Cockles and Mussels

Molly, the poor daughter of a fishmonger, makes her living selling cockles and mussels on the streets of late seventeenth-century Dublin. When her luck and faith eventually fail her, her misfortunes make history . . .

Trivia, anybody? It is believed that, rather than an ancient folk song, Molly Malone was composed quite deliberately and first published in 1883. The original edition did not list the author, leading to the assumption that there simply was no author, but in the version let out in 1884, it credited the piece as a ‘Comic Song’ by James Yorkston and arranged by Edmund Forman. After the allegedly Scottish song was naturalized into Ireland, there was generally no author published along with the music for reasons unknown to me.

Want any more information? go to homepage (dot) eircom (dot) net/ seanjmurphy / irhismys/ molly (dot) htm. Delete spaces and add punctuation in appropriate places, and voilà.

There will probably be several versions of this, based not only on my own ideas but the many legends and embroideries. In some, Molly is a Victorian innocent whose poverty gets her in the end. In others, she lives a torrid life (in most senses of the term), selling seafood by day and herself by night in late seventeenth-century Dublin. In my version--well, you’ll just have to see. :) --AGH! It’s an emoticon! Has the world gone mad? Are pigs enjoying the view from amongst the clouds? Is the devil ice-skating?

Yeah, sorry, couldn’t resist.

Mostly this was a writing exercise I set for myself; I wish some of them could be more stylized, but I wasn’t in one of those depressed/disjointed moods that lend themselves to that sort of writing. Which I guess is good.

But tomato, you say, can’t you ever finish anything before you start another project? To which I reply: yes, but where’s the fun in that?

Incidentally, one my cats is named Molly. Or, rather, Mollë, mollë meaning “apple” in Albanian. (I picked the name ‘cause it looked pretty.) It, however, got Americanized into Molly, even though the word is not pronounced at all like Molly. But anyway. Did you also know that molly used to be a synonym for ‘lady of the night’? Also, there is a character, an opium addict, whose name is Molly in Silas Marner . And my old neighbor’s dog was named Molly. And now this pointless paragraph (rather like a Pointless Albatross (1) is it not?) is over.

This should be updated fairly regularly; once every two to three weeks. Stories will vary in length, depending. This will just be as many different versions as I can think of, basically, and if any reviewers have suggestions, please feel free to leave ‘em!

Disclaimer: The song Molly Malone and all resulting legends do not belong to me unless specified otherwise.

(1) A Terry Pratchett thing, mentioned in The Last Hero . If you don’t know who Terry Pratchett is, you’re a) a hermit, or b) your tastes probably do not run to his type of book, so I wouldn’t worry about it.