Ranordine, together with Paddy's seven ages

Much ink has been spilled in attempts to explain “Ranordine.” We have never found a version that makes sense as a story. An alternative title found with the text is “A Soldier and His Fair Maid” (see America, Commerce, and Freedom), but neither text gives any indication that the speaker is a soldier or that, before their meeting, the girl was known to him. H. M. Belden outlines two possible readings. “In its main outline, and in particular in the demand for the name of the man, this piece seems to belong with the ballads of wayside seduction . . . . But the statement that he was ‘brought up in Venus’ train,’ that his castle is ‘written in ancient history,’ and that he lives in the mountains, suggests rather a supernatural lover” (286-88).

The song seems to be Irish in origin and not much earlier than the late eighteenth century. There is a village named Pomroy (Pomeroy) in Country Tyrone in Ireland, and that name persists with most versions of the song. Herbert Hughes collected a fragment of the song in Donegal and says that in that area “Reynardine is known as the name of a faery that changes into the shape of a fox” (1:4-6, qtd. in Mackenzie 102).

The text on “A Soldier and His Fair Maid” (see America, Commerce, and Freedom) has some small differences. Verse 2 is omitted and the last line in the verse beginning “I kiss’d her once” reads “wrote in some Indian history, my name is Rinodine” instead of “wrote in some ancient history—my name is Ranordine.” English nineteenth-century slip ballad versions of the song at the Bodleian Library show the title as “Reynardine” or “The Mountains High,” suggesting a connection to the fox theory mentioned above, reynard being the French word for fox. Most printed versions of the song are from five to seven verses long, but versions collected from traditional singers are often fragments, perhaps because the story does not hold together. Betsy Gaylord wrote out all seven verses as “The Mountain Lady” in her manuscript begun in 1798. Her name for the seducer was Arranodyne (401-3). The text appeared in two songsters between 1802 and 1815; there is also a broadside by Leonard Deming in the 1830s with the same text (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).

The tune illustrated here is from Smollet Holden’s Collection of Old Established Irish Slow and Quick Tunes and Aloys Fleischmann’s Sources of Irish Traditional Music (#4601). It appears to be the same basic tune as that collected in Arkansas in 1942 by Vance Randolph, who gives a list of traditional sources for the song, as do Belden and W. Roy Mackenzie (Randolph 1:379-80; Roud). The version that became popular in the British folk song revival of the 1960s and 1970s, however, was apparently not a product of folk tradition but instead stemmed from a revision by A. L. Lloyd (Winick 286-308).

“Paddy’s Seven Ages” is a comic takeoff on “Shakespeare’s Seven Ages,” beginning “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” from As You Like It (2.7.139-66). It is also a fairly unkind commentary about Irishmen that may fit among the other broadsides on that topic in this collection. The text is credited to George Colman the Younger in the Universal Songster but we have not located it in Colman’s works (3:144). It appeared in eleven songsters between 1807 and 1817 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).