As we rode out to Fennario
As we rode out to Fennario
Our Captain fell in love
With a lady like a dove
And he called her by her name Pretty Peggy-O…
— Traditional folk song
The song “Peggy-O” is a variant of the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie,” which recounts a disastrously thwarted romance between a young maid and a Captain of Irish Dragoons. Like so many other songs, it traveled across the Atlantic, into Appalachia and percolated out as an American folk song.
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For some months, I have been haunted with some intensity by the call of Fennario. This is hard to describe or explain — the closest I can come is that my Fennario represents a personal mythic frontier territory. It’s out there beyond the snowy peaks of Sheba’s Breasts, where the treasure of King Solomon’s Mines awaits; it finds us trekking through the haunted forests of Knysna or riding down the Devil’s Backbone in the company of spectral Confederate cavalry and a the ghost of a Lipan Apache hunter. It is a realm inhabited by Dire Wolves, Puckwudgies, and Wendigo.
I came to adopt this name for my personal mythic territory through two mentions in the Grateful Dead canon — the traditional Peggy-O and the Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia original Dire Wolf:
In the timbers of Fennario
The wolves are running ’round
The winter was so hard and cold, froze 10 feet ’neath the ground…
In a bit of synchronicity of the sort that often occurs ’round here, I recently came upon this statement from Hunter, the lyricist for the Dead, talking about the song Uncle John’s Band, which appeared along with Dire Wolf on Workingman’s Dead, the album that marked the band’s foray into what today is called “Americana” music:
“UJB is a celebration of folk themes played ‘down by the riverside,’ hailing from a peculiar place where Appalachia met immigrant Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish folk traditions, to my mind the mythic territory of Fennario, where Sweet William courted Pretty Peggy-O with such romantically disastrous consequences. I wanted to supercharge that ethos as something of ultimate value into the public consciousness.”
As you can doubtless imagine, the idea of supercharging that ethos as something of ultimate value really hits home.
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The public consciousness needs a little supercharging. I had a startling conversation on New Year’s Eve with a friend who recently welcomed a new grandchild named Boone into the world. When he told a group of teenaged folk here in Sisters that he was tickled to have a “frontier grandson,” they looked at him blankly. Turns out that not one of them had any idea who Daniel Boone was. That dismays me.
I fear we are losing both history and legend that I believe to be something of ultimate value.
What is to be done about this? Well, I can proudly note that I know young men in their 20s who listen to every episode of The Frontier Partisan Podcast. So, there’s that. I think there are other paths, too, that can lead through a storytelling gateway back into history.
I am encouraged by the success of many contemporary frontier tales that have found purchase in the public consciousness — like the crime/Western genre success of book series like Craig Johnson’s Longmire, and CJ Box’s Joe Pickett series (my brother sent me a box of Box over the holidays, and has devoured the TV adaption, which he reckons is a different but compelling beast of its own).
American storyteller Craig Johnson speaking about and signing his latest books in Mיdiathטque Josי Cabanis, Toulouse, France.
Then there’s the unexpected zeitgeist-gripping success of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone and its prequel Y 1883.
We might think of the Yellowstone “universe” as Sheridan’s own Fennario…
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Consider for a moment the impact of Diana Gabaldon’s decades-long, multi-volume expedition into mythic territory — the historical Scottish Highlands and American backcountry of Outlander. Untold numbers of people who had no knowledge of the Jacobite Rising and the Battle of Culloden Moor, couldn’t have known a Regulator from a Moderator, and whose understanding of the American Revolution was a cursory, sanitized textbook version, have found themselves immersed in ALL of that, thanks to an uncategorizable yarn that combines historical fiction, romance, and time-travel science fiction/fantasy. She threw everything into the soup kettle, as she Herself describes it:
…History, warfare, medicine, sex, violence, spirituality, honor, betrayal, vengeance, hope and despair, relationships, the building and destruction of families and societies, time travel, moral ambiguity, swords, herbs, horses, gambling (with cards, dice, and lives), voyages of daring, journeys of both body and soul…
The work is historically accurate, while at the same time incorporating the authentic superstition and folklore of Scottish Highlanders into the warp and weft of a weird tale that sends certain people hurtling through standing stones, falling through time. That’s a helluva way to supercharge the public consciousness…
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What the hell is Jim on about here?
OK… Thanks for asking. I’ll come to the point: I have decided that in 2022, in addition to the history podcast and this journal, I will undertake some mythic, folkloric yarn-spinning. Yep. Fiction. I long ago shied away from historical fiction, because I got hopelessly tangled in the rope of inhibition when deviating from the record for narrative purposes. I decided that fiction in general was not my metier, that I would stick solely to narrative non-fiction. Well, the Muse is beckoning me back, whispering Fennario on the wind. She is enticing me with a form that obviates inhibitions — what Steven Pressfield labels Resistance.
When you are explicitly dealing in folklore, the bounds of strict historical fact loosen considerably. As part-Shawnee storyteller Mitch Barrett is fond of saying:
I ain’t LYIN’! I’m tellin’ a story!
Mind you, I’m not speaking of outright fantasy fiction, per se. Creating secondary worlds is not for me. My Fennario exists in the known world, on a frontier grounded in history, but shot through with a timbers-shivering element of the uncanny. A place where Bluidy Tam cuts cards with the devil, the Wendigo hunts, and a “Dire Wolf collects his due while the boys sing round the fire.”
