The Willow Windle, Or "Ballad for the Willow Wives" being a folk song from County Withydingle, with its cultural context and appropriate historical notes

 The Willow Windle

Or "Ballad for the Willow Wives" - a folk song from the County Withydingle, with its cultural context and appropriate historical notes

Claude Monet, Water-Lily Pond and Weeping Willow

The Willow Windle is a dance for the Winthydingle Autumn Feast, when the goddess of unrequited love - the willow, or Lady Willow - begins to drop her leaves upon her careless lover, a fast moving branch of the Rogue River commonly known among the Withydinglians as “Rogue o’ the Rill.” This yearly celebration is tied to the end of the harvest season in this part of the country. It is rather a sad song in its substance and meaning, but the dance is quite lively, the liveliest of the year, in fact. An interesting juxtaposition. The Willow Windle could be considered the final celebration of the year in terms of its pure celebratory mood, even though the people have a true end-of-the-year celebration in their winter holiday. (See footnote 1) Scholars continue to debate this point.

The dance is only performed out of doors, rain or shine, and always beside the line of Willows bordering the stream on what is called the Willow Green, a large meadow kept mown but otherwise untouched for town festivities. 

The chant is sung in a call and response fashion. The women and men of the town form two lines facing each other with an aisle of grass in between. The dance is then performed to the beating of a single drum, though some versions allow the occasional flute or pipe to play willow melodies such as the "Withyringle" and "Haste to the Withe". 

The Dance begins with everyone facing that year's chosen Lady Willow. The lead lady begins the first line of the first verse, the lead man sings the second, they sing together the third, and everyone joins in on the fourth. It is then that the drumming commences and the rest of the dancers chant their appropriate verses as they perform the appropiate steps. The dance can continue indefinitely since once the song has been sung through in the traditional way, individual dancers can then call out verses at random and the dance becomes a kind of game of skill. Who can keep their footing longest? For in this dance, as I should have mentioned before, a dancer who mistakes their footing is cast aside or pushed behind their appropriate row - "leafed behind" as the folk of the town say, playing off "leaving," "left," and "leaf" - and that dancer's partner is then pushed to the center aisle between the rows of dancers, playing the part of the "arrow leafs so yellow/down the rushing stream". This motion is called "winding the little Lethe". This dancer must weave in and out of the dancing couples without loosing footing or disrupting the footing of other dancers. If he or she successfully runs this kind of dancing gauntlet, they become one of the "theives" mentioned in the fifth verse and have an opportunity to rejoin the dance. 

The fourth and fifth verses are especially dynamic. It is in these verse that each woman brings out a ribbon (fourth verse) and then each man a willow wand (fifth verse). Each man cuts and brings with him to the dance a willow wand carefully selected and peeled. This is pulled from a special holster inside his coat and becomes a sort of baton around which the "thieves" must dance as well as the men and women still “billowing,” as they say, or dancing. If the thieving dancer is a male and he successfully winds his way back into the dance without being touched by the willow wand, the male partner of the lady dancer "taken" by the "thief" must then "wind down the little Lethe" and wait his turn to become a thief. If the thief manages to steal the wand from the dancer completely, the dancer from whom it was stolen is out of the dance and may not enter back in.

If the "thief" is a woman, the same idea applies. Each woman dances with a ribbon of either gold or yellow-green, tied around their waist as a girdle, and this is untied and flourished during the fourth verse as was previously mentioned. The dancers use their ribbons to wrap each one's chosen partner and draw him in for a brief kiss as the verse commands. It is around this ribbon the "thief" must dance, also without being touched. The female thief also has the challenge of trying to steal the ribbon from the dancer. If this happens, the dancer from whom it is stolen is out of the dance permanently.

The dance, as I said, can go on indefinitely in this way. It is officially finished when either one couple remains or one dancer remains, whichever comes first.

Due to its extended time commitment, it is danced only at the most solemn of rituals, always at the Autumn Feast but occasionally at important weddings or in celebration of royal births. Interestingly, it is also danced at the funeral of the Drummer, or officially the Bearer of the Drum, as there is only one man in the town who is given the responsibility of Bearing the Drum. This man beats the drum for all dances and any other ritual where it is required. He is a kind of priest of rhythm, so to speak, though no one refers to him as anything other than “Drummer”. At his funeral, his chosen successor brings a virgin drum made with the wood from Drummer's Grove and with the skin of a year old white goat kid, raises the drum aloft, declares the name of the former Drummer, and sounds the drum once for each year his predecessor had been thr Bearer of the Drum. Then the dance begins as usual.

