‘In Olden Days’ with Spike and Ilja

Ilja Zendman and Spike Bakker, members of the Dutch musical duo, Moro.

In a track on the band Moro’s recent album, “In Geardagum,” a bog sacrifice finds herself up to her chin in the muck. “I’m sinking,” said writer and performer, Ilja Zendman.

“There’s a lot of dying in our songs,” said her partner, Spike Bakker.

And there would be for a couple with a shared passion for medieval instruments, balladry, and the history behind it.

Moro’s new album with the Beowulf-inspired title, “In Geardagum.”

Bakker and Zendman formed the duo Moro in 2019, and released their first album this summer. The band performs folk music, covers, and their own, folk-inspired music, all with medieval instruments. “In Geardagum,” takes its title from the first sentence of the poem Beowulf. It can be translated to “in olden days,” or “days of yore.” The album covers traditional ballads like the Swedish “Herr Mannelig,” and “Villeman og Magnhild,” and original tracks like “Grendel,” but also reflects the couple’s story as Dutch reenactors who were asked back to lecture and perform at the Sutton Hoo burial site in England, after visiting as tourists with their Germanic lyres.

Bakker and Zendman caught the historical reenactment bug on a rainy day when they visited a medieval market. “We felt at home there,” Bakker said. It wasn’t long before his interest in all things musical got him into Germanic lyres, and as historic perfectionists, the couple traded their viking kit for 7th Century Anglo-Saxon garb. “We’re the only Anglo-Saxon reenactors from the Netherlands,” joked Bakker.

Moro demonstrating at the preHistorisch Dorp, pre-historic village, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Moro’s musical history got interwoven with Sutton Hoo and Beowulf when the couple planned a trip to the site as tourists. Sutton Hoo is a site that derives its fame from the extraordinary Anglo-Saxon artifacts and ship burial found there in an archaeological dig in 1938. The ship and a lyre were quickly recognized as material evidence for passages from the Old English poem Beowulf. 

“I had this fantasy in my head. I would love to play in front of the barrows,” said Bakker. He wrote to the British National Trust, which manages the site, and got permission. The couple soon found themselves explaining their lyres to other tourists and staff, and it wasn’t long before Sutton Hoo management asked them back for proper gigs, most recently to perform and lecture. A hit with the academic set, Bakker and Zendman have made contacts in the broader English medievalist community and have been invited to other sites. “They treat us like rock stars, but of course, we think they are the rock stars,” Bakker said.

Moro performing at Sutton Hoo this year.

“In Geardagum” is full of folk narrative. Their cover of Garmarna’s “Varulven,” or werewolf, a grisly sort of Red Riding Hood tale, is a story of a woman going to meet her lover, who is waylaid by a wolf. She tries to bargain with the wolf, offering him her shoes and other articles of clothing, but ends up devoured. “Ramund hin Unge,” is about a Danish folk hero charged with killing seven giants. Moro’s own “Grendel,” is about the man-eating ogre from Beowulf. Written with Dutch lyrics, the song has recitations from Beowulf performed by the English musician and Old English reciter, Russell Jenkins.  

Zendman and Bakker write original songs in their native Dutch, but Zendman, the lead vocalist, sings all folk songs in their original languages, which, for her, are part of the stories. “I like languages. The music that we make has the languages that go with it. It’s all the pieces of the puzzle coming together,” Zendman said. Zendman is currently studying Old English so we may hear her reciting in future performances.

Zendman plays Germanic lyres on the album, mostly for rhythm and chords. She also plays background percussion. Bakker leads melodies with bowed lyres, the nyckelharpa, a fiddle with keys, or plays the lyre as well. The couple provides all lead and background vocals on the album. 

Bakker and Zendman include songs inspired by the Sutton Hoo burial site as well. The instrumental “Raedwald’s Dance,” is named after the supposed nobleman who was buried in the ship burial. “Gimm,” is the Old English word for gem, in honor of “the Anglo-Saxon bling.” 

The name Moro is Norwegian for “fun,” and Bakker and Zendman, for all their concern with getting historical details right, are definitely fun. They recently posted a video announcing a “Swedish classic,” only to prank viewers with a snippet from the Muppet’s Swedish Chef.

