Let Friendship and Honor Unite

What's the Spring, breathing Jessamine and Rose,
What's the Summer, with all its Gay train;
What's the Plenty of Autumn to those
Who have bartered their freedom for Gain.

Inventiveness in Oral Music on the North Carolina Coast

Not long ago I acquired an album - I use the term slightly generously - from Smithsonian Folkways entitled Between the Sound and the Sea: Music of the North Carolina Outer Banks. It's a glimpse into the last generation of a lost oral tradition in coastal North Carolina, as captured by a modern folklorist without the prejudices that bedeviled the antiquarian tradition of prior decades of folklore studies, and so serves as a perfect case study for the role of authorship in at least some oral cultures.

The Late Medieval Phallus

Shortly after François I was crowned king of France, a procession was held commemorating the new king, said to be a celebration of le vit de François I. This title is a pun on the near homophony of the sixteenth century French words vie "life" and vit "penis"; the artists responsible drew a cart through the streets of Paris on which they displayed a gigantic sculpted penis and invited the populace to come flagellate it.

The motivation for the demonstration is unclear, but it arose in a cultural context which had been filled with phallic art in all media for the past several centuries.

Medieval Tourist Kitsch

As the growing middle class in the late Middle Ages found themselves at leisure to travel for pleasure, a tourism industry arose in Europe for the first time. The travelers were pilgrims, choosing as their destinations holy sites across Europe (though the motivation for making a trip at all was not always purely a religious one). And, of course, people in the places to which they traveled excelled at profiting from the new arrivals.

Bayard

The Charlemagne who appears in the legendary Matter of France is not always on the side of the heroes, and there are those who stand opposed to him - not only the villainous traitor Ganelon, but heroic characters as well who, at least at times, stand in opposition to the king. They are the central figures of their own sub-cycle within the legends, recorded in folktales as often as in literary chansons de geste. Notably, though, folklore remembers these people more for their horse than for their specific acts of defiance.

Lockhart's "March of Bernardo del Carpio"

With three thousand men of Leon, from the city Bernard goes
To protect the soil Hispanian from the spear of Frankish foes
From the city that is planted in the midst between the seas
To preserve the name and glory of Pelayo's victories

Bernardo del Carpio, Spanish culture hero

In the earliest chronicles, Roland is said to have died at the hands of Basques. In later versions, the mythologized battle of Roncesvalles is between him as commander of Charlemagne's rearguard and the Saracens. But in Spain, the story is told slightly differently; the battle is the climax of a legendarium focused around a different character entirely. That story asserts the primacy of an independent Spain, and gained prominence as the notion of a united Spanish realm with its own national identity was coming to the fore. Naturally, therefore, it figures strongly in the romancero viejo.