Fiddler's Green
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Fiddler's Green is the afterlife imagined by sailors, and later adopted by U.S. Cavalry, where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing, and dancers who never tire. There is some evidence to support that the major propagators of this belief were pirates who, knowing they would never meet the criteria for entry into Christian heaven, simply created a religion of their own.[citation needed]
[edit] History
Fiddler's Green features in an old Irish legend that a sailor can find the paradisaical village by walking inland with an oar over his shoulder until he finds a place where people ask him what he's carrying. This legend may have some of its origin in Tiresias' prophecy in Homer's Odyssey, in which he tells Odysseus that the only way to appease the sea god Poseidon and find happiness is to take an oar and walk until he finds a land where he is asked what he is carrying, and there make his sacrifice.
U.S. cavalry had a story of Fiddler's Green published anonymously in a 1923 U.S. Cavalry Manual, and is still used in modern cavalry units to memorialize the deceased. The name has also had other military uses. Fiddler’s Green was the name of an artillery Fire Support Base in Military Region III in Vietnam in 1972 occupied principally by elements of 2nd Sqdn., 11th Armored Cavalry, and the name of the Navy's enlisted mens club in Sasebo, Japan in the early 1960s.Fiddlers Green is also the name of the stable and pasture used by Parsons Mounted Cavalry at Texas A&M University in College Station Texas, and the name of the bar at the Leaders Club in Fort Knox Kentucky.
A song based on Fiddler's Green was written and is copyrighted by John Connolly, a Lincolnshire songwriter in England Copyright 1970 for the World, March Music Ltd SOF, and has since passed into tradition and is sung worldwide in nautical and Irish traditional circles. Fiddler's Green is also a song by Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, released in 1991. Fiddler's Green is a road in Ancaster, Ontario, near Kingston (the band's origin).
The cavalryman's poem is as follows:
Halfway down the trail to Hell,
In a shady meadow green
Are the Souls of all dead troopers camped,
Near a good old-time canteen.
And this eternal resting place
Is known as Fiddlers' Green.
Marching past, straight through to Hell
The Infantry are seen.
Accompanied by the Engineers,
Artillery and Marines,
For none but the shades of Cavalrymen
Dismount at Fiddlers' Green.
Though some go curving down the trail
To seek a warmer scene.
No trooper ever gets to Hell
Ere he's emptied his canteen.
And so rides back to drink again
With friends at Fiddlers' Green.
And so when man and horse go down
Beneath a saber keen,
Or in a roaring charge of fierce melee
You stop a bullet clean,
And the hostiles come to get your scalp,
Just empty your canteen,
And put your pistol to your head
And go to Fiddlers' Green.
[edit] References
- Page, Michael; Robert Ingpen (1985). Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were. Viking Press. ISBN 0-670-81607-8.
- Fiddlers green - World Wide Words
