Week 41: Earl Richard, Sir Richard’s song

We continue the Kipling-and-others theme with two songs about Richards.

Earl Richard is more widely known as Young Hunting, although the eponymous character has several different names in the source (Child 68). The plot is both familiar (love and death) and very strange. The accompaniment is mostly drones of various origins.

Sir Richard’s song is another of Kipling’s hymns to England, this one spoken by a Norman knight who had fallen in love with the country after falling in love with an English woman. (Sexual love first, then love of country.) The tune, the arrangement and the delivery are very largely taken from Peter Bellamy, who liked this song enough to record it twice; it’s on both Oak, Ash and Thorn and Keep on Kipling. As far as I’m aware he never played zither, though.