for you, I would proceed with extreme caution if you choose to listen or read.

Habetrot and Scantlie Mab - an archived version of a fairy tale about Habetrot. For similar stories, search for stuff under the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index type 501, “The Three Spinning Old Women”.

Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth - Now this one may not seem immediately obvious in its relevance outside of “hey look, Arthuriana!”, but trust me, This Is A Surprise Tool That Will Help Us Later. The relevant parts are going to start at Book 6, with Vortigern’s shenanigans. There’s also a podcast audio adaptation by Myths & Legends, split into part A, part B, and part C, if you would prefer that.

Official website for Knocknarea, or Cnoc na Riabh - Knocknarea is a big ol’ hill in Ireland with a bunch of Neolithic cairns on it, the most famous of which is claimed to be Queen Medb’s tomb. For anything else related to Medb, go read the Tain.

The Wikipedia page for Cernunnos - this is the point where I have to give up on not linking wikipedia, alas, as the sources here are little too tiny and scattered. Cernunnos is a Celtic god from Gaul, he’s got horns, we’ve got his name and some archaeological depictions of him, and that’s basically it, because unfortunately no stories about him survived. If I can find a better source about him to link, I’ll drop it here.

Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory, Volume I and Volume II - Not including this initially was a huge oversight on my part, but this is pretty much The text for general Arthuriana and one of the really big ones that Fate takes influence from. You can read this for stuff about Morgause and Morgan, but it’s also just good to have on hand for anything with the Round Table in general.

I’ve also got a bunch of podcast episodes that don’t really fit in with any of the above that I’ll list here if anyone wants more dank audio content:

Robin Goodfellow: His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests by Tales of Britain and Ireland - Relevant if you want some alternative tales of Puck and Oberon. WARNING: The episode itself covers its warnings pretty good, but before you click - there’s a lot of adult content in this one, including the thumbnail image. Most of the stories adapted are going to get pretty bawdy even at best, and there’s one that explicitly involves an attempted rape that the titular character thwarts. Proceed with caution, and also maybe don’t listen in public.

Black Dogs and Englishmen: Black Shuck in English Folklore and The Barguest: Demon Dog, Silly Sprite or Spectral Hound?, both by Fabulous Folklore with Icy - Listen to these two if you want more info on barghests.

Scottish Halloween & Vampire Fairy Witches by Stories of Scotland - Listen to this if you want a retelling of a story involving the baobhan sith along with other Scottish traditions!

And that’s all I’ve got for right now! If I find any more relevant sources, or if someone directs me to said sources, I’ll be sure to add links to this post. Until then, happy reading and listening, and I hope everyone has fun with LB6!