“In Geardagum,” came about almost as a joke, after Jenkins sent Zendman and Bakker a recording on which he covered one of their songs. Museum patrons may treat them like rock stars, but they don’t see themselves that way. But because they are perfectionists, what began as a lark turned into hours of recording for almost two months. Their venture produced an album with good sound and professional marketing, but they recorded it at home and print the compact discs there as well.

The sixteen tracks are lively and tuneful. Zendman’s delivery of folk lyrics is energetic and her voice has the brightness needed to carry the melodies, but also the warmth to make them satisfying. Bakker’s nyckelharpa (or other bowed lyres) is an effective instrument for carrying melodies. The backing chords or supporting melody from Zendman’s lyre playing makes for a surprisingly full sound from only two musicians. This is likewise the case when they both play lyres. The introduction of percussion definitely gives the impression of more players.

Fully half of the songs on “In Geardagum” are original works, played mostly on instruments that haven’t often seen the light of day since they were buried with kings in the Middle Ages. In addition to instruments already mentioned the album includes the bowed lyres, talharpa (tail harp), moraharpa (a keyed fiddle precursor to the nyckelharpa), and percussion instruments including hand drums, a cajon, or box drum, and the ghungroo, or angle bells. “Var nu uit” is a haunting funeral song dedicated to the man buried under mound number one at Sutton Hoo. “Het Veen” (the bog), an instrumental with spoken words over two Germanic lyres, is from the perspective of a bog body and a woman about to be a bog body, people sacrificed to peat bogs in ancient times.

Bog bodies have been dated much later than the age of the (reproduction) instruments Bakker and Zendman play, but this may be the closest the couple comes to what I imagine Anglo-Saxon poetry to have sounded like. In our interview, Bakker and Zendman both sounded frustrated that the Netherlands lacks the extant ancient poetry of England, but perhaps they are making up for this deficit themselves.

Bakker and Zendman have carved out an interesting niche as performing reenactors, particularly with their successes in England. For a folk music group that has only been active for about five years, the production of an album and regular gigs is impressive. Despite the paid gigs they occupy that middle space of performers with day jobs, and they are unusually supportive of the performers and artists they share that space with. Full disclosure, Bakker has shared lyre videos with me to help me identify how he has played a song. Of the lyre-players I have met online, Bakker and Zendman have been two of the nicest.

Moro’s music is available online and “In Geardagum” can be purchased by contacting the group through social media or by email at moromuziek@gmail.com.

Ties to the Past; An Introduction to Language Change

Theseus Mosaic, discovered in the floor of a Roman villa at the Loigerfelder near Salzburg (Austria) in 1815, 4th century AD, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria (photo by Carole Raddato). In the Theseus story, the hero used a thread to find his way out of the labyrinth.

Do you have rizz, or are you guilty of occasionally acting sus? These Gen Z expressions didn’t exist a decade ago and they could entirely disappear from use as quickly. On the other hand, they could also come into such common use that they could one day become what some people call “proper” English. Who decides? The answer sounds sus itself: no one. Languages aren’t controlled by a special group of individuals. They evolve naturally, changing incrementally every year until eventually they don’t sound or look similar enough to be called the same language.

Take this English sentence from about a thousand years ago: “Eac swylce seo næddre wæs geapre ðonne ealle ða oðre nytenu ðe God geworhte ofer eorðan.” The sentence was written by the scholar Aelfric of Eynsham (a village in England). If you asked Aelfric what language it was, he would say it was English. Languages change quickly enough for people to notice–if they didn't, elders wouldn’t complain about the language of the youth–but slowly enough that we typically can read and understand writing from at least a few centuries ago with basic education. When it comes to Aelfric’s English, that of a thousand or more years ago, one needs to study and do the translating that one would have to do with a foreign language.

English is a Germanic language (along with German, Dutch, Danish and others). All of the Germanic languages evolved from a single language in the same way the Romance languages all evolved from Latin. Latin evolved into French, Spanish, Italian and other languages when Latin speakers started moving further away from one another or lost regular contact with each other. Each group’s version of the original language changed in different ways and eventually the different groups spoke versions of the original language that were so different that the groups could no longer understand each other. 

Our Ancestor Language

Speakers of English and Danish could have basic conversations a thousand years ago because their languages were not as different as they are today. Turn the clock back as many as five thousand years ago and most of the languages of Europe, as well as some in the Persian plateau and Indian subcontinent, were a single language. Speakers of English, Irish, Spanish, Russian, Greek and Hindi (and many others) speak descendant languages of a great ancestor language we call Proto Indo-European.