The following are the most well-known and traditional verses of the song. New verses can be added, and often are, but the process of verse approval is rather tedious and slow. New verses must be added only in between the last verse and the one just before it, and it (or they) must hold to the same established pattern. New verses must be learnt by heart by yhr entire community and if the Council of Song moves to accept a new verse, the entire town will meet once a week for the 9 months leading up to the festival in order to commit the words and any new movements to memory. 

After all this, there remains a final step: the Drummer must give his seperate and final approval, and his is the deciding vote as he is considered the Guardian of the Song's Soul. He is given the new verse or verses along with the council, but instead of joining with them and voting, and instead of joining the town in attempting to learn the new verse(s) as they do as well as any accompanying movement(s), the Drummer retreats to the Chamber of Patient Voices, a small stone hut built on a hill which lies across the Rogue River. The Chamber of Patient Voices - or the Drummer's Chamber as the town's folk call it - is built in such a way that one person playing or singing will, after a brief pause, hear his or her own words sung back to him or her, but in such a way that it seems as though multiple singers are singing in unison. (I have yet to discover the acoustic achievements necessary for such a marvel.) In the Chamber, the Drummer plays the song with, and then without, the new verses, each time listening to the rendition. This process takes the same 9 months and its purpose, so far as I can gather, is to help the Drummer hear, as he tells me, “either the voice of the Rogue o’ the Rill or that of Lady Willow, or both” in the new verses. In short, the Drummer must agree that the new verses are a further or deeper expression of the nature of the Willow Woman - or Lady Willow - and/or the Rogue o'the Rill, or a revelation of their history and interaction. 

One final note of explanation: the Withydinglians use the term “rill” to mean any branch breaking away from, or tributary rushing toward, a larger river, rather than our use to mean a small stream or thin channel. A rill can be a stream of reasonable size, something which is necessary to know for correctly understanding the song's imagery.

Claude Monet, Weeping Willow

Willow, willow, standing still-oh,

Drooping over mountain rill-oh,

Dropping arrow leafs so yellow

In the rushing stream;

Willow, willow, bend and billow

In the wind that blows so chill-oh,

In the wind that clothes the rill-oh

In your yellow leaves.

Yellow, yellow, gold and mellow

Bright as sunshine, happy fellow!

Leaves of warmth and light - do tell-oh

What the willow dreams.

Yellow, yellow, sing and bellow!

Ladies, turn and kiss your fellow!

Dance to drum in shady dell-oh

On the willow leaves

Fellow! Fellow! Merry fellow!

Whisk away your lady belle-oh!

Whisk the whispy wand o'willow -

Keep away the thieves!

Willow, willow, why-o, where-oh, 

Do you cry and sigh and care-oh?

Why do sorrows bend your fair-oh

Form so low, so mean?

Yellow willow, standing still-oh,

Bending, weeping, sighing mellow,

Tell your sadness, tell oh tell-oh

To the laughing stream. 

There goes rill-oh, down the hill-oh

Leaping cheerful, leaving willow,

Lethe-like, a lusty fellow -

Poor Willow and her dream!

No one knows exactly where this song and dance sprang from, or what verses are the original and root, so to speak. Its origins are murky at best. The people of the place say that when their forefathers settled in their valley many years ago, they could hear the sad whispering of the willows to the brisk and cheerful mountain stream,  which the willows line and over which they bend, but that as time has passed their voices have grown more tired and quiet, so that now it is but rarely heard. The song, they say, is meant to waken the willow wives and console each in turn (they choose a different willow each autumn) in the hopes that the voices of the trees are one day renewed and restored. (See footnotes 2)

Van Gogh, Garden with Weeping Willows

1. After the Autumn Feast comes the Mid-Winter Fire Festival and it's accompanying Pageant of the Trees, which is a much more stately dance and song in which the names of the trees are called out by the people of Withydingle so that the trees may hear their names and remember themselves. This, they believe, begins the long process of the land waking up from Winter's enchantment. 

There is a version for the children of that country which I find particularly interesting and which I hope to write about soon.

2. This is the consequence of reading Tolkien so as to teach his work. I came up with the silly little ditty and then wondered where on earth - or who on earth - would anyone ever sing something like that? Everything followed from that. Tolkien framed his books with the narrative of a Fictional Translator/Folklorist, so that's what I did. I took a Francis Childe approach and gave the song a festival (ritual context and purpose), a dance (physical incarnation), and a bit of historic and linguistic color.