My hope is that in some small way — through the pure joy of a well-wrought yarn or two — folks who might not ever be moved pick up a tome on frontier history might find themselves pulled down a forested path into a realm that holds a treasure of ultimate value, thus enriching us all.
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Matthew says
Look forward to reading it. Are you going to self-publish or posted here or what?
JimC says
Still scouting the territory and getting my bearings. A variety of approaches available.
Matthew says
Let us know!
I’ve only published a few short stories in out of the way places, so I haven’t been very successful as a writer, but I keep trying.
J.F. Bell says
Welcome, brother.
Never had much use for purebred fantasy, myself, though I allow I’ve got one well away on the back burner that fits the bill.
Nearer home, there’s something wondrous about finding that place where the bones of world don’t lie quite so deep and ghosts are seldom far. Circumstance puts you on a piece of ground. Myth (and sometimes blood) bind you to it.
The best settings are the places you’ve been that aren’t on the map. The ones you recall, sometimes distantly, sometimes fondly. The wild canyons where wind and water and light built the world as you had never seen it before and may not see again. The high silence you only find in lonesome and forgotten places. Fading in the rearview mirror, the little town you pass through at sundown to which you never return.
Best of luck. Let me know if I can be of any use.
JimC says
Thank you — and I will.
That’s it, exactly.
Paul+McNamee says
Mythic/folkloric could certainly be spun (that dread verb, “marketed”) as historical fantasy these days. A proper smattering of fantastical elements, even if only at magical realism levels.
Last year I read D. B. Jackson’s (David B. Coe) THIEFTAKER – featuring a mage working his way around riotous Boston in 1765. (Susanna Clarke’s JOHNATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL was set during the Napoleonic wars, comes to mind.)
And as an eternally learning writer – if you’re doing anything historical, it’s almost worth writing a longer work so your research time is in balance. There are times I’ve considered something historical but bowed realizing the time (and payout) on research time would be negligible for an end product of a short short story. Unless you’re having fun and don’t care on the other end – or you’re the building of a body of stories with those characters and setting.
Best of luck, of course. I’ll back your play.
JimC says
Thank you Paul. If I remember rightly, REH faced that problem with his beloved historical yarns — not enough pay for the research time. Thus was born the Hyborian Age…
What did you think of Thieftaker?
Paul McNamee says
I liked THIEFTAKER quite a bit. Immerses you in colonial Boston. Good setup of characters. Some more famous Sons of Liberty appear. It’s not at the very top of my reading list, but it is a series I will definitely go back to.
JimC says
Think I’ll give it a go.
Paul+McNamee says
p.s. –
According to Wikipedia …
“The song is about the unrequited love of a captain of Irish dragoons for a beautiful Scottish girl”
An Irishman and his unrequited love for a Scottish girl?
Just @ me next time!
(sorry, bit of reminisce of late) 😀
JimC says
Hah!
Quixotic Mainer says
Best of luck sir! I look forward to hearing the tale. As a wayward student I wrote a few novels, the best of whom got a friendly letter from TOR urging a major rewrite before it could proceed. I kept meaning to catch up with my characters again, but reality, as is it’s wont, got too busy.
I love the concept of Fennario, I’ve travelled that country a lot over the years, but hadn’t up until now known what it was called.
JimC says
Thank you.
Same. Something about putting a name to it really focused my mind and spirit.
Chas S Clifton says
I read a whole academic paper once on “Peggy-O.” Maybe I could find it.
Diana Gabaldon’s books changed my sister’s life, I think, although I stayed away from them. Seeing the 1964 pseudo-documentary “Culloden” back in the 1970s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culloden_(film)] was enough for me.
Good luck with your writing project.
JimC says
Thank you sir. I’d love to know more about the Peggy-O paper.
Chas S Clifton says
This is the Irish-Scottish version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonnie_Lass_o%27_Fyvie
But I know that I saw something else somethere. Still looking. Once, based on the Joan Baez and Grateful Dead versions (“All your cities I will burn . . “) I thought it was a British ballad from the Peninsular Campaign in the Napoleonic Wars, but I now see that as a misconception.
Keith West says
A few days late to this post, but let me encourage you with the writing. I’ll certainly help you promote it.
JimC says
Thanks Keith. Much appreciated.
lane.batot says
Me playing catch-up(not to be confused with ketchup) too–but it’s never too late to encourage a worthy endevour! Even if “Fennario” is a total fantasy-scape, remember, one must still have realistic rules to adhere too–as all the best, most gripping fantasy does. It really can be difficult to splice fantasy with realism, but once you do, you’ve got a winner! One of my pet peeves, for instance, is as an Animal Geek, are people that write books about animals that have them talking like us humans, and just making their characters out to be humans in fur coats, as it were, doing and motivated by things no self respecting animal would give a poot about. There ARE marvelous exceptions, like Richard Adams “Watership Down” and “The Plague Dogs”, or “Black Fox Running” by Brian Carter–those talking animals were STILL true to rabbits, dogs, and foxes, respectively! ….And if you write good historical fiction(I personally LOVE good historical fiction!), you must remember that such virtually always inspires the people that read it, to seek out and read the REAL history on the subject, as well! Couldn’t be a better motive than that!