Medieval embroidery and the baseball allergy

[pameladean]

Leaving aside momentous events both sad (our feline Eldest Inhabitant is no longer with us) and pleasing (Eric visited for eleven days), for some reason I felt impelled to share the random contents of my brain on a rainy autumn day.

I was putting clean sheets on David's bed, and he had June Tabor and the Oyster Band's "Freedom and Rain" playing. The track was "Dives and Lazarus," a bright bouncy energetic song with lots of brass. I have always been deeply amused by its apparent espousal, in the final verse, of a Universalist theology. "If I had as many years to live as there are blades of grass, I would --." At this point, I always hear them sing "make it in my will secure that the devil should have no power," but Googling suggests that possibly they are actually singing something more like, "then I would have some peace secure, and the devil will have no part." However, the interesting bit comes next. "Hell is dark, hell is deep, hell is full of mice. It's a pity that any poor sinful soul should be barred from our savior Christ." When they say "mice," they probably mean "rats," that having been the generic at the time. I expect the rest means something else too, but I don't care; I like my Universalist interpretation.

Another thing about this song that I like is its embroidery of the really pretty plain Biblical version. That version just says that Lazarus sat at Dives's gate, and the dogs licked his sores. In the song, however, Dives sends out the dogs to drive Lazarus away, and "they had not power to bite one bite, and they licked his sores away." I've seldom seen a medieval version of an originally Biblical story that did not fantasticate it in this manner. Sometimes the original is fantastical enough, however, and then the embroidery has a different glitter to it. When I was in graduate school, I was assigned a paper on the carol "Saint Stephen and King Herod." I recall the matter so vividly perhaps in part because the original of the story is not in the canonical Bible, but rather in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. There is an account of Stephen's martyrdom in the New Testament book of Acts, but it is a very sober document compared to the carol. Stephen is called the first Christian martyr, a fate he achieves, in the New Testament, some while after Jesus's life and death. However, it was apparently necessary to improve upon this thoughtless timeline so that he was martyred as soon as he possibly could be, just as Christ was born. Otherwise, I conceive, somebody might have got in before him.

I had a little trouble doing my research. Some Ph.D. candidate had checked out all the English versions of Nicodemus's gospel that were available in the SUNY-Binghamton library. This sort of thing happened with great regularity while I was at SUNY-Binghamton, and my usual recourse was to take the rickety bumpy old school bus that went at an ungodly hour up to Cornell, where they had enough books for their students and for us too. But I had left writing the paper until the last minute. So I ended up removing from the library a Greek edition put together by a German scholar who wrote his prologue in German but put his footnotes in Latin. I was completely unable to cope with either of those, but I was able to puzzle out the Greek well enough to get by.

In any case, there's already a roasted but crowing capon in the apocryphal gospel story, so the composer of the carol put in, as I have said, a different kind of embroidery. As you may or may not recall (I certainly did not, before this assignment in graduate school), St. Stephen was a clerk in King Herod's hall, and served him with bread and cloth, as every king befall. Stephen out of the kitchen came, with a boar's head in his hand; and he saw a star that was fair and bright, over Bedlam stand. That is, it is Christmas. It's the first one. Nobody has any idea of what it means. Certainly, nobody has had the time to concoct any traditions. But since this is a medieval carol, St. Stephen, a Jew himself and serving in the hall of the Jewish King, comes into the hall WITH A BOAR'S HEAD IN HIS HAND. Because that's what you HAVE on Christmas.

The next thing you know, he has cast the boar's head adown, which I'd have loved to see, and announced, "There is a child in Bedlam born is better than we all." Matters follow a predictable and not very funny course, but I take endless delight in the boar's head, as I do in the miraculous dog tongues in the Lazarus song. Sometimes the boar's head turns itself upside down in my perceptions and is emblematic of a mindset deeply provincial and oblivious, both the cause and background of horrors, which makes me flinch and sorrow. That is something that the dog tongues never do.

It has always seemed to me that anybody who likes these things ought to like baseball. But I don't. Well, it's not that I dislike it, it's that I can't pay attention to it. I can't even read about it when good writers write about it. It makes my eyes glaze over. I'll read about almost anything, but I can't read about baseball.

Maybe there should be a lot of crowing buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken at baseball games. Or miraculous dog tongues -- still, I hasten to add, attached to their dogs. That might do it.

Pamela

Comments

[par-avion.livejournal.com]

Aw, I remember that bus. My bf used to come visit me on the rickety bus, and then take Shortline back.

It seems unfair that a book, ONE book, be trilingual. How many people other than the author are fluent in German, Greek, and Latin?

[pameladean]

Now, perhaps not so many. Then, well, it was published in the 19th century, so probably most people who cared about the subject knew Greek and Latin. I assume he put his notes in Latin for better accessibility. That actually cracked me up at the time, even in my dismay.

Pamela