[Loch-Ruadh] FWD: [Bards] Goliards

[an angel in black ink]

not fwd--->((Xue: Thank you for your interesting opinion as well.))
   
   
   
   
  Message: 1
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:15:23 -0500

Vast ist dies "Goliard"??
/Q

They were basically medieval hippies.

They were part of medieval European student culture from about the 11th-12th
century onward: they appeared at the rise of the great Universities of the
Continent, especially in Paris, and continued...to this day, really.

They were the bad company you fell into when you moved away from home for
the first time and lived in a university town on money that wasn't your own.
They were the dropouts, flunk-outs and kick-outs who still managed to hang
around somehow, getting drunk, getting laid and getting into trouble.  Think
of National Lampoon's Animal House in the 12th century, and you've pretty
much got it.

They took their name from "Golias" a sort of deity or patron saint that they
invented or half-invented, and who was associated, sort of like Bacchus,
with drink and revelry, and sort of like Apollo with music.

So why are they so interesting?  Well, because they wrote a lot of poetry,
all of it very, very unconventional by the standards of the time, and some
of it quite good.  It could be bawdy or chaste, reverent or blasphemous,
philosophical, lyrical, bibulous, humorous or philosophical. Good or bad, it
makes for much more interesting reading than most of the court-poetry of the
age.

For some good examples of this kind of stuff, google "Carmina Burana" and
"Francois Villon" (though Villon came a bit lat to really be called a
Goliard).

"Laurels.  We're like Google.  Only with sarcasm."