Fiddler's Green
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Fiddler's Green is the happy land imagined by sailors where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing and dancers that never tire.
It features in an old English legend: They say that an old salt who is tired of seagoing should walk inland with an oar over his shoulder. When he comes to a pretty little village deep in the country and the people ask him what he is carrying... he will know that he's found Fiddlers Green. The people give him a seat in the sun outside the Village Inn with a glass of grog that refills itself every time he drains the last drop and a pipe forever smoking with fragrant tobacco. From then onwards he has nothing to do but enjoy his glass and pipe and watch the maidens dancing to the music of a fiddle on Fiddlers Green.
This legend may have some of its origin in Tiresias' prophecy in Homer's Odyssey, in which he tells Odysseus that the only way to appease the sea god Poseidon and find happiness is to take an oar and walk until he finds a land where he is asked what he is carrying, and there make his sacrifice.
It is also the subject of numerous songs, including this Irish sea chanty "fiddler's green" about a seaman who is dying at sea.
- Chorus
- "Wrap me up in my oil skin and blanket,
- No more 'round the docks, I'll be seen,
- Just tell me olde shipmates,
- I'm takin a trip mates,
- and I'll see ya some day in Fiddler's Green"
A ballad was written anonymously for the US cavalry, published in a 1923 US Cavalry Manual. It is still used in modern cavalry units to memorialize the deceased.
- Halfway down the trail to hell
- In a shady meadow green,
- Are the souls of all dead troopers camped
- Near a good old-time canteen
- And this eternal resting place
- Is known as Fiddler's Green.
- Marching past, straight through to hell,
- The infantry are seen,
- Accompanied by the Engineers,
- Artillery and Marine,
- For none but the shades of Cavalrymen
- Dismount at Flddlers' Green.
- Though some go curving down the trail
- To seek a warmer scene,
- No trooper ever gets to Hell
- Ere he's emptied his canteen,
- And so rides back to drink again
- With friends at Fiddlers' Green.
- And so when man and horse go down
- Beneath a saber keen,
- Or in a roaring charge or fierce melee
- You stop a bullet clean,
- And the hostiles come to get your scalp,
- Just empty your canteen,
- And put your pistol to your head
- And go to Fiddlers' Green.
In Neil Gaiman's Sandman novels, Fiddler's Green is a location in the mystical landscape of the Dreaming.
It once spent a few years as a human being, just for a change of pace, basing its appearance and personality on the writer G. K. Chesterton.