While digging around in folk songs for school work, I found a reference to a variation to our song of the month (The Mermaid) by Tolkien. It took a bit of Googling to find it, but the delight was manifold.
The song is an old English variation of the Mermaid story sung to the Mermaid tune.
It is in a book lost to time or at least to a lay scholar. There are maybe fourteen copies left of Songs for the Philologist according to the wiki and others were destroyed in a fire. There was no more explanation given.
The song was reprinted in the The Road to Middle Earth by TA Shippey. I have never heard of this one, but it looks like a gem, sourcing Tolkien’s Mirkwood in Eastern Europe and examining the placiness of Tolkien. Oh frabjous day.
So now to teach my children the Old English variation of the song they gobbled up. It is for the preservation of culture and history.
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