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

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!