The Ginger Concordance

The Ginger Concordance is a collection of Sea shanties, noted for being the only known such collection to predate the Wesmodian Reformation. As such it is of interest to thaumatologists studying the pre-Wesmodian shipboard cult of Zargyod.

Contents

The Ginger Concordance records 33 sea shanties collected by a scribe who neglected to claim authorship of the collection. They recorded only the lyrics to these songs, being evidently uninterested in matters of melody or instrumentation. They also did not give the songs titles, instead grouping them into five categories, evidently by subject matter. Within these categories the songs are numbered, and the done thing among scholars in the field is to refer to these songs by these numbers - thus a reference might be to "the Concordance's fourth work song" or "The third Ginger hymn to Zargyod."
The categories are as follows:
* Work songs, the largest category, consisting of thirteen songs whose lyrics demonstrate a preoccupation with regular rhythm, likely used to coordinate collaborative labour aboard ships.
* A collection of eight songs - widely referred to as the "sailor's songs" meditating on shipboard life. These lyrics are noted for their even, regular rhythms, though to a rather lesser extent than the work songs.
* Six hymns to Zargyod. These songs are substantially shorter than those in the other categories and vary their rhythms and meters to an extent that is, in this context, quite striking.
* A cycle of four poems meditating on the consequences of the four seasons on maritime travel and commerce, generally referred to as the "Wind songs" because all four contain prominent references to the relevant season's characteristic winds.
* Two long narrative poems relating the career and adventures of Tomro the Crow, a folk hero among the Sailors on the Sea of Jars, sections of which are reiterated in a variety of later shanties. These poems exhibit few of the characteristic features of shanties and their inclusion in the concordance suggests that the book was primarily intended as a compilation of maritime folklore rather than specifically of the shanty form.
The concordance is written in the Chogyan dialect. Its overall length is slightly more or less than eighty pages, depending on the style of the scribe manufacturing the copy in question.

Commentary

The precise year in which The Ginger Concordance was written is not known, but it is clearly from a time when Chogyos Customhouse could afford to set one of its functionaries to researching and recording maritime folklore. Scholars generally place it at some point in the latter days of the Chogyan Hegemony - that is, the late second or early first century BWR.
As such the Concordance is indubitably pre-Wesmodian, and thus insulated against any accusation that its religious and magical content is any sort of degraded or corrupted post-Wesmodian memory. The poems in this book are the work of sailors and overseers for whom the worship of Zargyod was an earnest part of their daily life. More specifically the Concordance is open to interpretation as an incomplete picture of the liturgies of the cult of Zargyod as it was practised aboard ships. Thaumatologists place great significance on the oral and creative cultures of sailors, which they see as containing numerous post-Wesmodian echoes of the practice of this cult. Those pursuing research in this area therefore regard the Concordance as an invaluable pre-Wesmodian baseline against which to compare the results of their fieldwork. The shipboard cult is thought to have arisen due to Zargyod's dual role as a god of fortune and the sea, and by replicating its practices in certain precise conditions it may be possible to magically manipulate the laws of probability. 

Availability

The Ginger Concordance has been disseminated fairly widely and it is not terribly difficult to find copies. This being said, it is generally agreed that only those copies that preserve the original Chogyan dialect are really useful as research tools. Many modern editions are translated into other, modern languages, which suffice for casual reference, but the whole point of thaumatological research on sea shanties is to develop a precise picture of their original liturgical practice, a pursuit to which translation is not conducive.