by Wendy Erisman, PhD. (University of Texas at Austin, 1998)
The learned work above agreeth in many points with the bardic musings of my own which follow...
Or, A Queer Postcolonial Feminist Questioning
of the Return of Repressed Premodern Eurocentrism
Not as it was, but as it might have been--
According to the ones who did not win,
Who wrote history not--we use this phrase,
We bold Boadiceas, witches, dykes, and gays,
The ones they burned, not on a glorious pyre,
The heretics and faggots to the fire,
Who nonetheless adore ancient attire,
The grace of robes and iambs, lute and lyre,
On which we wax lyric--ah, the old ways!
Forgetting Jews and Gypsies, Slavs and slaves,
Imperious Rome but also Normandy--and Saxony--hath kicked!
Christianity! The Muslims you have slain for the same god
Who hates the Goddess! Don't you find it odd
To be at odds with your All-Father's claims?
You Viking racists--why should we mince names?--
When you landed upon Hibernia's shores,
Did you foresee the slaughter of the Moors?
Iberia's glory, dispersed with the Jews,
Sought dispensation from a harder Muse,
In mitred cap, who hook'd his wand'ring sheep,
As hapless bad bards from the stage we reap.
O Everyman! What means this mummery?
O Everywoman!--lost in mystery--
Can we this history anew begin--
Not as it was, but as it might have been?
~Rosamunde del Shore, A.S. XXXVII
Of Rosamunde del Shore, My Persona
I am a marginal character, yet, as well ye can, the margin is oft the site of illumination. A runagate playing at the peripheries of Kingdoms and Cantons, I am, not unlike my twelfth-century namesake, as apt to be on the wrong side of everyone's sheets, whether vellum or silk. Nor did my seafaring kinfolk name me for Henry's fair leman; rather, 'twas for the red compass rose upon our sely device, which, had I not been named for it, but it in my stead for me, would most shamelessly have canted my given name as a surname. Mark ye, however, my forbears had long won renown as navigators when they came from the south of France to Brittany, and thence with William the Conqueror to Hastings, whereupon he rewarded their great service to him at his court, until David I of Scotland did invite them to accept at his hand a small fiefdom in the Caledonian lowlands near Argyll. Wherefore is that compass rose gules? ye may ask. 'Tis from a quaint legend, upon the truth of which I make no presumption, and remark but the prettiness of the story, that the women bards of our line are descended from the Lhianna Shee Eodain, for, when the gules combines with the per pale vert and argent of the field, all three colors dearest to the fair folk of Celtic lands are present to honor them. Eodain is a poet who incarnates the Lhianna Shee, or Fairy Sweetheart, and woos her lovers with beautiful verses writ by her own hand. Therefore do the colors of the device celebrate the Celtic fair folk, and its charge, my nautical ancestors. Once in Trimaris an herald beloved and well-esteemed of his people ycleped me Siren of the Eastern Seaboard, for my wanderings from Trimaris to Atlantia to the East and back again, where in each place I did leave poems with each of the gentil men who inspired my heart and my quill to soar as they never had done under power of avian wing. Here I remark my uncanny but quite mundane parallel with the story of the fairy leman Eodain, and now, in the dry plains of Ansteorra, I find my surname del Shore also to be a happy reminder of my coastal origins.