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The Mermaid (ballad)
''The Mermaid'' is a ballad, catalogued as Child Ballad #289, Roud 124. Dating to around the mid-18th century, this song is known by a number of names, including ''Waves on the Sea'', ''The Stormy Winds'' and ''The Wrecked Ship.'' The song belongs in the category of sea ballads, being a song sailors sung during their time off and not while they worked, but is more commonly thought of as a sea shanty. It is well known in American folk tradition, and the text has appeared in many forms in both print and oral mediums. The ballad remains part of American culture as a song sung at camps operated by the Boy Scouts of America as well as in public school music education classes. Synopsis The ballad describes a ship that left port, its misadventure and eventual sinking. The moral of the song is that mermaids are a sign of an impending shipwreck. It is sung from the point of view of a member of the ship's crew, although the ship sinks without any survivors. In most versions the ship is unn ...
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Child Ballads
The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. Their lyrics and Child's studies of them were published as ''The English and Scottish Popular Ballads''. The tunes of most of the ballads were collected and published by Bertrand Harris Bronson in and around the 1960s. History Age and source of the ballads The ballads vary in age; for instance, the manuscript of "Judas" dates to the thirteenth century and a version of " A Gest of Robyn Hode" was printed in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The majority of the ballads, however, date to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although some are claimed to have very ancient influences, only a handful can be definitively traced to before 1600. Moreover, few of the tunes collected are as old as the words. Nevertheless, Child's collection was far more comprehensive than any previous coll ...
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Roud Folk Song Index
The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud (born 1949), a former librarian in the London Borough of Croydon. Roud's Index is a combination of the Broadside Index (printed sources before 1900) and a "field-recording index" compiled by Roud. It subsumes all the previous printed sources known to Francis James Child (the Child Ballads) and includes recordings from 1900 to 1975. Until early 2006, the index was available by a CD subscription; now it can be found online on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website, maintained by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). A partial list is also available at List of folk songs by Roud number. Purpose of index The primary function of the Roud Folk Song Index is as a research aid correlating versions of traditional English-language folk song lyrics independently documented ove ...
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Sea Shanty
A sea shanty, chantey, or chanty () is a genre of traditional Folk music, folk song that was once commonly sung as a work song to accompany rhythmical labor aboard large Merchant vessel, merchant Sailing ship, sailing vessels. The term ''shanty'' most accurately refers to a specific style of work song belonging to this historical Musical repertoire, repertoire. However, in recent, popular usage, the scope of its definition is sometimes expanded to admit a wider range of repertoire and characteristics, or to refer to a "maritime work song" in general. From Latin ''cantare'' via French ''chanter'', the word ''shanty'' emerged in the mid-19th century in reference to an appreciably distinct genre of work song, developed especially on merchant vessels, that had come to prominence in the decades prior to the American Civil War although found before this. Shanty songs functioned to synchronize and thereby optimize labor, in what had then become larger vessels having smaller crews and o ...
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Boy Scouts Of America
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA, colloquially the Boy Scouts) is one of the largest scouting organizations and one of the largest youth organizations in the United States, with about 1.2 million youth participants. The BSA was founded in 1910, and since then, about 110 million Americans have participated in BSA programs. BSA is part of the international Scout Movement and became a founding member organization of the World Organization of the Scout Movement in 1922. The stated mission of the Boy Scouts of America is to "prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law." Youth are trained in responsible citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in a wide range of outdoor activities, educational programs, and, at older age levels, career-oriented programs in partnership with community organizations. For younger members, the Scout method is part of the ...
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Mermaid
In folklore, a mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including Europe, Asia, and Africa. Mermaids are sometimes associated with perilous events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks, and drownings. In other folk traditions (or sometimes within the same traditions), they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans. The male equivalent of the mermaid is the merman, also a familiar figure in folklore and heraldry. Although traditions about and sightings of mermen are less common than those of mermaids, they are generally assumed to co-exist with their female counterparts. The male and the female collectively are sometimes referred to as merfolk or merpeople. The Western concept of mermaids as beautiful, seductive singers may have been influenced by the Sirens of Greek mythology, which were originally half-birdlike, but ca ...
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Almeda Riddle
Almeda Riddle (November 21, 1898 – June 30, 1986) was an American folk singer. Born and raised in Cleburne County, Arkansas, she learned music from her father, a fiddler and a teacher of shape note singing. She collected and sang traditional ballads throughout her life, usually unaccompanied. Introduced to a wider public by folklorist John Quincy Wolf and musicologist Alan Lomax, Riddle recorded extensively, and claimed to be able to perform over 500 songs. She was born Almeda James and was a first cousin twice removed of the outlaws Frank and Jesse James. On a recording of the song " Jesse James" she noted, "I'm sure you've read of Frank and Jesse James. Well, my father's grandfather and their father ( Robert S. James) was brothers. I never was ashamed of the James boys was my cousins, but neither was I proud of it." In old age, she was often known as Granny Riddle. In October 1959, on Wolf's recommendation, Lomax and Shirley Collins recorded Riddle at her home in He ...
