The Single One the Vikings Brought (Tarse)

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
In the year 865, when the Great Heathen Army landed at East Anglia,
Pemba here, turning the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
found this word they carried across the North Sea.
Tarse, from Old Norse þars, sharp as a fjord wind.
It meant the single one, the male member, spoken in longhouses
where the fire spat embers onto dirt floors.
In Northumbria, around 900, a settler named Harald,
not recorded but imagined, barked it over a drinking horn
filled with mead from fermented honey of lindens.
The horn, curved like a ram's, passed hand to hand,
while the word lodged in English soil.

[Chorus]
Tarse, lost by 1700, when Pepys was sealing his diaries
and the coffee houses of London favored Latin whispers.
But here, in this re-imagining, I pull it from the OED's dusty entry,
second edition, 1989, Oxford's vault.
Tarse, the Vikings brought you on their dragon-prowed ships,
sails striped red and white, oars dipping into the gray waves.
You vanished like the Danelaw's borders, but I speak you now.

[Verse 2]
Picture the scriptorium at Lindisfarne, 1300,
before the raids but after, a monk named Brother Edmund
inking it onto vellum from a calf slaughtered that Michaelmas.
The quill scratches, the word tarse in a recipe for virility,
ground stag antler mixed with wine from Bordeaux casks.
Temperature dropping to 5 degrees Celsius in the stone cell,
smell of tallow and ink, the sea pounding outside.
It meant the thing directly, no shame in the script,
but by 1700, polite society buried it under euphemisms.

[Bridge]
Ah, the gaps: the women in those halls, their voices unscribed,
whispering tarse in jest or anger, lost to male quills.
The peasants in York, 950, during solstice feasts,
their laughter guttural, but names erased.
A quiet joke: if tarse returned today, would it sail back
on a longship or a dictionary's footnote?

[Verse 3]
Re-imagined here, in our coral-fringed library, 2017,
I, Pemba, address you, old word, like an exiled friend.
You traveled on longships, 30 meters of oak and iron rivets,
from Oslofjord to the Humber estuary.
The sensory anchor: burning pine, musk of bodies,
rough bench under hands, as tarse cuts the din.

[Outro]
Tarse, the single one, brought by Vikings, lost, found again.