This week one of the greatest and most magical of the Scottish border ballads, Child 39. It’s quite long, so I give just the more dramatic second half; the whole is readily available online, though versions may differ. The plot is this: young Janet is forbidden by her father to go anywhere near Carterhaugh, which is the haunt of the notorious Tam Lin, a knight who has been abducted by the fairy court and who is known for seducing young maidens. Being a typical teenager she promptly hoists her skirt up a little above her knee (they wore them longer in those days) and scuttles off to Carterhaugh as fast as she can go, where she meets Tam Lin and predictably comes back pregnant. Scorning her father’s attempts to marry her off respectably to someone else, she goes back to Carterhaugh and tells Tam Lin that he’s going to be a daddy so what about it? Tam Lin says OK but first you have got to release me from the fairy spell, and that’s not going to be easy… This is where our extract begins.

I think one reason why this ballad still resonates so powerfully is that so many today face in their own way the prospect of holding fast to a loved one throughout a series of transformations, whether caused by age or illness or dementia, though sadly, unlike in the ballad, there is for them no happy ending in prospect.

The ballad has been covered by numerous folk artists, perhaps most notably by Fairport Convention on their seminal 1969 album ‘Liege and Lief’.

From ‘Tam Lin’

‘Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The elfin folk will ride
And they that would their true love win
At Miles Cross, they must bide.’

‘But how shall I thee ken, Tam Lin
And how shall I thee know?
Among so many unearthly knights
The like I never saw?’

‘Oh, first let by the black, black steed
And then let by the brown
But haste ye to the milk white steed
And pull the rider down

For I’ll be on the milk white steed
With a gold star in my crown
Because I was an earthly knight
They gave me that renown

And they will turn me in your arms
Into a beast so wild
But hold me fast and fear me not
I’m the father of your child

And they’ll change me in your arms
Into the red hot iron
But hold me fast and fear me not
I’ll do you no harm

They’ll turn me in your arms, my love
Into an awful snake
But hold me fast and fear me not
For I’m to be your mate

At last they’ll turn me in your arms
Into the melting lead
Then throw me into clear well water
And throw me in with speed

And then I’ll be your own true love
I’ll turn a naked knight
Cover me with your green mantle
And cover me out of sight

My right hand will be gloved, Janet,
My left hand will be bare
Cocked up shall my helmet be
No doubt I shall be there.’

Gloomy, gloomy was the night
And eerie was the way
When Janet in her green mantle
To Miles Cross she did gae

About the middle of the night
She heard the bridles ring
Janet was as glad of that
As any mortal thing

First went by the black, black steed
And then went by the brown
But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed
And pulled the rider down

And thunder rolled across the sky
And the stars they burned like day
And out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
Crying young Tam Lin’s away

They turned him to a bear so bold
Then to a lion wild
She held him fast and feared him not
He was the father of her child

And then they turned him in her arms
Into iron like hot fire
She held him fast and feared him not
He was her heart’s desire

They turned him, changed him in her arms
Into a hissing snake
She held him fast and feared him not
He was to be her mate

At last they turned him in her arms
Into the molten lead
She threw him into clear well water
And threw him in with speed

And then he turned a naked knight
She young Tam Lin did win
She covered him with her green mantle
As blithe’s a bird in spring

Out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
Out of a bush of broom
‘She that has gotten young Tamlin
Has gotten a stately groom’

Out then spoke the Queen of the Fairies
And angry queen was she
‘Shame betide her ill-starred face
And an ill death may she die’

Out then spoke the Queen of Fairies
Out of a bush of rye
‘She has gotten the fairest knight
In all my company

If what I’d see this night, Tam Lin
Last night I’d understood
I’d have torn out thy two grey eyes
And put in two of wood

If what I see this night, Tam Lin
Last night I’d only known
I’d have taken out your heart of flesh
Put in a heart of stone

If I’d but half the wit yestreen
That I have bought today
I’d have paid my tithe seven times to Hell
E’er you’d been won away’

Anon

This is my own take on the famous Old Irish lament, poignant in its depiction of old age, that I mentioned in a reply to a comment a couple of weeks back. I have not on this occasion included the Irish text because my version is more a distillation than a translation as such, omitting some stanzas and being rather free with others, so it would not contribute much to a word-for-word understanding of the original. More literal translations are available online.

