Mar. 20th, 2011

watervole: (Default)
Several people have given me helpful links and comments - this is a link I found when following on from a LOTR Read through on TOR.

There's a discussion by Ursula le Guin on Tokiens use of patterning in speech and story.  She says: " Tom Bombadil, in The Fellowship of the Ring, speaks metrically. His name is a drumbeat, and his meter is made up of free, galloping dactyls and trochees, with tremendous forward impetus: Tum tata Tum tata, Tum ta Tum ta . . . . "You let them out again, Old Man Willow! What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!""

I looked up dactyl - basically a long
beat followed by two shorter ones (Like a long finger bone with two shorter joints after it - hence the name). 

A trochee is a long beat followed by a short one.  (Edgar Allen Poe's 'Raven' is a classic example of a poem using trochees)

watervole: (Anonymous Morris)
The names of morris dances under go a fascinating process of Chinese Whispers.

I just found a dance on You Tube called 'White Ladies of Aston'.

The usual name of the dance is 'White Ladies Aston' named for the the village where it was recorded.  It's an unusual name for a village, so you can see how the name change occurred.

Another one I've found is "Fiddler's Lock", which was originally named after an old gypsy violin player - 'Fiddler Locke' (and danced to one of his tunes).

Sometimes a dance gets named after the tune used.  We hope to learn 'Dancing Oolert', but we'll probably use a different tune.  However, we'll probably still call it 'Oolert' rather than its original name of 'Rochester Thistle' which was changed to 'Witchmen's Thistle' by teams who learnt it from the Witchmen...

It is quite possible that the 'East Acton Stick Dance' (which I saw danced last night at a morris gathering) isn't actually from East Acton at all, but originates from a 50s TV show by Tony Hancock!

Anonymous's own dance "All Around my Hat" (which naturally involves dancing around a hat), is actually danced to "All around my hat, I will wear the green willow".

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Judith Proctor

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