The folk from the folk songs

[resonant]

Pretty Fair Maid in the Garden lyrics

Tim O'Brien performs Pretty Fair Maid in the Garden

So a lad falls in love with a pretty fair maid, and then he goes for a soldier, and they're separated for seven years. And by our standards these people are (1) practically children and (2) practically strangers, but she's pretty and she's pleasant and so he trades rings with her and he goes off to war.

So the soldier lads talk, late at night around the fire, and soon all of them know about Ned's pretty fair maid, and they have an agreement that if something happens to Ned, someone else will take the ring back to her. And something does happen to Ned, because they're soldiers, after all, but Robin takes the ring and carries it. And when Robin is killed, Will takes it. And when Will peacefully musters out to marry a farmer's daughter, he passes the ring to Gilbert, and so on.

Meanwhile the original pretty fair maid -- let's say her name is Nancy -- waits there in the cottage with a garden. Let's say she's gazing upon a badly painted miniature of a generic lad; there's no miniature in the song, but my plot requires it. Anyway, she waits, like a faithful true love, until she dies of smallpox, and then her sister Molly moves in. Molly eventually marries a house carpenter, but she passes the miniature on to Jennie, who passes it to Mary, who gives it to another Mary, and so on.

And eventually a lad who has never set foot in this village shows a ring to a woman who's never met a soldier, and she shows him a miniature, and the two of them get married and live happily ever after, because that's true love.

Comments

[lunabee34]

This is utterly delightful. I'm sold.

[minoanmiss]

BWEE

[trobadora]

OMG! That's amazing. :D

[isis]

Hah, the romance equivalent of grandfather's axe!

[castiron]

You have created a folk song concept that is even better than Tom Lehrer's "Irish Folk Song".

[likeaduck]

I listened to the performance without looking at the lyrics first and heard it as "and if he's to some fair girl married/ I'll love the girl and marry him" and was very surprised you had chosen to go with a version that left out the openness to nonmonogamy.

[resonant]

Even "I'll love the girl that married him" has a little hint of it. Maybe the soldier could bring a girl with him when he comes back.

Maybe the soldier could be a girl who cut her hair and went off with the regiment. Wandered in out of another song. Why not?

[starwatcher]

.
I chuckled out loud, and yeah, I could totally get behind it happening for real -- or reading about it for fun.

the two of them get married and live happily ever after, because that's true love.

Still makes me chuckle the third time reading -- just that line. I think because, yeah, "true love" is so often just that carelessly defined in a story. Like, her foot fits the glass slipper, that's true love. Similarly here -- one has a picture, the other has a ring and they need no other connection than that; it's destined! <snicker again>
.

[resonant]

I often think about* a scene in Samuel Delany's Babel-17, in which a starship captain has to replace a Navigator who's been killed. Navigators work in groups of three in telepathic contact, and they're romantically/sexually bonded, so to replace one is obviously very, very difficult, but the captain takes the two surviving Navigators, and she chooses a very successful new third for them.

Later someone asks her how she did it, and she says, "I had a dozen whose profiles suggested they would be a good fit. I chose the only candidate who didn't have any languages in common with the two Navigators. By the time they learned to communicate, they would have the start of a bond."

* where "often think about" means "shamelessly use as a building block for my own ways of writing romance"