Lady Mondegreen – small god of mis-heard lyrics

[image description: Medieval portrait of a black-haired woman in green robes with gold embroidery and a red wax seal at her breast stands with her hands clasped. Behind her, a blotter-green field calligraphed with ancient gold words too faint and jumbled to be understood, save for the number 256. Text reads, “Lady Mondegreen small god of mis-heard lyrics”]

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Oh, she’s a tricky one, that Lady Mondegreen.

She’ll tell you she’s a tuxedo.  She’ll tell you there’s a bathroom on the right.  She’ll burn the trees off every lawn, and she knows the rumor in the night.  She changes the meaning—she’s not the god of eggcorns, after all—but she doesn’t do it maliciously, and she was born within her own domain.

For once there was a man, the bonny Earl of Moray, and another believed that he conspired against the king.  To prove himself, that other conspired against the earl, until one day he killed him, ran him through and laid him on the green.  And as a king is the land, he bled into the soil, until it welcomed him home, until it loved him like a lady.

Until a girl named Sylvia Wright heard that they had slain the Earl of Moray, and the Lady Mondegreen.  She carried the lady in her heart her whole life, refusing to hear talk of other lyrics, of less romantic ends, and she spoke of her often, she spread her gospel until all misheard lyrics whose meanings changed became the domain of the Lady Mondegreen.  Her rule stretches further than the earl’s does, in this modern world; she is brighter, and better remembered.

She may not always be understood, but she is always bright, and beautiful, and beloved.  She’s very old, but her current form is very new, spoke for less than a hundred years.

Long may she rain, and wrong may she reign.