Cantigas de Santa Sanjo di Telura
The Cantigas de Santa Sanjo are a series of religious songs attributed directly to the mortal Ajoran friar and eventual ascendant god of fresh water and repentant scoundrels, Saint Frances Heronseye. The name derives from his mortal name, Frances Sanjo di Telura.
These Cantigas are related to but distinct from the older Cantigas de Santa Ajora. They are among the most widespread pieces of First Age art to survive to the modern era, alongside the Ajoran Cantigas, various songs attributed to Laila By-the-Sea and programmes composed by the God-Empress of the New Rozsan Empire, Nir.
Classification
Scholars generally divide the Cantigas into four groups along two axes of consideration: canonicity and period.
Canonicity
The first axis differentiates "canonical" songs, strongly thought to be his own compositions, and "questionable/apocryphal" works that may have been composed after his ascension, but attributed to him.
Period
The second axis differentiates songs of Frances Sanjo's Early versus Late periods. His early music generally comprises sanitized versions of popular Allesander tavern songs of the time: these are songs he would have sung in his early days as a drunkard and criminal, which he later adapted to give an element of moral teaching. It is these songs he often sung to the local wildlife. While initially secular, these songs have since become popular in Frankish (and even Ajoran) churches, obscuring the boundary between secular and religious verse.
The Late period is typified by more original compositions. They range in theme from direct religious celebrations of beauty and Ajoran ideals to more political admonishments of greed, excess and pollution. It is these songs that are more difficult to attribute directly to Frances Sanjo: they may have been mutually composed by him and his congregants, or his name may have been used to give the songs more heroic legitimacy.
Songs
One famous example of an Early period song is Frances's adaptation of an old tavern song typically named Ela Escrina ("The Snake" in Old Allesander). In the original, a farmer finds a snake freezing to death, takes pity on it, takes it home and nurtures it back to health, only to be bitten by the venomous creature and die. The lesson of this original is that evil cannot be redeemed.
Of course, such a message is anathema to a god of redemption, and his version differs in its conclusion. In it, the snake emerges from her den beneath the farmhouse to visit her recent saviour. In doing so she frightens his drunken friends, who hurriedly stomp the poor animal to death. The song finishes with a verse of mourning by the farmer, who laments that perhaps it is not evil that is immutable, but the weak-minded need to see villainy where there is none.
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