In what I can only describe as a moment of complicated irony, I am reasonably sure that the singer of this song ended up as a landed baron in SM Stirling’s Emberverse series*.
Song of the Dispossessed, Joe Bethancourt
*It’s very complicated irony. Spoilers, for those who don’t know the series: in that series, Portland, Oregon was taken over after the Change (an event which pretty much magically eliminated high-energy chemistry) by a heavily mutated version of the SCA (known as the Portland Protective Association, or PPA).
- One level of irony is that at first it would have been worth Bethancourt’s life, new-minted high noble or not, to perform that song in front of the Lord Protector of Portland, as the fellow was a bloody-handed tyrant with a hardcore medieval fetish, and a burning urge to conquer everything that he saw.
- Another level of irony is that the aforementioned Lord Protector made the mistake of having a Norman medieval fetish, which is precisely the wrong societal model to adopt if you want to avoid having independent-minded landed barons. In fact, the expectations of the collected baronage got the Lord Protector killed in the end.
- And the supreme level of irony was that, by the time of Bethancourt’s death in that series, the PPA was populated and largely ruled by people who would have scratched their heads over why this song would ever had been considered at all controversial. Of course nobles were supposed to rule in a conscientious and honorable manner. Everybody knew that.
So I guess Joe Bethancourt won that argument in the end, after all.
#commissionearned