Cockaigne


Cockaigne or Cockayne is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, it is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied, sexual liberty is open, and food is plentiful. Writing about Cockaigne was commonplace in Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth.

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 cocaigne " plenty", ultimately adapted or derived 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, the same place is called Paese della Cuccagna; the Flemish-Belgian equivalent is Luilekkerland, translated from the Middle-Belgian 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 may also signify such a place. From Swedish dialect lubber comes Lubberland, popularized in the ballad An Invitation to Lubberland.
In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London as the land of Cockneys, though the two are not linguistically connected otherwise. The composer Edward Elgar used the word "Cockaigne" for his concert overture and suite evoking the people of London, Cockaigne , Op. 40.
The Dutch villages of Kockengen and Koekange may be named after Cockaigne, though this has been disputed. The surname Cockayne also derives from the mythical land, and was originally a nickname for an idle dreamer.

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, 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 :
Cockaigne was a "medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labor and the daily struggle for meager food."
The Brothers Grimm collected and retold the fairy tale in Das Märchen vom Schlaraffenland.

Traditions

A Neapolitan tradition, extended to other Latin-culture countries, is the Cockaigne pole, a horizontal or vertical pole with a prize at one end. The pole is covered with 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

Literature

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."

Painting