The poem is thought to have been written in the late 8^th or early 9^th century. The Old Woman of Beare was originally an immortal mythological figure, to be equated with the Cailleach, ancestress of races and creator of the landscape, raising mountains and cairns, but by the time of the poem’s composition she has come to be seen simply as a very old woman who has outlived friends and lovers and now consorts with a Christian saint, much as Finn’s son Oisin was seen. It is a pity to lose the  mythological dimension, but on the other hand it does bring the human side into focus, making the old woman the epitome of grandmothers throughout the ages, railing against the ravages of time and deploring the mores of the young while remembering her own colourful past.

Lament of the Old Woman of Beare

(after the Irish)

I who was young am old.
Ebb-tide has come to me.
The days of my life flow outward,
The days of my life like the sea.

I am the Old Woman of Beare.
I used to wear a dress
Brand-new each morning. Now
I walk in nakedness.

When we were young we loved
Men; the girls today
Care for riches more.
The men have passed away.

Swift chariots and steeds
That bore off every prize –
Their day passed long ago.
Every good thing dies.

Look at these arms now.
They used to circle kings.
The bones stick through the flesh.
On them no wedding-rings.

The Stone of the Kings on Femen,
Mighty Ronan’s chair –
Their cheeks of stone are withered.
How shall flesh ones fare?

Femen’s plain I envy.
It has a yellow crop.
My crop is grey: I must
Wear this veil atop.

The waves of the sea are talking,
The wind blows up their spray.
Fermuid who was my darling
Will not come today.

I know where the kings’ sons are.
They rowed across the sea.
Under the reeds of Alma
The lads that lay with me.

The flood-tide and the ebb,
The fluxes of the main,
I have known them all.
They will not come again.

The ebb is with me now.
No second flood will come.
I wait for the winds to be silent,
For the voice of the sea to be dumb.

This is one of the great incest ballads, Child #16.

The social history of brother-sister incest is an odd one. The ancient Egyptians seem to have had no problem with it, at least among members of the royal family, but in Europe it became a very strong taboo, and Germanic legend features heroes who slept, quite unwittingly, with a sister from whom they had been reared separately, and on finding out what they had done were driven to suicidal despair, a theme which is reprised by J.R.R. Tolkien in his tale of Túrin Turambar. Obviously we understand now that incest is a bad idea from a biological point of view, but you’d think it would be enough in such unintentional cases to say ‘Oops, sorry, sis, didn’t realise’ and not do it again.

The old ballad poets did not see it as their business to make overt moral judgments, but as far as one can discern the narrator’s attitude here it seems to be ‘All very sad, but what else was a chap supposed to do in the circumstances?’. Of course, in this ballad it is not clear whether there was foreknowledge or not, but even if there was the brother’s reaction (and the sister’s connivance) are surely a bit over the top: it was hardly the baby’s fault.

I give the slightly modernised version sung by Maddy Prior on her 1998 album ‘Flesh and Blood’.

Sheath And Knife

It’s whispered in the kitchen, it’s whispered in the hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
The king’s daughter goes with child, among the ladies all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

It’s whispered by the ladies one unto the other
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘The king’s daughter goes with child unto her own brother’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

He’s ta’en his sister down to his father’s deer park
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
With a yew-tree bow and arrow slung fast across his back
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘And when that you hear me give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Shoot from your bow an arrow, and there let me lie’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when that you see that I am lying dead
  The broom blooms bonnie, the broom blooms fair
Put me in a grave, with a turf all at my head
  And we’ll never go down to the broom any more.

And when he has heard her give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
A silver arrow from his bow he suddenly let fly
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And he has dug a grave both long and deep
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
He’s buried his sister with their babe all at her feet
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when he is come to his father’s own hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
There was music and dancing, there were minstrels and all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

O the ladies they asked him, ‘What makes thee in such pain?’
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘I’ve lost a sheath and knife, I will never find again’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘O the ships of your father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can bring as good a sheath and knife unto thee’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘All the ships of my father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can never ever bring such a sheath and knife to me’.
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

Anon

I don’t remember where I came across this week’s piece, but I believe it to be from a newspaper of the time, possibly the ‘Sunday Express’, describing the last hours of the ‘Titanic’ in 1912. It seems to me a very fine piece of journalism, restrained and moving, with just the one touch of purple prose at the end. Of course, one must always beware of myths springing up around such events, and it is the British way to extract what heroic capital they can from total disasters – look at Dunkirk – but there does seem to be plenty of corroboration from eyewitness sources for its general veracity, and if one is tempted to smile at the self-conscious heroism of some of the participants, then remember this: they put their lives where their mouths were.

