Seven Virgins, The (The Leaves of Life)

DESCRIPTION: The singer, (Thomas), meets seven virgins, including the Virgin Mary. They are seeking Jesus, who is being crucified. Mary asks Jesus why he must suffer so; Jesus tells her it is for the sake of humanity. He dies. The singer commends God's charity
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1847 (A Good Christmas Box, according to Dearmer/VaughnWilliams/Shaw-OxfordBookOfCarols)
KEYWORDS: Bible Jesus religious dialog
FOUND IN: Britain(England(West))
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Leather-FolkLoreOfHerefordshire, pp. 187-188, "The Seven Virgin, or, Under the Leaves" (1 text plus an excerpt, 1 tune)
Hamer-GarnersGay, p. 57, "Under the Leaves (The Seven Virgins)" (1 text, 1 tune)
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, pp. 145-146, "All Under the Leaves, and the Leaves of Life" (1 text)
Quiller-Couch-OxfordBookOfBallads 111, "The Seven Virgins" (1 text)
Dearmer/VaughnWilliams/Shaw-OxfordBookOfCarols 43, "The Seven Virgins" (1 text, 1 tune)
Grigson-PenguinBookOfBallads 4, "The Seven Virgins" (1 text)
DT, SVNVIRG SVNVRG2
ADDITIONAL: Walter de la Mare, _Come Hither_, revised edition, 1928; #479, "The Seven Virgins" (1 text)
Bob Stewart, _Where Is Saint George? Pagan Imagery in English Folksong_, revised edition, Blandford, 1988, pp. 123-124, "The Leaves of Life" (1 text)
Roud #127
RECORDINGS:
May Bradley, "Under the Leaves" (on Voice11)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Tam Lin" [Child 39] (tune)
NOTES [1000 words]: The idea behind this song is very old, although the song may be relatively recent in the form we know it. Greene, p. 24 n. 4, observes, "Only here and there can as much as a whole line of modern traditional song be recognized as actually surviving from a medieval carol. One striking example is the second line of the couplet burden of [Greene, The Early English Carols] No. 193, a lament of Mary over her crucified son:
For to se my dere Son dye, and sones have I no mo.
Greene also notes a similar Manx text from 1924.
This line of the song is based on the legend that Mary was a perpetual version; Matthew 13:55 lists Jesus as having brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas; Mark 6:3 lists brothers James, Joses, Judas, and Simon. (At least, these are the common readings; in Matthew, the manuscripts א D M 579 have "John," B C N Θ 1 33 have "Joseph"; K L W and most later manuscripts have "Joses." In Mark, the best manuscripts, B D L Δ Θ 33 565 579 have Ιωσητος, Iosetos=Joset; most later manuscripts, including A C M N W, read Ιωση, Iose=Jose(s); א reads "Joseph.") There are repeated references in Acts to James, the Lord's brother. InterpretersDict, volume II, p. 791, states, "The relationship between James and Jesus has been much discussed.... NT and early Christian writers refer to James as a 'brother' of Jesus, and the natural interpretation of the language of that period is the literal one, that James was a son of Joseph and Mary, younger than Jesus. Though this view was rejected by most of the ancient church, it is probably correct. Belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary led to the development of the view that Jesus and James were foster brothers," with James being the son of Joseph by a previous marriage.
The details in this song are generally from the Gospel of John. Only in John is Mary explicitly present at the cross, and John is the only gospel in which Thomas has a speaking role (though he was popular in the Apocryphal Gospels). Jesus's last words ("sweet mother, now I die," or similar) are perhaps closer to the fourth gospel ("it has been finished/completed/perfected," 19:30) than any of the other gospels.
In addition, Jesus's instruction to his mother to take John as her son is found only in the fourth gospel (John 19:26-27, though in fact the disciple involved is not named there; in fact, John is not even mentioned in the fourth gospel, though he is widely believed to be the "beloved disciple" referred to in chapter 19; Brown1, pp. xciii-cii).
One might note that there was a legend, based on a complicated analysis of the names of the women at the foot of the cross in the various gospels, that John and his brother James were Mary's nephews and Jesus's first cousins (Brown2, pp. 904-907; InterpretersDict, Volume II, p. 791, etc).
Some versions contain a line, "Oh the rose, the gentle rose, The fennel it grows so strong...." Binney, p. 107, reports that "The seeds of fennel, dill, and caraway... all contain natural oils that help soothe spasms in the intestine.... Bitter fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), whose seeds taste rather like celery, was considered sacred by the Greeks. They believes that the TItan Prometheus had hidden fire in the hollow stalks of the fennel plant in order to steal it from the gods and bring it to humans."
The idea that fennel was used for upset stomachs seems to be quite old. The "B" version of Langland's Piers Plowman, Passus V, line 306, reads "A ferthyngworth of fennelseed for fastynge dayes" (so Langland/Schmidt, p. 78; in Langland/Bennett, p. 46, it's line 313 but the text is the same except for orthography. In Langland/Donaldson, p. 49, it is modernized as "A farthingworth of fennel seed for fasting days" with a note that it was considered good for someone drinking on an empty stomach. The note on p. 172 of Langland/Bennett quotes a 1629 authority who said it was "of much use to expel wind"; that on p. 427 of Langland/Schmidt tentatively suggests that it could be chewed on a fasting day without breaking the rule against eating. The reading goes back to the "A" version of the poem (it's Passus V, line 155, on p. 103 of Langland/Knott/Fowler, but they offer no explanation).
On the other hand, Ault, pp. 69-73, quotes a piece from 1584, "A Nosegay Always Sweet, for Lovers to Send for Tokens of Loave at New Year's Tide, Or for Fairings," which includes a list of flowers and their symbols, e.g. "Lavender is for lovers true..."; "Rosemary is for remembrance..."; "Sage is for sustenance...." The fennel portion has "Fennel is for flatterers...."
None of this seems very relevant, but it certainly shows that fennel was well-known as an herb from an early time.
More interesting, in light of the notion of Mary's perpetual virginity, is the fact that silphium, a member of the fennel family, was reputed to be a workable form of birth control (Gray/Garcia, p. 227. It may even have been true -- we can't tell, because silphium was harvested to extinction).
The statement that Jesus was crucified on a yew tree is also interesting. The Gospels do not state the nature of the tree on which Jesus was crucified. Yew trees grow in parts of the Middle East, but they are never mentioned in the Bible. But yew trees came to be regarded as a symbol of the transcendence of death: "Evergreen tree that is widely associated with immortality and life after death, hence its presence in countless churchyards in the Western world and its consequent association with death itself" (Pickering, p. 322). On the other hand, Jones-Larousse, p. 465, says it was planted by churchyards to keep witches and demons away and keep them from animating the corpses. Which gives another twist on the idea of Jesus being crucified on a yew tree: He returned to life despite the yew!
Another possibly origin for the number seven is that there were considered to be seven woes of the Virgin Mary, to match her seven joys; these were mentioned in the Latin hymn "Summae, Deus, clementiae, Septem Dolores Virginia." - RBW
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