Impossible riddle: Scarborough Fair

Leggi in Italiano

Love imposes impossible tasks
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
But none more than any heart would ask
I must know you’re a true love of mine

Scarborough Fair
Scarborough Fair

Since the Middle Ages Scarborough (in Yorkshire to the north of York) was an important port and market place for all traders in England . The fair lasted 45 days and it was a big event, full of people, music and food; in the seventeenth century it has losing a bit importance, but it is still popular today.


The protagonist of this ballad asks a passerby who is going to the Scarborough fair, to greet the one who had once been his lover, asking her when she will come back to him, but she answers (using the impossible tasks) “never”. Lover courtship once was based on “impossible riddles”.
Prequel of this ballad is “The Elfin Knight ” collected by professor Francis James Child.
Surely the song was very popular in the Yorkshire in 1850 and it is reported by Frank Kidson in “Collection of Traditional Tunes” – 1891 in which it is referred to as “the melody sung at Whitby” (ie in the Scarborough area) in 1860.

Roud 12 ; Master title: The Elfin Knight ; Child 2 ; G/D 2:329 ; Ballad Index C002 ; Old Songs TrueLover ; VWML CJS2/10/2868 , RoudFS/S214281 ; Wiltshire 1074 ; Mudcat 82980 , 145138 ; trad.]

Text and also melody have many versions, from the research of Jürgen Kloss we learn that already in Scotland in the second half of the seventeenth century circulated a ballad entitled “The wind hath blown my Plaid away” on a girl who hears the horn of the Elfin Knight, whose structure is identical to the modern version of Scarborough Fair, while Thomas d’Urfey in “Jockey’s Lamentation” (in
his Pills To Purge Melancholy published for the first edition 1706) penned the melody; as Kloss observes in his essayThis practice of recycling tunes and some lines – especially refrains – from older ballads was not uncommon at that time. Already at that time songwriters understood perfectly well that a new popular song must also sound familiar and these kind of old-fashioned Scottish ballads from the previous century could easily be modernized with new lyrics according to the current urban taste.”
The melody with the title “Over The Hills And Far Away” – has remained popular throughout the eighteenth century and widely used with new texts and arrangements and it’s the one’ Simon & Garfunkel version.

As already introduced in the first episode of this series on ballads about impossible riddle Riccardo Venturi in Antiwarsongs wrote “A LONG, LONG HISTORY” in which he traces the alternations of the pre-Simon & Garfunkel and also post ballad (to which we refer for further information)
Among the many instrumental versions the most interesting was undoubtedly that of John Renbourn in “The Lady And Unicorn” (Transatlantic 1970).

As Venturi already observes the figure of a very young Ewan McColl (1915-1989) was emblematic for the folk revival of this ballad: he recorded both the version of The Elfin Knigh and Scarborough fair in multiple editions and collections (the first for the first time with his wife Peggy Seeger in Classic Scots Ballads -1959) (cf); the second for the first time with AL Lloyd in 1956 -The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume IV Riverside edition
Ewan MacColl in “Matching Songs” and “The Singing Island” 1960. He had picked up the song in 1947 from a Scottish-born miner named Mark Anderson in Middleton-in-Teasdale, Yorkshire. According to Alan Lomax, however, the source of MacColl was actually the volume One Hundred English Folk Songs by Cecil Sharp, published in 1916.

In 1962, Martin Carthy “discovers” the song [from McColl] and makes a personal reworking of it, arranging the melody and performing it in concerts; but he recorded Scarborough Fair only in 1965, in his first album, Martin Carthy (later included on various other albums and compilations). Martin Carthy shows an authentic fondness for this song: in fact he sings a slightly different version of it in the album Wood Wilson Carthy (whose title is an evident homage to Woody Guthrie), while together with Bert Jansch (who will become the Pentangle) sings a further version in Acoustic Routes, with the ancient title of The Elfin Knight.

Marianne Faithfull, in April 1966, recorded her version of Scarborough Fair on her North Country Maid album. (skip verse III and VII)

Ewan MacColl
I
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
For once she was a true love of mine
II
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt(1)
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without any seam or needle work
And then she’ll be a true love of mine
III
Tell her to wash it in yonder dry well
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
where water ne’er sprung nor drop of rain fell,
And then she’ll be a true   love of mine
IV
Tell her to dry it on   yonder thorn,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Which never bore blossom since Adam was born,/ Then she’ll be a true love of mine.

