> Wednesday evening the Scottish Society of Tidewater had a program entitled
> "Haunted Castles of Scotland". The last castle was Roslin Castle and its
> Chapel. [...] The hammered dulcimer came in and both finished soft just
> as the speaker said that the knights were buried with "bell, book and
> candle." I had borrowed a very large handbell (Low E) . The lights all
> went out and the recorder player rang the bell three times.
> Very effective.
Nice idea. The reader was presumably doing Walter Scott's "Lovely
Rosabelle", from "The Lay of the Last Minstrel"? There are a couple
of musical settings of that - a near-contemporary one by George Linley
(weird Schubertian chromaticisms, tricky to sing) and a ballad-like
one I've only heard sung once, by Gordon from Haddington Folk Club -
anyone know where the latter tune comes from?
Roslin is in the news again, for yet another crackpot theory. Some
time ago I mentioned here that an occult potboiler claimed the chapel
had the severed head of Christ in the basement. Then we had all the
fuss over Dolly the cloned sheep, done at the Roslin Institute nearby.
Now some American Christian fundamentalist group is putting the two
ideas together, claiming that the Institute has a hush-hush project to
clone Jesus (or start a full-scale Jesus factory) using DNA found in
relics scattered round Europe... I would love to be able to think up
a song about that but there are times when reality gets too outlandish
to parody. (I'm reminded of that bit in Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-
Birds" where the hero's landlady finds a copy of "The Imitation of
Christ" among his books and squawks indignantly, "What do they want to
imitate Him for?")
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