free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
Here the nightingale sings not and the cuckoo does not speak.
The plains nourish horses and the mountains heroes,
And the girls waste away and become husks.
The heroic can easily become a bore. It is most likely to avoid the
danger of bombast when there is something to be heroic about. The
majority of Cretan songs have little or no poetic merit at all, and that
includes the best known of them, ‘The Rebel’. All Cretans know this
song; it describes how when the starless nights return and February
comes round, the hero will take his gun and go on an errand - to
make wives into widows, and little children into orphans. ‘The Rebel’
caught the imagination of the oppressed Cretans. Poetic merit by our
standards of course has little to do with the popularity of a song, since
folk songs serve plenty of non-poetic functions. But of those songs which
are worth repeating, it is no accident that some of the best concern
death; for this is something in the face of which heroism is not out of
place.
Others have written of the place of Charos in Greek folk lore. 3 He is
no longer the grim ferryman who conducts souls across the Styx. He
has taken the place of Thanatos, Death itself, and of Hades, the ruler
over the dead. He comes to abduct the souls which are due. Sometimes
he is sent by God – sometimes he is even called St Charos - but usually
he acts on his own. For his kingdom has nothing to do with God. It is
the ‘lower world’, peopled by shades of the departed. A few songs will
make quite clear the Cretans’ attitude to this twilight kingdom of
Hades (which is now a place) with its cobwebbed gates.
Why are the mountains black and filled with tears ?
No wind assails them, nor rain beats them;
Only . . . Charos is passing, sweeping the dead.
He sweeps the young in front, the old behind
And the poof babies in rows on the saddle.
– Stop Charos in some village, stop at some stream,
For the old men to drink water, and the young to play with ball
And the little babies to gather flowers.
– But I do not stop at villages, I do not stop at a stream,
For mothers to come for water and recognize their children,
For man and wife to see each other and avoid separation.
Tell me who it was that threw the apple into Hades
And the golden sword in the earth down there, and the silver ribbon.
Young men run for the sword, young girls for the ribbon,
And the little babies run to take that apple of Paradise.
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