Cockaigne or Cockayne () is a Mythical place in Middle Ages myth, an Imagination place of luxury and ease, comfort and pleasure, opposite to the harshness of medieval peasant life.
Cockaigne was a "medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labor and the daily struggle for meager food."
Etymology
While the first recorded uses of the word are the Latin
Cucaniensis and the Middle English
Cokaygne, one line of reasoning has the name tracing to
Middle French (pays de) cocaigne "(land of) plenty",
ultimately from a word for a small sweet cake sold to children at a fair. In
Ireland, it was mentioned in the
Kildare Poems, composed c. 1350. In
Italian language, the same place is called
Paese della Cuccagna; the Dutch equivalent is
Luilekkerland ("lazy, delicious land"), translated from the
Middle Dutch word
Cockaengen, and the German equivalent is
Schlaraffenland. In Spanish, an equivalent place is named
Jauja, after a rich mining region of the Andes, and
País de Cucaña ("fools' paradise") may also signify such a place. From Swedish dialect
lubber ("fat lazy fellow") comes
Lubberland,
[ Today's wwftd is..., at Worthless words for the day, by Michael A. Fischer.] popularized in the ballad
An Invitation to Lubberland.
In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London[ OED notes a first usage in 1824.] as the land of ("Cockney" from a "cock's egg", an implausible creature; see also basilisk), though the two are not linguistically connected otherwise. The composer Edward Elgar used the word "Cockaigne" for his symphonic poem and suite evoking the people of London, Cockaigne (In London Town), Op. 40 (1901).
The Dutch villages of Kockengen and Koekange may be named after Cockaigne, though this has been disputed.[Moerman, H. J., Nederlandse plaatsnamen: een overzicht (1956), Leiden: E. J. Brill, page 129] The surname Cockayne also derives from the mythical land, and was originally a nickname for an idle dreamer.[ The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, ed. by Patrick Hanks, Richard Coates, and Peter McClure, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), I, p. 534 s.v.; .]
The name of the drug cocaine is unrelated: it was named in 1860 by Albert Niemann from the plant coca (Quechua kúka) and the suffix used to form chemical terms.
Descriptions
Like
Atlantis and El Dorado, the land of Cockaigne was a
utopia. It was a fictional place where, in a parody of paradise, idleness and gluttony were the principal occupations. In
Specimens of Early English Poets (1790), George Ellis printed a 13th-century French poem called "The Land of Cockaigne" where "the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing".
According to Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (2003):
Traditions
A
Naples and
Southern Italy tradition, extended to
Italian diaspora communities and other Latin culture countries, is the
Greasy pole (Italian:
cuccagna; Spanish:
cucaña; Filipino
: palo sebo), a horizontal or vertical pole with a prize (like a
ham) at one end. The pole is then coated in grease or soap and planted during a festival. Then, daring people try to climb the slippery pole to get the prize. The crowd laughs at the often failed attempts to hold on to the pole.
Legacy
Place-names
-
The Dutch village of Kockengen in the province of Utrecht is likely to have been named after Cockaigne by the local clergy, who established farms and peat-cutting settlements in the area.
[Herman Pleij, ]
-
The Canadian town of Cocagne, New Brunswick, at the mouth of the Cocagne river, was named after Cockaigne.
-
The English village of Cockayne Hatley in Bedfordshire was named after the Cokayne family, who took possession of the land in 1417.
Literature
-
"Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis" ("I am the Abbot of Cockaigne") is one of the drinking songs ( Carmina potatoria) found in the 13th-century manuscript of Carmina Burana, better known for its inclusion in Carl Orff's secular cantata, Carmina Burana (1935-36).
-
"L'invitation au voyage", a prose-poem by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, found in his collection Paris Spleen (1869), makes reference to the "land of Cocaigne", there envisioned as a country in keeping with Baudelaire's poetic ideals, such as silence, decorum, indolence, and artifice. He describes it as "the East of the West, the China of Europe", as he describes it as being located to the North and as being possessed of qualities thought of as being essentially "Oriental" by the Europeans of the time.
-
The Land of Toys (or Pleasure Island) from The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) is said to be located in Cockaigne.
-
James Branch Cabell in his (1919), has the land of Cocaigne between the lands of sunrise and morning. ch XXIV. "Thus Jurgen abode for a little over two months in Cocaigne, and complied with the customs of that country. Nothing altered in Cocaigne: but in the world wherein Jurgen was reared, he knew, it would by this time be September, with the leaves flaring gloriously, and the birds flocking southward, and the hearts of Jurgen's fellows turning to not unpleasant regrets. But in Cocaigne there was no regret and no variability, but only an interminable flow of curious pleasures, illumined by the wandering star of Venus Mechanitis."
Jurgen: a Comedy of Justice
-
Clark Ashton Smith wrote a romantic prose poem titled "In Cocaigne" (1922).
-
“The Land of Cockaigne” is the first poem in the 2015 book The Emperor of Water Clocks by Yusef Komunyakaa, an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994.
Painting
-
"The Land of Cockaigne" was depicted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his painting Luilekkerland (1567).
-
Cockaigne, a 2003 painting by Vincent Desiderio.
Music
-
Cockaigne (In London Town) is a concert overture composed by Edward Elgar in 1901.
-
The folk song "The Big Rock Candy Mountains", first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928, depicts a hobo's idea of paradise along the lines of Cockaigne, with "cigarette trees" and hens that lay soft-boiled eggs.
-
The album Land of Cockayne (1981) by Soft Machine.
-
Edenbridge's song The Most Beautiful Place mentions "You are what I call Cockaign".
-
Jacques Brel's song Le Plat Pays mentions "Et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne" (and black steeples like cockaigne poles)
-
Carl Orff’s choral work Carmina Burana, a musical setting of anonymous mediæval ribald verse in Latin and Middle Low German, includes the song Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis or "I am the abbot of Cockaigne".
-
A song "The Land of Cockaigne" can be found on the 2017 album A Coat Worth Wearing by the Scots-born Sheffield-based musician Neil McSweeney.
Comics
-
Cockaigne is the home of Narda, the wife of Mandrake the Magician (created by Lee Falk).
-
Cockaigne is mentioned in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore, mainly in the form of written accounts given by Mina Harker and Fanny Hill
Film
-
Hans Trutz in the Land of Plenty, a 1917 German fantasy film by Paul Wegener.
-
Mischief in Wonderland, a 1957 German fantasy film starring Alexander Engel.
-
Pays de cocagne, a 1971 documentary film directed by Pierre Étaix.
Various
-
The Joy of Cooking (first edition 1931) uses the word "Cockaigne" to indicate that the recipe was a favorite of the authors' parents.
-
A ski resort in Cherry Creek, New York bore the name Cockaigne until its 2011 closure.
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Nick Bostrom discusses Cockaigne as an example of the simplest type of utopia, that of endless material abundance, in the philosophy book Deep Utopia.
See also
-
Arcadia (utopia)
-
Fiddler's Green
-
Cloud cuckoo land
Further reading
-
Luisa Del Giudice, "Mountains of Cheese and Rivers of Wine: Paesi di Cuccagna and other Gastronomic Utopias," in Imagined States: National Identity, Utopia, and Longing in Oral Cultures, ed. by Luisa Del Giudice and Gerald Porter, Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001: 11–63.
-
Hardstaff, Sarah. “Candytown and the Land of Cockaigne: Gastronomic Utopia in The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and Other Children’s Literature.” Marvels & tales 34.1 (2020): 39–52.
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Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life, trans. Diane Webb. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
External links
