Suddenly the garden is full of primroses
Feb. 23rd, 2020 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI have had a good day today! Yesterday I did too many things (good things, but too many of them) and overloaded my brain, so I've been recovering by staying in all day and keeping to quiet things. I've made lots of progress on the jumper I'm knitting (I'm making a gansey in the traditional style, using a pattern from Staithes on the Yorkshire coast—I've now finished the 'miles of stocking stitch' bit and got to the more interesting patterned section, which is great fun and going well) and written over 1,000 words of delicious hurt/comfort for The Flight of the Heron—my usual pace when I'm working steadily on a fic is about 500 words a day, so I'm very pleased with this.
Anyway: I was going to post this rec yesterday, but sensory overload makes listening to music impossible, so here it is now. Folk music, ambivalent moods and nature imagery are three of my favourite things, so of course I like this song a lot, and I'm always reminded of it at this time of year—the weather for the last couple of days has been both mild and very windy, which feels appropriate.
I think my favourite thing about it is the contrast between the lyrics and the music. One of the comments quoted on the Mainly Norfolk page about the song describes it as 'Male Chauvinist Pig Song of the Year', which is understandable if you're just looking at the words (although, in fairness, there are plenty of recordings by women which address it to a 'young man' rather than a 'woman'—arrogance is a common folk song trait :P). But that seems to become much less obvious when set against that lovely, haunting tune, which was apparently collected from a street singer in Newcastle in the 1820s.
If I had to pick an existing folk tune to set the Raven King ballad from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to, this one would be my top choice if it wasn't for the metre being twice as long as it needs to be. It has just that sort of slightly eerie, unsettled, ambivalent sound (it even has that perfect little falling-back twist in the final line in just the right place to sing 'the Raven King...' to if you arranged the lyrics right), which undercuts the arrogant certainty of the lyrics beautifully. You get the feeling, listening to that tune, that the narrator's confidence that his former lover will return to him is decidedly misplaced—and, perhaps, that he knows this, that he realises that the human heart and will are not as constant and predictable as the seasons.
Anyway: I was going to post this rec yesterday, but sensory overload makes listening to music impossible, so here it is now. Folk music, ambivalent moods and nature imagery are three of my favourite things, so of course I like this song a lot, and I'm always reminded of it at this time of year—the weather for the last couple of days has been both mild and very windy, which feels appropriate.
I think my favourite thing about it is the contrast between the lyrics and the music. One of the comments quoted on the Mainly Norfolk page about the song describes it as 'Male Chauvinist Pig Song of the Year', which is understandable if you're just looking at the words (although, in fairness, there are plenty of recordings by women which address it to a 'young man' rather than a 'woman'—arrogance is a common folk song trait :P). But that seems to become much less obvious when set against that lovely, haunting tune, which was apparently collected from a street singer in Newcastle in the 1820s.
If I had to pick an existing folk tune to set the Raven King ballad from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to, this one would be my top choice if it wasn't for the metre being twice as long as it needs to be. It has just that sort of slightly eerie, unsettled, ambivalent sound (it even has that perfect little falling-back twist in the final line in just the right place to sing 'the Raven King...' to if you arranged the lyrics right), which undercuts the arrogant certainty of the lyrics beautifully. You get the feeling, listening to that tune, that the narrator's confidence that his former lover will return to him is decidedly misplaced—and, perhaps, that he knows this, that he realises that the human heart and will are not as constant and predictable as the seasons.