‘Benjamin Guggenheim appeared on deck with his male secretary, both resplendent in evening clothes. He told a steward: ‘I think there is grave doubt that the men will get off. I am willing to play the man’s game if there are not enough boats for more than the woman and children. We’ve dressed in our best and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen. If it should happen that my secretary and I both go down and you are saved, tell my wife I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward’.

Mrs Isidor Strauss also refused to go. ‘I’ve always stayed with my husband, so why should I leave him now? Where you go, I go’, she told him. As she rejected all pleas to get into a lifeboat, a friend said to Mr Strauss: ‘I’m sure nobody would object to an old gentleman like you getting in…’ He answered: ‘I will not go before other men’.

And that, wrote Walter Lord, was that. ‘Mrs Strauss tightened her grasp on his arm, patted it, smiled up at him, and then they sat together on a pair of deck chairs’.

… While the drama was unfolding, the ship’s band assembled on one of the decks and helped to keep up morale by playing ragtime tunes. ‘Many brave things were done that night’, wrote Beesley, ‘but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower, and the sea rose higher and higher to where they stood, the music serving as their own immortal requiem’.

I recently noticed that an AI search assistant tool had started popping up in my browser, inviting me, with an air of great confidence, to ask it anything, so I thought I’d give it a little test by setting it a riddle. I deliberately didn’t give Bing any clues as to the provenance (it’s from the Old English, Riddle 25 in the Exeter Book), and I used my own unpublished translation rather than anything it might find an exact match of online. The answer, as I am sure will be obvious to you, is ‘onion’. I find it rather touching to think of our distant ancestors, in those days before Netflix, sitting round exchanging riddles about vegetables. Ah, lad, we made our own entertainments in them days…

The exchange went as follows:

‘Hi Bing, I wonder if you can tell me the answer to this riddle:

‘I am a wondrous thing, I give joy to women,
A boon to those nearby; I do harm to none
That dwell in cities, save only to my slayer.
My shaft stands stiff and tall; I rise from a bed
That is shaggy beneath. At times a churl’s beautiful daughter,
A proud-minded maiden, will take me in her grasp,
Rub me to redness, raising up my head
As she holds me fast…. Soon she will feel
Our meeting, that curly-locked maid
Who holds me fast. The eye will be wet.’

Bing’s answer came back in a rather impressive five seconds:

‘Hi. I’m glad you enjoy riddles. This one is from the Exeter Book, a collection of Old English poetry from the 10th century. The most likely answer is onion, although some other possibilities have been suggested, such as hemp, leek, rosehip, mustard or phallus. The riddle plays on the double meaning of the description, which could refer to either a vegetable or a sexual organ. The last line implies that the eye of the person who peels the onion will be wet from tears. Did you guess it right?’

Well, well. I then tried the riddle on my wife, but she said ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about and I’m trying to get the dinner’. So I reckon that’s score one for AI, nought for humans. However, I then went on to test Bing’s appreciation of other poems, and it became clear that while AI is quite good at assembling bits of information already on the Net into a more or less coherent whole, it is quite clueless when asked to do anything that involves real creative understanding. Sample: ‘”Kerr’s Ass” is a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, an Irish poet. The poem, written in a colloquial and humorous style, describes the activities and behavior of a donkey owned by a man named Kerr.’ So maybe we poets needn’t step down just yet.

For those interested, here is the original Old English text:

‘Ic eom wunderlicu wiht, wifum on hyhte,
neahbuendum nyt; nængum sceþþe
burgsittendra, nymþe bonan anum.
Staþol min is steapheah, stonde ic on bedde,
neoþan ruh nathwær. Neþeð hwilum
ful cyrtenu ceorles dohtor,
modwlonc meowle, þæt heo on mec gripeð,
ræseð mec on reodne, reafað min heafod,
fegeð mec on fæsten. Feleþ sona
mines gemotes, seo þe mec nearwað,
wif wundenlocc. Wæt bið þæt eage.’

This great ballad of the working man dates from early last century and appears to relate to events in Victorian times. Whether or not there ever was a John Henry, and whether or not anything like the events in the ballad actually happened, there is no doubt that John Henry stands as a powerful symbol of the worker throughout the ages, taking what positives he can from a hardscrabble existence by maintaining a desperate pride in his own competence, even while knowing that he is likely to be ruthlessly cast aside as soon as that competence wanes, or better comes along to replace him.

