Tolkien and Parody

[davem]

On 'Grammeree'

There is a folksong, The Wife of Usher's Well, about a mother who's three sons had 'died' whille at the 'Foreign School', & who attempts by an invocation of Christ to bring them back to life:

There was a lady at Usher's Well,
And children had she three,
She sent them off to the foreign school,
To learn their grammeree.

O they hadn't been gone but a very short time,
About three weeks & a day,
When death, sweet death came hastening along,
And stole those babes away'

As RJ Stewart points out in The UnderWorld Initiation, in folksong (specifically the type known as 'Magical Ballads'), 'visits to 'Spain', 'Turkey', the 'unco'land, a 'foreign land', often imply the journey to the OtherWorld or UnderWorld'.

In other words, she sends her children into Faerie to learn the 'mysteries', but they die (or get trapped) while there, & she attempts to bring them back into this world, but as the song tells, she fails in the attempt.

So 'grammerians' were believed to know 'secrets' - they were 'wizards' who had arcane knowledge unavailable to others - possibly the reason for the suspicion of 'book learning' among the ignorant.