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Mythical land of luxury From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cockaigne or Cockayne (/kɒˈkeɪn/) is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of luxury and ease, comfort and pleasure, opposite to the harshness of medieval peasant life.[1] In poems like The Land of Cockaigne, it is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful (skies that rain cheese). Cockaigne appeared frequently in Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at scarcity and Christian asceticism.
Cockaigne was a "medieval peasant’s dream, offering relief from backbreaking labor and the daily struggle for meager food."[2]
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",[3] 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, 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,[4] popularized in the ballad An Invitation to Lubberland.
In the 1820s, the name Cockaigne came to be applied jocularly to London[5] as the land of Cockneys ("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 concert overture 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.[6] The surname Cockayne also derives from the mythical land, and was originally a nickname for an idle dreamer.[7][8]
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 -ine used to form chemical terms.[9]
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".[10]
According to Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life (2003):
roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one's mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one's feet. The weather is always mild, the wine flows freely, sex is readily available, and all people enjoy eternal youth.[11]
A Neapolitan and Southern Italian tradition, extended to Southern Italian diaspora communities and other Latin culture countries, is the Cockaigne pole (Italian: cuccagna; Spanish: cucaña), a horizontal or vertical pole with a prize (like a ham) 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.
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