The linguist recognized for helping us determine that languages as far-flung as Irish and Hindi were related noticed similarities between the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, and the classical language of India, Sanskrit. William Jones, a British scholar who had studied ancient Greek and Latin, was then stationed in India where he became interested in Sanskrit. In 1786, he wrote of the three languages that: “no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists” (Wikipedia). The study of languages, particularly old ones, at that time, was called philology.

Indo-European language number comparison (with non-Indo-European languages for comparison, Razib Khan.)

Notable similarities exist between languages descended from Proto Indo-European in vocabulary and grammatical structure. Examples often cited are words for the numbers one through ten, words for parts of the body (feet, head) and the words for immediate family members, but there are thousands of others. The common Indo-European cognate words are those words that the prehistoric speakers of Proto Indo-European would have used. These include words for animals and plants and technology and relationships. The leading theory is that this group lived in an area that is today mostly in parts of Ukraine and Russia. This is based on PIE vocabulary for plants, animals and geography common to that area. Cognate: words from different languages that descended from the same ancestor language.

Indo-European Migration Theory

Based on common cognates for plants and animals, the grassy steppes of Ukraine are considered a leading homeland for the Proto Indo-European speakers (Notes From the Underground). 

Why Study The History of Languages

Understanding where your language came from, where it has been and how it was spoken and written, helps you understand certain oddities in modern English. Understanding that spelling in English was formalized at a time when all the letters in words were pronounced might help you understand why our spelling is sometimes so different from our modern pronunciation. There was a time when knight and night were pronounced differently and neither sounded like nite. Many features of older forms of our language persisted into modern usage and these tend to be the most confusing parts of our language. The use of the word “would” to express desire (“I would that I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart…” Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.124-125) is easier to understand if you know that English promoted its verb for desire (will) to become its future tense and that the ancestor of “would” (spelled wolde–the L and the E were pronounced!) simply meant “wanted.”

Then there is the wonder of what we can use linguistic rules (like Grimm’s Law) and language comparison to understand about history before history was written. None of what we know about Proto Indo-European was determined using physical or written records (although archaeological record has corroborated certain details). These people didn’t write. But by studying the cognates in our languages, we can track when certain groups migrated away from the rest. For example, the PIE language Hittite (a dead ancient language spoken in what is now the country of Turkey) has the largest number of common (cognate) vocabulary with the other groups so we can surmise that it was the closest language to our original ancestral language and that the Hittite speakers were the first to split off of the original group of Proto Indo-European speakers. 

A comparison of "Sky Father" gods from various Indo-European languages (starkeycomics.com).

Because of language study we also know more about our extremely ancient ancestors and how our culture came to be. Without a piece of physical evidence (only linguistic evidence) we know that our common ancestors had invented the wheel, domesticated horses and used them to pull wagons. We know that they worshiped a sky god based on the names of various mythological figures like Zeus, whose name (a cognate of Jupiter) originally meant “sky” or “father” god. We can even compare the earliest myths of our sister languages to know that these long gone people told a story of a battle between that god and a great serpent or dragon. 

Understanding that English shares a history with so many different languages might make the world seem a little smaller and people a little closer. Cultures that might have seemed foreign might seem less so, and knowing that so many diverse cultures sprang from one group of people might help us see that peoples all over the world have things in common even when they seem quite different.

(I wrote this article to introduce high school age students to language change after failing to find an age-appropriate explanation. It could be used to start a short unit of study or as a non-fiction article.)

Folklorist’s Notebook; Lazy Summer Edition

My 2024 summer yard meadow.

The end of the lazy summer days approaches and the sun and humidity have blessedly agreed to allow us to open the back windows of our Southern New Hampshire home to soft breezes and the chirping of daytime crickets. It has been a summer of work with my hands, often in short bursts, outside, tending to my overgrown bushes and my aging apple tree. I’ve tracked several stories that deserve more attention than I will grant them here, but the school year threatens and I will soon turn my energies back to teaching.

I have given myself permission to be lazy about writing this summer. I started a new teaching position last year and all of the changes made for a tougher time. I needed relaxation and feel that I got it. My work on bard-related projects has continued, but more behind the scenes, hopefully building to some public reveals in the future. 

