Hardhead
Explorer
I have a very odd request that only tangentially related to RP, but I didn't know where else to go on the vast interwebs. I need someone that really knows their Germanic folk customs, and someone that is fluent in German to help reverse engineer a chant back into German. I know this is a long shot, but if anyone cares to help, her's the deal:
My hometown was settled predominately by German immigrants. Our phone book pretty much reads like a list of anglicized German surnames. One tradition we have from this time is the tradition of the New Years Shooters, who gather every year on New Year's Eve, and on the stroke of midnight begin firing antique muzzle-loaded black powder rifles (without bullets, of course). They travel around town and do this for a full 24 hours, and a giant roving party more or less follows them. I can't overstate how big of a deal they are around here.
Anyway, every time they go to a new location, the Crier receits a chant. Here it is, though I've changed the formatting to make it more obvious where the couplets are. (The traditional formatting can be found here
Besides the fact that our town was predominately settled by Germans, I have one other hint. There's a few weird places in the rhyme breaks down. One is the good/flood rhyme, which seemed very sloppy to me. I checked the translation using Google Translate, and what do you know? Good and Flood do rhyme in German. Eureka!
The other very strange place is the "We have this New Year's morning Called you by your name/and disturbed you from your rest, But we hope no harm by the same" lines. Besides sounding vaguely pre-Christian (I know that would be a huge stretch, but asking Jesus not to hurt you because you called his name and disturbed him from his rest is just weird), the lines are too long, and just don't seem to fit into the rest of the thing.
There's also an orphaned line around "desire" and a clear mixup at "warm our eyes and bless our hearts" which should clearly be "hearts/eyes" instead of "eyes/hearts" to make the rhyme work. This is just evidence to me that the chant has gotten screwed up over time. In fact, though supposedly it's been going on forever, I believe that it actually fell out of usage for a while before being revived some time in the '60s.
My grandmother also claims there was once a Woman's Chant that was done in answer, but has been lost. No clue there.
Anyway, what I'm hoping is someone that knows something about German folk practices might recognize this. Or maybe there's something obvious that stands out if you look at it with an eye to knowing what it must have been like in German. Or, really, any information.
For all I know, a quick search on the German Google with some obvious reverse-engineered translations will bring up an old German chant that is this one's obvious predecessor. It's just something I can't do, and my hometown is so small and this is such a niche curiosity that no one has really researched it.
So, thanks for anyone that can help.
My hometown was settled predominately by German immigrants. Our phone book pretty much reads like a list of anglicized German surnames. One tradition we have from this time is the tradition of the New Years Shooters, who gather every year on New Year's Eve, and on the stroke of midnight begin firing antique muzzle-loaded black powder rifles (without bullets, of course). They travel around town and do this for a full 24 hours, and a giant roving party more or less follows them. I can't overstate how big of a deal they are around here.
Anyway, every time they go to a new location, the Crier receits a chant. Here it is, though I've changed the formatting to make it more obvious where the couplets are. (The traditional formatting can be found here
Besides the fact that our town was predominately settled by Germans, I have one other hint. There's a few weird places in the rhyme breaks down. One is the good/flood rhyme, which seemed very sloppy to me. I checked the translation using Google Translate, and what do you know? Good and Flood do rhyme in German. Eureka!
The other very strange place is the "We have this New Year's morning Called you by your name/and disturbed you from your rest, But we hope no harm by the same" lines. Besides sounding vaguely pre-Christian (I know that would be a huge stretch, but asking Jesus not to hurt you because you called his name and disturbed him from his rest is just weird), the lines are too long, and just don't seem to fit into the rest of the thing.
There's also an orphaned line around "desire" and a clear mixup at "warm our eyes and bless our hearts" which should clearly be "hearts/eyes" instead of "eyes/hearts" to make the rhyme work. This is just evidence to me that the chant has gotten screwed up over time. In fact, though supposedly it's been going on forever, I believe that it actually fell out of usage for a while before being revived some time in the '60s.
My grandmother also claims there was once a Woman's Chant that was done in answer, but has been lost. No clue there.
Anyway, what I'm hoping is someone that knows something about German folk practices might recognize this. Or maybe there's something obvious that stands out if you look at it with an eye to knowing what it must have been like in German. Or, really, any information.
For all I know, a quick search on the German Google with some obvious reverse-engineered translations will bring up an old German chant that is this one's obvious predecessor. It's just something I can't do, and my hometown is so small and this is such a niche curiosity that no one has really researched it.
So, thanks for anyone that can help.
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