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Mirror
A mirror or looking glass is an object that Reflection (physics), reflects an image. Light that bounces off a mirror will show an image of whatever is in front of it, when focused through the lens of the eye or a camera. Mirrors reverse the direction of the image in an equal yet opposite angle from which the light shines upon it. This allows the viewer to see themselves or objects behind them, or even objects that are at an angle from them but out of their field of view, such as around a corner. Natural mirrors have existed since prehistoric times, such as the surface of water, but people have been manufacturing mirrors out of a variety of materials for thousands of years, like stone, metals, and glass. In modern mirrors, metals like silver or aluminium are often used due to their high reflectivity, applied as a thin coating on glass because of its naturally smooth and very Hardness (materials science), hard surface. A mirror is a Wave (physics), wave reflector. Light consis ...
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Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literature, Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman language, Anglo-Norman (a langues d'oïl, relative of French) as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian languages, Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic peoples, Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Sa ...
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The Road To Middle-Earth
''The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology'' is a scholarly study of the Middle-earth works of J. R. R. Tolkien written by Tom Shippey and first published in 1982. The book discusses Tolkien's philology, and then examines in turn the origins of ''The Hobbit'', ''The Lord of the Rings'', ''The Silmarillion'', and his minor works. An appendix discusses Tolkien's many sources. Two further editions extended and updated the work, including a discussion of Peter Jackson's film version of ''The Lord of the Rings''. The book's various versions, including new editions in 1993 and 2005, have been welcomed by Tolkien scholars and others as rigorous, convincing, and "the single best book written on Tolkien". Shippey won the 1984 '' Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies'' for the book. Book Background Tom Shippey is, as Tolkien was, a philologist. Early in his career he taught English at the University of Oxford, using the same syllabus as Tolki ...
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Songs For The Philologists
''Songs for the Philologists'' is a collection of poems by E. V. Gordon and J. R. R. Tolkien as well as traditional songs. It is the rarest and most difficult to find Tolkien-related book. Originally a collection of typescripts compiled by Gordon in 1921–1926 for the students of the University of Leeds, it was given by A. H. Smith of University College London, a former student at Leeds, to a group of students to be printed privately in 1935 or 1936, and printed in 1936 with the ''impressum'' "Printed by G. Tillotson, A. H. Smith, B. Pattison and other members of the English Department, University College, London." Since Smith had not asked permission of either Gordon or Tolkien, the printed booklets were not distributed. Most copies were destroyed in a fire, and only a few, perhaps around 14, survived. The book is accordingly "extremely rare", according to the University of Leeds, which has a copy. Tolkien's songs Of the 30 songs in the collection, 13 were contributed by Tol ...
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Nixie (folklore)
The Nixie, Nixy, Nix, Näcken, Nicor, Nøkk, or Nøkken (german: Nixe; nl, nikker, ; da, nøkke; Norwegian nb, nøkk; nn, nykk; sv, näck; fo, nykur; fi, näkki; is, nykur; et, näkk; ang, nicor; eng, neck or ) are humanoid, and often shapeshifting water spirits in Germanic mythology and folklore. Under a variety of names, they are common to the stories of all Germanic peoples,The article ''Näcken''tome 20, p. 317 in (1914) although they are perhaps best known from Scandinavian folklore. The related English ''knucker'' was generally depicted as a wyrm or dragon, although more recent versions depict the spirits in other forms. Their sex, bynames, and various transformations vary geographically. The German and his Scandinavian counterparts were male. The German was a female river mermaid. Similar creatures are known from other parts of Europe, such as the Melusine in France, the Xana in Asturias (Spain), and the Slavic water spirits (e.g. the Rusalka) in Slav ...
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List Of The Child Ballads
The Child Ballads is the colloquial name given to a collection of 305 ballads collected in the 19th century by Francis James Child Francis James Child (February 1, 1825 – September 11, 1896) was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of English and Scottish ballads now known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of ... and originally published in ten volumes between 1882 and 1898 under the title ''The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.'' The ballads Following are synopses of the stories recounted in the ballads in Child's collection. Since Child included multiple versions of most ballads, the details of a story can vary widely. The synopses presented here reflect the summaries in Child's text, but also rely on other sources as well as the ballads themselves. References {{Francis James Child Child Ballads Murder ballads ...
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