V
O, will you(2) find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the sea foam and the sand
or never be a true lover of mine
VI
O, will you plough it with a ram’s horn,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
And sow it all over with one pepper corn,
or never be a true lover of mine
VII
O, will you reap it with a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And bind it up with a  peacock feather
or never be a true lover of mine
VIII
When you have done and finished your work
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme:
Oh, come to me for the cambric   shirt,
And you shall be a true love of mine.

NOTE
1) According to prof. Child asking a girl to sew a shirt is equivalent to asking her to accept the courtship. The shirt fabric is a particularly expensive and refined linen variety produced in the city of Cambrai (France) not before 1677. This fabric was marketed in England only at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Also in Scotland they began to produce a similar fabric called “Scotch cambrics” which became more common use around 1770
2) in Ewan McColl’s version the girl does not speak with the messenger but directly with the suitor. This is an “error” that had already appeared in Frank Kidson’s “Traditional tunes” (1891) due to a sort of “accommodation” representative of the most popular variants of the ballad. It should be “Tell him ..” Marianne Faithfull’s version says “Tell him ..”
In the Martin Carthy version, on the other hand, “Tell her” is still reported (as it will be in the Simon and Garfunkel version, these tests were requested by the girl to her lover and not vice versa)
3) Martin Carthy instead says “And to thrash it all out with a bunch of heather” 

And we come to Paul Simon who had learned the song in London in 1965 from Martin Carthy and partially resumed the ballad by alternating the verses with a song called pacifist-style Canticle (already written in 1963 by Simon as The Side of a hill – these are the years of the war in Vietnam). Simon and Garfunkel release the song on October 10, 1966 and also republish it as a single after the success of the film The Graduate (for which the two had written the soundtrack)
Simon & Garfunkel have filed copyright as authors, although the melody is a traditional one (and without a nod of thanks to Carthy)
The interpretation is dreamy, almost with gothic veins and echoes of fairy bells.


Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary & thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
(On the side of a hill in the deep forest green)
Parsely, sage, rosemary & thyme
(Tracing a sparrow on snow-crested ground)
Without no seams nor needlework
(Blankets and bedclothes a child of the mountains)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
(Sleeps unaware of the clarion call)
Tell her (1) to find me an acre of land
(On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves)
Parsely, sage, rosemary, & thyme
(Washed is the ground with so many tears)
Between the salt water and the sea strand
(A soldier cleans and polishes a gun)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her  to reap it in a sickle of leather
(War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions)
Parsely, sage, rosemary & thyme
(Generals order their soldiers to kill)
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
(And to fight for a cause they’ve long ago forgotten)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary & thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine.
ANTIWAR SONG: CANTICLE
On the side of a hill in the deep forest green
Tracing a sparrow on snow-crested ground
Blankets and bedclothes a child of the mountains
Sleeps unaware of the clarion call
On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves
Washed is the ground with so many tears
A soldier cleans and polishes a gun
War bellows, blazing in scarlet battalions
Generals order their soldiers to kill
And to fight for a cause they’ve long ago forgotten

PentangleOne More Road, 1993

Angelo Branduardi in “Futuro antico”, 1996. In the Italian version arranged by Branduardi (written by his wife Luisa Zappa) the musical texture is fabulous, and the sound of the trumpet probably recalls the symbolism of “The Elfin Knight “.

Quando andrai a Scarborough Fair
salvia, menta, prezzemolo e timo
tu porta il segno del mio rimpianto
alla donna che allora io amavo.
Vorrei in dono una camicia di lino
salvia, menta, prezzemolo e timo
tu dille che non voglio ricami,
ma che sappia che ancora io l’amo.
Per me basta un acro di terra
salvia, menta, prezzemolo e timo
quella casa tra il mare e le dune
e la donna che allora io amavo.
Tornerò a coltivare i miei campi
salvia, menta, prezzemolo e timo
e distese di erica in fiore
perchè sappia che ancora io l’amo.

Omnia in Alive! 2007 -The Elven Lover

The Gothard Sisters in Story Girl 2011 a fresh and lively arrangement of a trio of young girls from Pacific Northwest (USA)

Hayley Westenra (Celtic Woman) from Christchurch NZ

Aurora Aksnes 2017 for the opening theme of the Brazilian soap opera “Deus Salve o Rei” (God Save the King).

