Sea shanties

The Eleven Cities surrounding the Sea of Jars are a maritime society substantially dependent on sea trade, and therefore traffic on the high seas. As such Sailors on the Sea of Jars are a recognisable social cohort, and their shipboard culture and traditions have permeated much of general society. One of the most prevalent examples of this influence is that sea shanties are a well-established part of the oral culture of the cities.

Authorship and original context

Very few sea shanties have known authors. They emerge organically, at sea as a utilitarian aid to the collaborative labour of running a ship. Many tasks aboard ship - weighing anchor, furling or unfurling sails, hauling-in of fishing nets - requires the co-ordination of actions by multiple strong backs. The pace of such labour was set either by calls from overseers or the playing of musical instruments (originally drums, though pipes became far more common as took up less space on deck). The notion of putting lyrics to tunes, or replacing rhythmical calls with narrative lyrics, appears to have arisen fairly quickly after sailors began plying the Sea of Jars on vessels large enough to necessitate collective labour. What sea shanties represent, therefore, is a harnessing of a utilitarian necessity for creative purposes.
The result of this is a large number of minor instrumental variations on familiar tunes and different lyrics set to the same melodies as the oral tradition has developed. A non-sailor who does not travel may spend their entire lives associating a particular tune with a particular, beloved set of lyrics, blissfully unaware that what they have grown up with is only the local regional variation of a living tradition that may include numerous variations in other cities or on the high seas. Lyrics recalling a naval victory (real or imagined) over Chogyos in Pholyos might be set to the same tune as a bawdy tale of a girl who went to sea in Andymalon.

Thaumatological significance

As implied above, the subject matter of shanties tends towards the sea and travel thereupon. Typical songs involve good-natured complaints about shipboard life, the romanticisation thereof, or fanciful stories involving the sea. This last category is particularly interesting to thaumatologists in that many shanties make passing or concerted references to the god Zargyod and his shipboard cult, a poorly-attested but apparently pervasive feature of pre-Wesmodian maritime culture. It is likely that at least some of these compositions had, either in their original intent or as a result of gradual re-purposing, some significance to this cult. This makes them of interest to folklorists studying Zargyod as a god of the sea and thaumatologists who hold that the rites and liturgies associated with him might be used to manipulate the laws of probability. It is speculated that the replication of the essential features of sea shanties in precisely the right circumstances could produce magical effects. Because of the 'kelp-roots' nature of shanty composition, furthermore, the tradition all but begs to be experimented with. Practical thaumaturges interested in Zargyod and his apocrypha therefore spend a good amount of time studying and conjuring with shanties.

Cataloguing and systemisation

The study of sea shanties is necessarily dependent on purity of material, a complicated issue given the constant malleability of the tradition. Shanties exist in a constant state of flux, and it is not always easy to determine whether the shanty one is working with is the genuine article. This is compounded by the absorption of many shanties into the broader oral culture of the Eleven Cities, which has seen melodies gradually mutated and corrupted as the songs become further and further removed from their original maritime context. A related problem is the ongoing development of the shanty tradition in the post-Wesmodian era. And as the need for collective labour on ships is in no danger of abating, shanties continue to be written and recited aboard ships on which Zargyod is nothing more than a recurring character in a series of (often semi-comic) secular stories. This has naturally led to a decline (though not eradication) of his popularity as a subject. The question of whether this damages the possible thaumaturgical potency of post-Wesmodian shanties is an interesting one. Some scholars hold that the newer entries in the tradition are of value because they have almost by necessity evolved from pre-Wesmodian models, and that the essential common features of the two parts of the tradition are the crux of what should be studied. Others argue that post-Wesmodian shanties are devoid of magical significance and strive to establish pure antique models.
Fieldwork to gather material for this study is difficult and time-consuming, so much so as to preclude any given researcher from time to actual study what they might discover in their course of such endeavours. As such most scholars work from one of the four currently extant published catalogues of shanties. All four of these bodies of work catalogue their contents on different principles reflecting the preferences (and biases) of their author, though scholars in the field claim the resulting heterogeneity as a virtue, asserting that it provides a framework for analysing different shanties and determining the historical, and potentially magical, importance of their constituent features.
The four existing catalogues are:
* The Ginger Concordance is unique among the existing catalogues of shanties in that it dates from the pre-Wesmodian era. Compiled by a functionary of Chogyos Customhouse (who neglected to identify himself) in the days when that institution was still a temple of Zargyod, the collection is also by far the smallest of the four, listing only 33 songs. Given its pre-Wesmodian provenance, however, it remains an esteemed research resource for those working in the field.
* Songs of the Reverent Pirates was compiled by Pholyan thaumatologist Stanph Hymagyod and published in 180 AWR. The book is controversial for Hymagyod's repeated assertions of the existence of "Reverent pirates," a social phenomenon now widely dismissed, but scholars have observed that many of the 139 shanties collected therein can be demonstrably linked to others in the Ginger Concordance and subsequent collections. Though Hymagyod's fieldwork and conclusions are both questionable, therefore, his book remains a powerful research tool.
* Myras's Archive is a collection of shanties and sea folklore amassed by Elapalozian thaumatologist Qaryas Myras. The foremost contemporary researcher into the related area of Sailor's dances, Myras has also amassed a large corpus of shanties (exactly how many is an interesting matter of definition) and allows access to it in exchange for a modest fee and an undertaking that her contributions to any future published work will be acknowledged. She also interviews prospective visitors ahead of time and has been known to refuse access to those she regards as time-wasters. 
* Similarly, the Moronyad Archive has been collected by Ezynon Moronyad. Moronyad's collection of sea shanties is widely applauded as the largest assemblage ever assembled, and like Myras he is happy to make it available to those whose motives he is satisfied are pure, especially if they have something to contribute. Such endorsement can be swiftly withdrawn, however, if he comes to suspect that the visitor might ever have had anything to do with Myras, a researcher against whom he nurses a private and mysterious but apparently very bitter grudge.