Whoo boy. I guess it’s not terribly surprising that people being… quite eccentric in one area are also irrational in others.
@Mindysan33
I laughed at the “is it, though?” I tend to think of these kinds of projects as “rectal reconstructions” in that they’re pulling this stuff, almost wholesale, from their posteriors.
I don’t remotely buy it - “Wack fol’a day diddle dee dye doe” is one of many, many variations of some “nonsense” words popular in songs in Irish/Scottish musical tradition. I would believe that it ultimately derives from something that had some meaning in Celtic, but at this point it’s so corrupted as to be meaningless, and no one seems to have the slightest clue what the original phrase/phrases meant. (Some people think “Hickory dickory dock.” from the nursery rhyme comes from Cumbric language counting, for example, but there’s no agreement.)
I’m the same with African Funk compilations. I don’t understand the lyrics but enjoy the music, and hope I’m not tacitly condoning some abhorrent views.
I got this a couple times with modern Arabic folk rock - once a work friend surprised I was listening to Ahlam: but dont you find the lyrics too political? Nope (but apparently good). Then, complimenting the music in a Taxi. Driver: you wouldn’t like it if you could understand the lyrics.
Now I want to know if anyone has tried poitin mixed with Mountain Dew, and how did they escape Ireland alive?
Other than dick (or variations of it) meaning 10, there doesn’t seem to be any connection. The old base 20 counting system is mostly of historic interest only, but parts of it still survive. I still have a tendency to say yan instead of one, even though I moved away from Cumbria 20 years ago.
But this struggle over neo-pagan musical spaces does remind me somewhat of what happened with oi and punk in the 80s and 90s with the rise of the neo-nazi skinhead movement…
The path from “Hevera Devera Dick” to “Hickory Dickory Dock” is pretty tortured, but still kind of vaguely plausible. If there’s a connection from some Celtic phrase to “Wack fol’a day diddle dee dye doe,” it’s going to be similarly corrupted (and probably about as [un]meaningful).
Yeah, there has always been that nazi/racist wing to neo-paganism, especially it seems, with some of the Nordic neo-pagan groups. (Which makes sense, I guess - if one is going to be a nazi pagan, that would be the tradition that would be attractive…) So it’s an issue with the music, too. But the very nature of these musical “reconstructions” automatically causes me to give them a bit of nervous side-eye. The whole shtick is that they’re a(n impossible) recreation of ancient Northern European music/traditions, but what they actually do is incorporate musical elements and traditions from all around the world that are contemporary. So there’s this implied message, even if completely unintentional, that says, “oh, our ancestors developed all this stuff millennia ago, and you primitives are still stuck in the past/have only now reached the stage where ‘we’ were 3000 years ago.” I don’t think the subtext is intended, just a consequence of trying to make interesting music within that gimmick, but it still takes me aback.
A lot of the bands in this genre that are more notable are pulling from recent surviving traditions - Breton and Norman folk music that survived in the East Coast and Quebec to the present day. More Northern Traditions were still living in places like Estonia and Lithuania, and several of the better bands in our lifetime went and studied with the living practitioners in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. It’s not some made up imagined tradition, even if the survivals may have changed some over centuries. I’m trying to dig for some example CDs but I think they are stuck in my closet since WFH became a thing and I had to install an extra desk.
Speaking as someone with a passing knowledge of historical Celtic linguistics:
I mean, you might be able to squint and get faoi out of “fee”, and h-úraig out of “huri”, but it’s still gibberish. And I’m pretty sure they aren’t Proto-Celtic scholars. Also, there isn’t a hint of any mention of Lúg anywhere in there whatsoever.
It’s lilting. It’s scat singing. It’s the same thing as “whack fol the diddly-eye-ay” or “willo willo waily and a hey nonny nonny” or “A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom” or “ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long”. It’s pretty sounding, and it doesn’t have to mean anything.
Also, I get that it adds to the sound and the vibe of the thing, but I’m pretty sure there weren’t any didgeridoos in Pagan Iron-Age “Celtia” (Goidelic? Brythonic? Gaulish? Iberian? Lepontic? Ligurian? Oh, why am I asking questions to which I know there isn’t any meaningful answer.)
I think if you’re pulling from things like folk traditions that did manage to survive to the modern day (however changed or transformed), sure, that’s very true… but if you’re talking about trying to be just like the Norse in the Viking age or like the pre-Christian Celts, then not so much, no. That’s basically what at least some of these neo-pagans are trying to claim, not a longer descent of culture that did indeed change over the centuries. The far right, neo-nazi ones do try to claim that they are fully resurrecting traditions of a long bygone era that we don’t fully understand and that they are the authentic practioners of it, because of some bullshit about their “pure viking blood”…
Teitelbaum’s ‘War for Eternity’ is tangentially connected to this stuff and worth checking out.
The author is a musician and academic who became aware that his interest in traditional music brought him in close proximity to a nebulous right wing sludge he refers to as traditionalism. Steve Bannon and his enthusiasm for the cyclical aspects of Hinduism is relevant here.
I’m talking about the groups that are claiming/pretending as part of their shtick to be “recreating” long-lost musical traditions but are actually inventing it completely out of whole cloth (albeit inspired by a lot of different world music that has nothing to do with that particular region and its history).
… I thought it was interesting that the bard character on “The Witcher” was basically doing acoustic prog rock (or something) and they didn’t bother to make it sound traditional at all