MAGIC HERBS
The refrain of the second line of each stanza, already in the eighteenth-century versions, is centered on a series of herbs, and there have been many hypotheses about this: a meaningless line or a pun chosen for its assonance.
Jürgen Kloss notes that the phrase could be more a stylistic choice of publishers in the printed variant, than a line handed down by oral tradition.
the bitterness between them must be driven away by parsley, the sage must give them the strength to bear the separation, the rosemary must give to her the loyalty of waiting for him, and the thymus give to her the courage to face the impossible trials to arrive or return to him, as a virgin. ” (Bert de Jong)
Folklorists and students of plant mythology are well aware that certain herbs were held to have magical significance—that they were used by sorcerers in their spells and conversely as counter-spells by those that wished to outwit them. The herbs mentioned in the refrain of Scarborough Fair (parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) are all known to have been closely associated with death and also as charms against the evil eye. The characters in the Elfin Knight (of which Scarborough Fair is a version) are a demon and a maid. The demon sets impossible tasks and on the maid’s replies depends whether she will fall into his clutches or not. Child believed that elf to be an interloper from another ballad (Lady Isobel and the Elf Knight) and that he should rightly be mortal, but as Ann Gilchrist points out “why the use of the herb refrain except as an indication of something more than mortal combat?” Sir Walter Scott in his notes to Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border recalled hearing a ballad of “a fiend …paying his addresses to a maid but being disconcerted by the holy herbs she wore in her bosom” and Lucy Broadwood goes as far as to suggest that the refrain might be the survival of an incantation against such a suitor.[Martin Carthy]

Some officinal herbs in the medieval garden, were the main ingredients of love filters or amulets.
In particular, these herbs were used against the plague or its nauseating odor: the medicine of the time believed that the miasma were the cause of the infection and that it was essential to purify the air.
Parsley: it is a herb associated with witches and death, was believed to favor lust and love, but also digestion. It symbolizes the possibility of removing sorrow and bitterness from life.
Sage: is a herb associated with wisdom, the word itself derived from Latin and means “to save and protect”; a popular saying suggests eating spring sage to live long. It is a stimulant of the organism indicated as invigorating in case of physical or intellectual exhaustion. It is believed that in addition to being able to mitigate the pain can also increase psychic powers, it was also anciently used as a carrier of fertility and domestic harmony.
Rosemary: it is a herb associated with memory, but also with death, able to help the deceased to enter the land of the dead. To ward off evil spirits and an amulet to protect herself from disease. Its very persistent scent reinforces the memory and the ability not to forget. It symbolizes loyalty, and since ancient times it was worn by the spouses. Finally the rosemary plant is strong and resistant, although it grows slowly and at the beginning with difficulty, and therefore traditionally symbolizes female love
Thyme: it was considered the grass where the fairies love to live or dance. In the Middle Ages it was used to adorn the knights’ weapons to infuse courage. It was a herb used in sacred fires and as religious incense. The plant in popular ballads is associated with the concept of purity for the ancient belief that the thymus was able to give strength and clarity to the mind and purify the air from disease.
But many others were the recurring magical plants in popular ballads such as juniper, hawthorn, holly and ivy, and especially broom!
see also

SCOTTISH VERSIONS
Cambric shirt
The Elfin Knight

ENGLISH VERSIONS
Scarborough fair
Whittingham Fair

AMERICAN VERSIONS
Cambric Shirt

VARIANTS
La pesca dell’anello (italian version)

LINKS
http://ontanomagico.altervista.org/captain-wedderburn.html
http://www.lizlyle.lofgrens.org/RmOlSngs/RTOS-TrueLover.html
http://www.justanothertune.com/html/cambricshirt.html
http://www.musicaememoria.com/scarborough_versioni.htm
http://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=1076
ttp://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=122336#2682446
http://mainlynorfolk.info/martin.carthy/songs/scarboroughfair.htm

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Pubblicato da Cattia Salto

Amministratore e folklorista di Terre Celtiche Blog. Ha iniziato a divulgare i suoi studi e ricerche sulla musica, le danze e le tradizioni d'Europa nel web, dapprima in maniera sporadica e poi sempre più sistematicamente sul finire del anni 90

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