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Jamie Bell : The Eagle (2011)

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reblog this for good luck

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forever haunted by hozier's face when he sings "put me back in it" (and by haunted i mean i'm clawing my eyes out)

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Writing is so silly I smash my fingers on a keyboard all day and then you read the words and I've transfered my silly thoughts and stories from my brain to your brain

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Daddy James in the battle vest is the James I initially fell in love with. 😍🥵 Look at his gray chest hair peeking, ahhh! 🔥🔥

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‼️ THIS IS NOT A DRILL ‼️

OFFICIAL UNREAL UNEARTH: UNENDING ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

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The thing about writing a novel....I can't post it on AO3! When I wrote fanfiction, I loved the community aspect of writing: the fevered inertia of writing a new chapter that felt like it was writing itself because part of what motivated me was having something new to share with my friends and followers. It made writing something to look forward to, while writing something no one knows about yet can be lonely and challenging.

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Heard a rumour y’all forgot how to act

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In exchange for Oscar Wilde to have his pictures taken by the popular photographer Napolean Sarony, he actually signed a contract in 1882, ‘agreeing that he would sit for no other formal portraits, or for any other photographer, while he was in America’.

— David M. Friedman, Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity

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Despite my love of the tumblr-based lore of Hozier as, variously, a fae creature, a bog body, or a Celtic god incarnate in human form, let me make my case that he is, instead, the mortal beloved of a fairy in the chivalric romance tradition of Thomas the Rhymer.

Sir Thomas de Ercildoun, known as Thomas the Rhymer, was a 13th Century Scottish laird and prophet. He shows up in various forms of a ballad in which he, while playing his lute in the woods, is approached by a beautiful woman who turns out to the the Fairy Queen. She dares Thomas to kiss her. He takes the dare–she is, after all, beautiful–and thus seals his fate to serve her in fairyland for seven years. After his term of entertaining the fairies with music and poetry is done, Thomas returns to the mortal realm with the gift of prophecy bestowed upon him, as well as the inability to tell a lie.

Three connections are immediately apparent. Thomas and Hozier are both musicians who play stringed instruments. Hozier is frequently associated with woods, hence the moniker “forest daddy.” And in tumblr lore, Hozier is known for long absences from the public eye, interpreted as his being abducted into the “fae realm.” But what of lyrical evidence?

Several connections can be made between the lyrics of “Work Song” and the Thomas the Rhymer ballad. 

1.The singer is “found” by his lady. This motif also appears in “Jackie and Wilson”: “She blows out of nowhere, a roman candle of the wild.”

2. Hozier sings, “There’s nothing sweeter than my baby / I’d never want once from the cherry tree,” while in the ballad the Fairy Queen admonishes Thomas not to eat fruit from a tree found in a fairy garden, lest he be cursed; she then provides him with sustenance, herself. 

3. “In the low lamp light I was free / Heaven and hell were words to me” evokes the part of the ballad in which the Fairy Queen shows Thomas the respective paths to Heaven and Hell, then shows him a third path, the one to fairyland, which renders both previous paths irrelevant.

4. Finally, the recurring references to life after death in the chorus–”No grave can hold my body down / I’ll crawl home to her”–mirror Thomas’s eventual fate. It is said that instead of dying a mortal death, he was summoned back to fairyland to abide with his queen forevermore.

Though Hozier has cited James Joyce as an influence on “Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene,” one might also read into its lyrics references to a fairy woman. One folkloric explanation of the origins of fairies is that they are fallen angels, while the vampiric affections of the Angel of Small Death, who collects the (metaphorical) hearts of her devotees, bears similarities to the 19th Century Irish story of the leanan sidhe. These female fairies provided their mortal lovers with inspiration, though they drained their energies and often killed them in the end. Hozier seems to reference this when he characterizes the Angel’s intoxicating attentions as “somewhere between love and abuse,” and when he, at the end of the song, “wonder[s] if better now, having survived.”

And of course, anyone familiar with the dangerous and capricious dispositions of fairies in folklore can see how, if Hozier loves one of the Good Neighbors, he would be able to confidently assert, in “NFWMB,” “Nothing fucks with my baby. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Thanks to anyone who reads this far for indulging me. Obviously this is all intended in good fun, and Andrew is (probably) not enthralled by a fairy. In writing this I consulted The Enchanted World: Fairies and Elves, published by Time-Life Books; At the Bottom of the Garden by Diane Purkiss; and of course Wikipedia for quick reference of things I had read years ago from other sources. Also, sorry if anyone else has been making this argument and I missed it; it’s been turning around in my head for a couple of years, and I’m only now organizing my thoughts.

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𝐀𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞

Gold-coloured, golden-hued.

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"i wish he'd released July in July". No but you dont get it.

And July is still coming

Just knowing that's getting me through

It's literally about holding onto the promise of the passage of time. Life might suck right now but July will return. July was written during the pandemic as he was struggling with the uncertainty and isolation of it all and going through a breakup as well. It's literallly about him telling himself "there's still beauty and one day I will return to it".

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Sometimes I'm sure that I don't ask for help. I cry, wail, beat my head against a wall for it.

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Butchered Tongue being on the Unreal Unearth album is so quintessentially Hozier to me cause he was like yes I’m going through a terrible breakup yes it has changed me in irreversible ways and YES I’m still pissed off and disgusted by colonialism if you were wondering btw