Maiden in Brazil

Dear students, I’m almost gone to Curitiba. There’s no way I am going to miss Iron Maiden playing the songs I used to rock with, when I was a teen myself and couldn’t afford air tickets nor going to concert venues .

Maybe studying English isn’t as fun as Maiden concerts, but we can learn a lot from their symbols and lyrics. Bruce himself has an historian’s degree under his belt and this is reflected in most of his songs which talk about History and Literature, often mixing both.

Here Eddie dresses as an English Redcoat in the cell phone snapshot taken while the group played “the trooper”, this song is a direct reference to the poem The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson, and readers of the first with a working knowledge of British History will firmly place the song in the context of the War of Crimea. The song differs from the poem though, in that it is brutally focused on the sheer waste of British lives in the Battle of Balaclava, whereas the poem merely hints at that in far greater elegance.

The Redcoat became intimately associated with the British Empire to the point of being somewhat akin to a national symbol. Not to be liked by all, however. If Lord Tennyson praises the British soldiery with

“When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made!”

The American colonials held the “King’s men” in much more contempt and defiance, as their folk lore attests:

“Why come ye hither, Redcoats, your mind what madness fills? In our valleys there is danger, and there’s danger on our hills (…) soon you’ll know the ringing of the rifle from the tree.”

See you next week!