Poor John, though – he never really had a chance against the inexorable rise of the machine. And of course, in one form or another it still goes on. Back in the nineteen eighties when my day job was computer programmer (it paid better than being a poet by a ratio of approximately 300 to 1) I was involved in coding a software package to perform a ‘cost rollup’, that is, to calculate the total cost of a final assembly by adding up the cost of all its individual components, and also to allow the user to see what would be the effect of changing the cost of any particular widget in the hierarchy. It is the sort of thing that computers can do very well but which is laborious for humans. I remember at one firm a worker whose job had been to make this kind of calculation by hand shaking his head in sad disbelief as the computer carried out in a couple of minutes work that he was used to spending many hours on. I felt obscurely guilty.

The text of the ballad exists in various versions, and it has been covered by numerous folksingers: I use the version I happen to know best, and which I think is punchier than some.

John Henry

John Henry was a little baby,
Sitting on his mammy’s knee.
He gave one long and a lonesome cry,
Said ‘That hammer’ll be the death of me’.

John Henry he had a woman,
Name was Mary Magdalen.
She would go to the tunnel an’ sing for John,
Jes’ to hear John Henry’s hammer ring.

Captain said to John Henry
‘Gonna bring me a steamdrill round,
Gonna take that steamdrill out on the job,
Gonna whop that steel on down.’

John Henry told his captain,
Lightnin’ was in his eye:
‘I’ll never be conquered by your old steam drill,
I’ll beat it to the bottom or I’ll die.’

John Henry walked in the tunnel,
Had his captain by his side,
But the rock so tall, John Henry so small,
Lord, he laid down his hammer an’ he cried.

Now John Henry start on the right hand,
The steam drill start on the left.
‘Before I let this steam drill beat me down,
I’d hammer myself to death.’

Well, John Henry kissed his hammer,
The white man turned on the steam;
Little Bill held John Henry’s trusty steel,
Was the biggest race the world ever seen.

Now John Henry swung his hammer
An’ he brought it down on the ground,
An’ a man in Chatanooga two hundred mile away
Thought he heard a sobbing sound.

Oh the captain said to John Henry
‘I believe this mountain’s fallin’ in.’
John Henry said to his captain
‘Taint nothin’ but my hammer sucking wind.’

John Henry said as he took his stand
‘This’ll be the end of me.’
But every foot that steam drill drove
John Henry’s hammer drove three.

Now the hammer that John Henry swung
It weighed over nine pound.
He broke a rib in his left hand side
And his entrails fell on the ground.

John Henry was hammerin’ on the mountain
An’ his hammer was strikin’ fire.
He drove so hard till he broke his heart
An’ he lay down his hammer an’ he died.

Now all the women out in Kansas
When they heard of John Henry’s death,
They stood in the rain, flagged the eastbound train,
Goin’ where John drew his last breath.

When John Henry died there wasn’t no box
Was big enough to hold his bones
So they buried him in a boxcar deep in the ground,
Let two mountains be his gravestones.

An’ they took John Henry from the graveyard
An’ buried him away in the sand,
An’ every locomotive comin’ roarin’ by
Whistles ‘There lies a steel drivin’ man.’

Anon

As is frustratingly so often the case with ballads, it is not possible to know either who wrote this grim but powerful poem nor how old it is. The first mention of it occurs in a letter of 1802 from Charles Kirkpatrick to Sir Walter Scott, who said it had been collected from an old woman at Alva, and it first appeared in print in Walter Scott’s ‘Minstrelsy’ in 1812.

To me it feels much older, perhaps even having roots in mediaeval times, and indeed an English ballad with a very similar theme, ‘The Three Ravens’, is first recorded in 1611. But ‘The Three Ravens’ is much more upbeat, in that the knight’s hawk, hounds and lady stay with the knight to protect his remains rather than deserting him, and the relish with which, by contrast, the knight’s fate is related in this poem hints perhaps at a speaker for the common people, not averse to indulging in a bit of class revenge: I like to think of it being composed by some Ewan MacColl figure with a gift for the trenchant lyric and a big political chip on his shoulder. And yet the last stanza seems to rise above any rancour, recognising that there will be those who will mourn without closure for the knight in his unknown grave, and acknowledging the pathos inherent in all mortality with that haunting image of the wind blowing over bare bones forever.

The Twa Corbies

As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane:
The tane unto the tither did say,
‘Whar sall we gang and dine the day?’

‘—In behint yon auld fail dyke
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

‘His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady’s ta’en anither mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue e’en:
Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

‘Mony a one for him maks mane,
But nane sall ken whar he is gane:
O’er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.’

Anon

twa=two
corbies=crows (or ravens)
the tane=one of them
tither= other
auld=old
fail dyke=wall of turf
wot=know
kens=knows
hause-bane=neck bone
een=eye
gowden=golden
theek=thatch