Song Chain: Cymbeline

Loreena McKennitt: Cymbeline

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Have you ever played Word Association? It’s the game where one person says a word, and the next player has to say the first word that comes into their head. The results can be funny, revealing, or just wonderfully odd. This week, we will be playing a musical version of that game, and forming a song chain. Each song will have something, anything at all, to do with the last one. To start off, here is the first song that came to mind when I saw Mt Vernon Mike’s post of The Reduced Merle Haggard.

So how did I get to Loreena McKennitt from Merle Haggard? Mike mentioned Shakespeare. Now, if I were normal, I would have posted Romeo and Juliet. But no, I had to think of one of the Bard’s most obscure plays. Cymbeline can only be regarded as a history if you regard the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth as being more historical than folkloric. In any case, it is clear that Shakespeare expanded the plot of Cymbeline with material that came not from Geoffrey at all, but rather from the Bard’s own mind. Loreena McKennitt uses Shakespeare’s own words from near the end of the play as the text for her song. The result is a beautiful lament for a pair of doomed young lovers.

Songs From Poems: The Lady of Shalott

Loreena McKennitt: The Lady of Shalott

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Alfred Lord Tennyson published his original version of The Lady of Shalott in 1832, but Loreena McKennitt takes her lyrics from Tennyson’s revised version from 1843. Tennyson is famous for his Idylls of the King, which was a series of poems inspired by Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Although The Lady of Shalott is a tale with Arthurian elements, it is not part of The Idylls of the King. In fact, the poem was inspired by an Italian telling of the story of Elaine of Astolat, and this version has several differences from Malory’s telling. Note too that, although T H White would later combine the characters, this is not the Elaine who was the mother of Galahad.

Tennyson presents a lady who is under a curse: she must view the world only through a mirror, and then weave images of what she sees. This curse was apparently Tennyson’s invention; it can be found neither in the Italian version nor in Malory. It is the element that makes the poem so fascinating. There have been many scholarly discussions over the years about what this signifies. For me, and I think for Loreena McKennitt as well, it is best left a mystery. I do enjoy the irony of one notion though. The lady in her weaving reminds me of the Fates in Greek myth. That would mean that the Lady of Shalott can control every destiny except her own.

Seven Deadly Sins: The Bonny Swans

Loreena McKennitt: The Bonny Swans

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Here's our missing sin: Envy.

The Bonny Swans is a murder ballad about sexual jealousy. Childs lists it as #10 of his 305 Popular English and Scottish Ballads, and the original version goes way back to 1656 or thereabouts (Childs labels it "The Twa Sisters"). Here's Wikipedia's summary of the gruesome plot:

Two sisters go down by a body of water, sometimes a river and sometimes the sea. The older one pushes the younger in and refuses to pull her out again; generally the lyrics explicitly state her intent to drown her younger sister (over a suitor)…When the murdered girl's body floats ashore, someone makes a musical instrument out of it, generally a harp or a fiddle, with a frame of bone and the girl's "long yellow hair" for strings. The instrument then plays itself and sings about the murder…so that the elder sister is publicly revealed.

This song clearly violates two of the many warnings from this wonderfully amusing list, Things I've Learned From British Folk Ballads", to wit:

Avoid navigable waterways. Don’t let yourself be talked into going down by the wild rippling water, the wan water, the salt sea shore, the strand, the lowlands low, the Burning Thames, and any area where the grass grows green on the banks of some pool. Cliffs overlooking navigable waterways aren’t safe either.

Sharing a boyfriend with your sister is a bad plan.

The Aristocrats: The Lady of Shalott

Loreena McKennitt: The Lady of Shalott

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No week of songs about aristocrats could be complete without a tale from the Arthurian legends. Here, after all, we have a set of tales in which almost no common folk appear.

I’m sure that most readers are familiar with the main outline of the story of King Arthur and his knights of the round table. But the Arthurian legends also encompass a large number of side stories. In particular, when the knights scatter throughout the countryside in search of the Holy Grail, each knight has his own adventures. “The Lady of Shalott” is the tale of what happens to Sir Lancelot during this time. The telling used here is by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Loreena McKennitt is a Canadian artist with a beautiful, almost operatic, soprano voice which she knows how to use to best affect. She plays harp, piano, and other keyboards. Her music can be found under new age or Celtic or world music; all of those labels have some validity, but none do justice to her music.