You mustn't take my stories for a guide

[sovay]

Has anyone—other than Peter Bellamy—done any serious work on Kipling's relationship with and contributions to the folk tradition? Yesterday I was flipping through a copy of Captains Courageous (1897) that I found on the used-book shelf in Stop & Shop and noted the number of sea-songs he either references or quotes explicitly, and while I am sure he did not write "The Dreadnought," I am still looking for a version of "Wheat in the Ear" that is not spliced into a Southern game-song by Gordon Bok. This is not a new thought. I have had various of the Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) stuck in my head since last summer. Fragments of The Seven Seas (1896) keep turning up in my stories. And I am hardly the first person to notice how many of his poems are written like songs, as though to invite setting; there is even an ongoing catalogue being compiled. So I want to know: where's the scholarship on it?

Comments

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Yesterday I was flipping through a copy of Captains Courageous (1897) that I found on the used-book shelf in Stop & Shop

?!?!

[sovay]

?!?!

The Stop & Shop in Arlington has a bookcase near the checkout line that I look through each time I'm in the store, although usually it's filled with bad paperback romances and bestsellers no one is buying. This time it had a summer-reading edition of Captains Courageous, which I picked up, since it was the only thing worth reading on the shelf. And I meant to get Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) from the Arlington Library this afternoon—I am tired of reading them off the screen.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

I was thinking you had somehow found an 1897 edition of Captains Corageous at Stop & Shop, which would have been intriguing but just mind-blowingly implausible. The used-book shelf does seem like an improvement over the Harlequin unplanned-pregnancy novels at my local supermarket, though.

[sovay]

I was thinking you had somehow found an 1897 edition of Captains Corageous at Stop & Shop, which would have been intriguing but just mind-blowingly implausible.

Alas, no. That would have been awesome.

The used-book shelf does seem like an improvement over the Harlequin unplanned-pregnancy novels at my local supermarket, though.

I should think almost anything would be!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I saw Bellamy on stage once. He was brilliant.

I seem to remember him telling us that Kipling wrote the Barrack Room Ballads with specific music hall tunes in mind.

if you'd given me that ring she said i'd have pulled the trigger

[rukeyser.livejournal.com]

discovered you by way of by way of & the name caught me. is it that most discriminating of courted females that you named yourself for?

[sovay]

is it that most discriminating of courted females that you named yourself for?

It is, and the genetic relationship between her name and my own, which are both derivatives of Sophia. Pleased to meet you!