The Lyre

I have been on vocal rest since the spring because of a growth on my vocal chords (called a granuloma) that may be the result of acid reflux, but is likely also related to an expansion of reading aloud for longer periods of time in the classroom. This led to working on instrumental pieces on my lyres, which has tested and grown my lyre-playing chops. I have learned six new tunes (which I do not believe Terry Bell of Longhouse Lyres has recorded!) and have begun to be able to play them in succession, a set of sorts, that I can play without singing. I found the songs in Cantiga’s Renaissance Festival Favorites, two that can be played with an ACDEFGA tuning and four that can be played with a GABCDE. I finally filmed myself playing and hope to do some more.

Summer Reading

I spent a good six months studying the mythological background to the poem Gilgamesh, which I was lucky enough to teach for the first time. I have wanted to be able to give students a bit of a better understanding of the gods that appear in the story. I believe that Samuel Noah Kramer’s Sumarian Mythology has given me the clearest understanding of what is known about Mesopotamian mythology, because of Kramer. I then started a Homeric reading project and finished Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and then moved on to her Iliad. Having returned to the school year, I am spending too much time creating lesson materials and grading student work to spare the time to write about them now.    

Regarding this Blog

This blog was born of the pretense that I was writing for the mythology beat of a large regional newspaper. It came about during the pandemic, when school had ground to a halt and then restarted at about half speed. They say to dress for the job you want, and “Practical Mythology,” is at least one job I would like. I’ve done nothing (as of this writing) to try to develop a revenue stream associated with NewEnglandBard.com because I am not particularly entrepreneurial, but if there were such a time when I could augment my income doing work like this, I would be able to do more of it. It’s in my nature to be a perfectionist and have extremely polished posts, but that has limited how often I can post here and perhaps it is time to allow myself a simpler format for a busier time!

Of Hobyds and Hobbits

Topics on the Welsh Translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

A story I worked hardest to produce was about Adam Pearce’s Welsh translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I don’t speak Welsh, but various articles shared how Pearce chose to translate certain names. Tolkien was very thoughtful about how he developed names in his novels, so I found this to be interesting. For example, Pearce translated Bilbo Baggins’s home Bag End as Pen-y-Bag, which is a fairly direct translation that is structured like other place names.

Tolkien Scholar Tom Shippey has written that Bag End itself is a linguistic curiosity that Tolkien perhaps meant to comment upon the English expression cul-de-sac. What distinguishes cul-de-sac as an oddity is that it is an English expression using French rather than a French expression itself. To live on a cul-de-sac suggests wealth, which Bilbo has. The name Baggins itself sounds like a derivation from Bag End, and we must recall Bilbo’s hated relatives, the Sackville-Baggins, who are covetous of Bilbo’s property.  

Pearce says the Welsh have no elves, so he repurposed the more villainous, hobgolin-y ellylon or ellylod, respelling it Ellyllyn (Ellyl plural). I have only found ellylon glossed as elf in English, but their associations with toadstools, flowers and Queen Mab suggest to me the little-people version of elves. I first thought that Ellyllyn, with its repetitive els, sounds like a word Tolkien could have invented in his Elvish tongues, but I then recalled that the double-l in Welsh is voiced quite differently than in English and Tolkien was particularly interested in the sounds of his languages. The very concept of elves in folklore is interesting. Tolkien repurposed the word to describe a tall (by fair folk standards) noble creature conspicuously un-elf-like, at least by the standards of European folklore.

Finally, Pearce used a Welsh runic system to recreate the dwarvish runes in the text instead of using the Anglo-Saxon runes Tolkien originally used. With the colonial history of England and Wales, this makes sense to me. However, the Welsh runic system used, called Coelbren y Beird runes, is an 18th century invention by the Welsh poet and antiquarian Iolo Morganwg, as opposed to the ancient runes Tolkien used. I am not disparaging Pearce’s choice, Coelbren y Beird runes, or Morganwg and I don’t know what I think Tolkien would have wanted. Tolkien loved the Welsh language, but he was very picky about translations of his works. It is a topic worth discussion.

Beowulf Fighting the Dragon Window

Let me close with an image of a piece of stained glass I am making for my New England home. It is from a cover illustration of Beowulf, translated by Burton Raffel, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. I plan to fit this to a small window on my back sun room where I began writing this post. I will share more images of it when I get ready to put it up.