Large Fierce Mammal

On the heels of yesterdays Dark Sentiment that spoke of magickal invisibility rings and the weakness of Man in favour of evil doing in the face of certain – or at least perceived – anonymity, today I present something a bit more uplifting.

A School History of England was written by C.R.L.Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, and a modest printing occurred in 1911. Counted among Kipling’s contribution are twenty-two poems (or twenty-three, depending on who you talk to), including the one we’re going to look at here.

“Dane-geld” is a term used to describe either the paying of blackmail or protection money, or the figurative taking it up the ass to get the easy way out instead of solving the issue once and for all. Regardless of application, the philosophy is the same – paying Dane-geld is not on.

Rudyard Kipling has been given credit for inventing the term, but he really only deserves credit for making it a thing of common usage. Ah, how I yearn for those heady days of yesteryear before the decay of literacy saw overt misspellings of even simple words granted official acceptance in dictionaries of the English language on the grounds of “common usage”.

You may wish to read the poem in its entirety here while listening to this entertaining musical version performed by Michael Longcor, from his CD titled Norman and Saxon.