"The word mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright, who wrote a
Harper's column about the phenomenon in 1954. When she recounted
hearing a Scottish folk ballad "The Bonnie Earl o'Moray", she heard
the lyric
Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
Wright powerfully identified with Lady Mondegreen, the faithful friend
of the Bonnie Earl. Lady Mondegreen died for her liege with dignity
and tragedy. How romantic!
It was some years later that Sylvia Wright learned that the last two
lines of the stanza were really:
Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Amurray,
And laid him on the green.
Sylvia Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her
heroine that she memorialised her with a neologism."
'When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's
Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
I saw it all clearly. The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow
beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing
with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her lung,
dark brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark green dress
embroidered with light green leaves outlined in gold. It had a low
neck trimmed with white lace (Irish lace, I think). An arrow had
pierced her throat: from it blood trickled down over the
lace. Sunlight coming through the leaves .rnade dappled shadows on her
cheeks and her closed eyelids. She was holding the Earl's hand.
It made me cry.
The poem went on to tell about the Earl Amurray. He was a braw gallant
who did various things, including playing at the bar, which, I
surmised, was something lawyers did in their unserious moments (I grew
up during prohibition, though I was against prohibition and for
Governor Smith). The poem also said that he was the queen's love, and
that long would his lady look o'er the castle doun before she saw the
Earl Amurray come sounding through the town. Nothing more was said
about Lady Mondegreen.
But I didn't feel it was necessary. Everything had been said about
Lady Mondegreen. The other ladies may have pretended they loved the
Earl, but where were they?
The queen was probably sitting in Dunfermline toun drinking the blood
red wine along with the king (he was in "Sir Patrick Spens"), As for
the Earl's wife, hiding in the castle in perfect safety and pretending
to worry about him, it was clear she only married him so she could be
Lady Amurray. She was such a sissy she probably didn't even look doun
very hard--she was scared she'd fall through the crenelations of the
battlements.
As a matter of fact, she looked like a thin wispy girl I once socked
in the stomach while I was guarding her in basketball because she kept
pushing me over the line when the gym teacher couldn't see her and who
was such a sissy that she fainted dead away so that everybody said I
should learn to be a lady when really she was cheating--but I won't go
into that.
Lady Mondegreen loved the Earl truly, and she was very brave. When she
heard that Huntly (the villain) was coming after him, she ran right
out of her castle and into the forest to be with him without even
stopping to change from her best dress.
By now, several of you more alert readers are jumping up and down in
your impatience to interrupt and point out that, according to the
poem, after they killed the Earl of Murray, they laid him on the
green. I know about this, but I won't give in to it. Leaving him to
die all alone without even anyone to hold his hand--I won't have it.'