The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]

Subject: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Mr Happy
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 08:47 AM

There's a line in one of the verses which I don't quite understand.

It's here:

'Twas England bade our wild geese go
That small nations might be free
Their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves
On the fringe of the grey North Sea'

How far does the fringe of the North Sea stretch to be anywhere close to Suvla Bay on the Aegean coast of the Gallipoli peninsula in European Turkey, south of the Gulf of Saros?

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Lighter
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 09:15 AM

It's "*and* the fringe."

People who sing "on" literally don't know what they're talking about.

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Lighter
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 09:25 AM

Or singing about. BTW, O'Neill has two "Foggy Dews," neither of which is accompanied by words, and neither of which is quite the tune you're thinking of, popularized by the Clancys. But there are resemblances among all three.

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: MartinRyan
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 11:04 AM

"or" rather than "on"

Regards

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: MartinRyan
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 11:06 AM

For that matter - "great" rather than "grey" - though the latter is, of course, just as fitting in two senses.

Regards

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: MartinRyan
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 11:12 AM

Written by Canon Charles O Neill, parish priest of Kilcoo and later of Newcastle. (Source:Cathal O Boyle's Songs of County Down). It often appears in print with the author given as "P O Neill" which was, of course, the collective nom de guerre of the IRA.

Regards

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Lighter
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 12:12 PM

Oh, *that* O Neill!

I thought we were talking about Francis O'Neill.

"Or" would work about as well as "and," though "and" would be punctiliously correct. But I take it that C. O'N. wrote "or."

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 31 Mar 14 - 01:09 PM

And yet another Foggy Dew
Jim Carroll

Foggy Dew (Old Irish version) Junior Crehan
This song was written by Alfred Percival Graves and published in 'Irish Songs and Ballads in 1880. Junior says he learned it when he was at school
It has nothing whatever to do with the erotic English song of the same name or the Irish song celebrating Easter Week 1916.
it is highly likely that the attributed author of the Easter Week 'Foggy Dew', Canon Charles O'Neill (1887-1963), borrowed 'Graves' evocative title as a 'calm before the storm' scene-setter. The English title is said to be a corruption of 'buggaboo', the old term for the ghost that the gullible young woman is invited to hide from, under the young man's blankets.

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Mr Happy
Date: 01 Apr 14 - 10:10 AM

Thanks to respondents, 'or' makes far more sense, although 'and' would do as well & there's not a huge difference in received language that might make 'and' sound like 'on'

The DT version has 'on'




Jim,

In which culture is 'buggaboo' a ghost?

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 12:39 AM

G'day Mr Happy,

By my Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary:

"... probably of dialect origin: cf. Welsh bucibo 'the Devil': from bwci 'hobgpblin'."

REgards,

Bob

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 12:40 AM

... Oops! Hobgoblin ...

Regard(les)s

Bob

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 02:45 AM

"In which culture is 'buggaboo' a ghost?"
Can't remember - I think its an English vernacular country saying, though it might be Australian.
Bert Lloyd referred to it whenever he sang The Foggy Dew (erotic version); I think it is in his 'Folk Song in England' - I'll take a look when I wake up.
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 02:48 AM

Sorry - didn't finish -
Bert related the term to 'bogey-man'
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 08:09 AM

Bugaboo from Folk Song in England, as promised
Jim Carroll

Another song among Bell's papers is the earliest-known copy of the familiar and controversial "Foggy dew", about whose title-image ink has flowed and typewriter ribbons grown faint. What is the mysterious 'foggy dew' that so frightens the girl in the song? 'Foggy', we're told, is Middle English for 'coarse rank marsh grass' and so may stand for maidenhead (why?); 'dew' is a familiar folk symbol for chastity (and many things besides); there is a suggestion that the expression is merely a clumsy Anglicization of Irish 'orocedhu' meaning 'darkness, black night', and Robert Graves, always ready to make a bold dash into folklore matters, takes this Irish notion further with the suggestion that the blackness relates to the Black Death which may have been raging at the time of the song's inception (though so far we've no grounds for dating it before the closing years of the eighteenth century) and to the black dress of nuns. So there we are: the girl is not terrified of her coarse rank virginity; she is hammering on a convent door begging the nuns to save her from the plague. The version that Bell received early in the nineteenth century offers another, less spectacular but more convincing explanation. He calls it "The bogle bo", meaning 'ghost', of course.Even "The foggy dew/Bogle bo/Bugaboo", mild as it is, had to wait long before any set of it was printed in full, apart from the broadsides. Where love songs were concerned, the collectors and publishers gave all their preference to the kind of sentimental idylls whose creation nourished particularly towards the middle years of the eighteenth century.

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Lighter
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 09:36 AM

Bell's text:

@displaysong.cfm?SongID=5934

And the 1689 version, with a weird "Bogulmaroo":

http://www.horntip.com/html/books_%26_MSS/1600s/1689_pepys_broadside_%28broadside%29/index.htm

"The Foggy, Foggy Dew" is a paradigm example of the "folk process."

Submitted for your approval:

The well-known Irish poet Paul Muldoon (in "A New Literary History of America," 2009 , p. 609) takes Carl Sandburg to task for his naivete' about "The Foggy, Foggy Dew" (which he almost single-handedly made famous among academics):

"For example, nothing is made of the fact that there's a vast hinterland of punnery on the relationship between a 'fair young maid' and 'morning' (maighdean/maidin) in the Irish tradition from which this song partly derives [sic], so that the idea of walking [sic] through the morning/maiden [sic] dew takes on a whole other significance. The word 'foggy,' meanwhile, refers not so much to a 'thick mist' but 'rank grass' [sic] which compounds the erotics of 'the foggy, foggy dew.'"

Beat that, Canon O'Neill! ("Rank grass!" Ooooooh, baby!)

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 10:09 AM

To check out the fog from which the Canon roared -

Click here

Regards

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: MartinRyan
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 10:11 AM

Ooops! That was me, emerging from the long grass having lost my cookie...

Regards

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Lighter
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 10:37 AM

Great link, Martin. A shortened version was collected as "traditional" in New York State around 1940. (See Cazden et al, "Folk Songs of the Catskills.")

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: mg
Date: 02 Apr 14 - 10:10 PM

I have read small nations were belgium, netherlands etc...they went to wwi to save others.

Subject: RE: The Foggy Dew [O'Neil]
From: Lighter
Date: 03 Apr 14 - 09:49 AM

The Netherlands was neutral in WW1.

The "small nations" were Belgium, Luxemburg, and Serbia, though Belgium - right across the North Sea - was always the most prominent in the British press.