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'Cameron of Ardroy's Last Goodnight': a Flight of the Heron filk ballad
While listening to ballads recently, it occurred to me that the words of 'Lord Maxwell's Last Goodnight' (Child ballad 195) have a lot in common with Flight of the Heron... and so, inspired by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
luzula's filk balladry, I decided to write that version.
This is based on June Tabor's version of the lyrics. Tabor has recorded the ballad twice with slightly different melodies, here and here. Each verse of this melody goes to two verses of Child's ballad-metre arrangement of the lyrics, so that's how I've written them out here. The verses skip around the plot of parts four and five of Flight of the Heron a little, but will hopefully make sense enough!
I've preserved a couple of Scots words from the original, so should point out that 'aye' in verse four means 'always', and that 'gotten' in verse two is not an Americanism. :) I've assumed 'Ardroy' is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable—although canon doesn't give a definite pronunciation, this follows the pattern of Ardgour, Ardrossan etc.
Child says of this use of the word 'goodnight' that it 'is to be taken loosely as a farewell'—I think here it's Ewen's (merely temporary) farewell to Scotland, but also his 'last goodnight' to the dying Keith.
Thanks to Luzula for beta reading!
'My dear Ardroy, if you could stay about your father's house
Free from fetters and a prisoner's fate; in my arms I'd thee embrace
Ah, then I might have kissed your mouth, and been no more your enemy.'
'I thank you, my dear, for your kindness; trust me, I may not stay with thee.
'For I have risen for my Prince, the white rose and the Stuart cause
My Cameron heart did still incline to loyalty's greatest laws
So by Lochiel's side I fought, and all for him such strife to see
But George has gotten what he has sought; trust me, I may not stay with thee.
'Adieu, Glen More, my proper place; adieu, adieu, Lochaber fair
Adieu, my house, my own Ardroy, and my dear lochside there
Adieu, Beinn Tigh's high peak so fine, and Loch Lochy's bank where the oak is bonny
Adieu, my home and my only joy; trust me, I may not stay with thee.'
Now he has taken his good gold ring, with fetterlock and lion's head
Says, 'Take you this, my own dear love, and aye have mind of me.
By you I've gained a greater thing, and your true friend I'll always be.'
But no more "always" would they get; 'Trust me, I may not stay with thee.'
The moon was bright, the ship was clear, the young laird went away
But his dearest friend was no more there, and he cared not for the safe convoy
From musket shots and shouts they flew, from Morar sands that shine so white
Now he is over the flood to France; Ardroy has taken his last goodnight.
As for the original ballad, it recounts real historical events, though in a somewhat romanticised way. John, ninth Lord Maxwell, murdered Sir James Johnstone in 1608 as part of a long-running and complicated family feud and then fled the country to escape trial. I quite like the odd contrast the ballad makes between this brutal, bloody history and the poetry of Maxwell's tender goodbye to his home—that evocative list of place names, and the bonny birk... The loving farewell to his wife is a fiction—in fact he was in the process of divorcing Lady Maxwell when these events began, and she died before he left Scotland. 1608 is of course too early for Jacobites in the eighteenth-century sense, although Maxwell was imprisoned for being Catholic at one point—and again later on for what Child rather mysteriously describes as 'his extravagant turbulence', and which actually seems to have been him challenging another nobleman's use of a disputed title. Never a dull moment in the seventeenth-century Borders...
As for the 'last goodnight', Maxwell returned to Scotland a few years later and was captured and executed—strangely not unlike the fate of Archibald Cameron, although the context is obviously very different.
luzula's filk balladry, I decided to write that version.This is based on June Tabor's version of the lyrics. Tabor has recorded the ballad twice with slightly different melodies, here and here. Each verse of this melody goes to two verses of Child's ballad-metre arrangement of the lyrics, so that's how I've written them out here. The verses skip around the plot of parts four and five of Flight of the Heron a little, but will hopefully make sense enough!
I've preserved a couple of Scots words from the original, so should point out that 'aye' in verse four means 'always', and that 'gotten' in verse two is not an Americanism. :) I've assumed 'Ardroy' is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable—although canon doesn't give a definite pronunciation, this follows the pattern of Ardgour, Ardrossan etc.
Child says of this use of the word 'goodnight' that it 'is to be taken loosely as a farewell'—I think here it's Ewen's (merely temporary) farewell to Scotland, but also his 'last goodnight' to the dying Keith.
Thanks to Luzula for beta reading!
'My dear Ardroy, if you could stay about your father's house
Free from fetters and a prisoner's fate; in my arms I'd thee embrace
Ah, then I might have kissed your mouth, and been no more your enemy.'
'I thank you, my dear, for your kindness; trust me, I may not stay with thee.
'For I have risen for my Prince, the white rose and the Stuart cause
My Cameron heart did still incline to loyalty's greatest laws
So by Lochiel's side I fought, and all for him such strife to see
But George has gotten what he has sought; trust me, I may not stay with thee.
'Adieu, Glen More, my proper place; adieu, adieu, Lochaber fair
Adieu, my house, my own Ardroy, and my dear lochside there
Adieu, Beinn Tigh's high peak so fine, and Loch Lochy's bank where the oak is bonny
Adieu, my home and my only joy; trust me, I may not stay with thee.'
Now he has taken his good gold ring, with fetterlock and lion's head
Says, 'Take you this, my own dear love, and aye have mind of me.
By you I've gained a greater thing, and your true friend I'll always be.'
But no more "always" would they get; 'Trust me, I may not stay with thee.'
The moon was bright, the ship was clear, the young laird went away
But his dearest friend was no more there, and he cared not for the safe convoy
From musket shots and shouts they flew, from Morar sands that shine so white
Now he is over the flood to France; Ardroy has taken his last goodnight.
As for the original ballad, it recounts real historical events, though in a somewhat romanticised way. John, ninth Lord Maxwell, murdered Sir James Johnstone in 1608 as part of a long-running and complicated family feud and then fled the country to escape trial. I quite like the odd contrast the ballad makes between this brutal, bloody history and the poetry of Maxwell's tender goodbye to his home—that evocative list of place names, and the bonny birk... The loving farewell to his wife is a fiction—in fact he was in the process of divorcing Lady Maxwell when these events began, and she died before he left Scotland. 1608 is of course too early for Jacobites in the eighteenth-century sense, although Maxwell was imprisoned for being Catholic at one point—and again later on for what Child rather mysteriously describes as 'his extravagant turbulence', and which actually seems to have been him challenging another nobleman's use of a disputed title. Never a dull moment in the seventeenth-century Borders...
As for the 'last goodnight', Maxwell returned to Scotland a few years later and was captured and executed—strangely not unlike the fate of Archibald Cameron, although the context is obviously very different.
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Thanks for the historical details--it does seem like a place and time in history that one might perhaps not have wanted to live in. I am reminded of the Duffy quote "...the seething violence and insecurity of the upper classes", though that was about the 18th century.
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Yeah, I think the ballads bear that one out!
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This in particular stays with me:
'Adieu, Glen More, my proper place; adieu, adieu, Lochaber fair
Adieu, my house, my own Ardroy, and my dear lochside there
Adieu, Beinn Tigh's high peak so fine, and Loch Lochy's bank where the oak is bonny
Adieu, my home and my only joy; trust me, I may not stay with thee.'
no subject
Heh, I changed very little from the original in that verse, apart from the place names—it was one of the first things that gave me the idea of writing the filk, how those lines reminded me of the scene where Ewen is being taken as a prisoner down the Great Glen and bidding farewell to all the places of his home.
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