Sea Shanty

Shanties are the songs sung by sailors across the Known World. While they vary by region, there are a number of accepted key traits as to what qualifies a folk song to become a shanty. Firstly, a shanty is maritime in nature, often dealing with lyrics related to the sea, sailing, and sailing life. Secondly, they are often used by sailors to motivate them when carrying out arduous work onboard a vessel. Thirdly, they typically have an 'invocative' quality capable of resonating with the underlying forces of the world to alter the very fabric of the universe. 
In most cases, shanties are employed by sailors to provide them with unusual endurance, or to grant them proto-precognitive abilities which enable them to navigate foul weathers. However, in some cases, as in the case of the famous Great Sea Shanty incident, shanties may enable ships to cut their way through intense storms and radically change how the universe operates.
In this way, sea shanties share some similarities to traditional prayers or invocations designed to directly address a god, culture hero or the spirity of an ancestor, unifying and channelling the psychospiritual resonance of a crew in certain ways. However, while such devices typically include specific references to the entity being addressed, shanty lyrics more typically tend to be more interested in the lived experiences of sailors, including:
* The desire to reach a safe harbour
* The rewards of cameraderie, drinking, seeing loved ones, returning to one's home town
* The fear of punishment, keel-hauling, the lash, shortages, transportation abroad
* The memorialising of maritime incidents, such as wrecks, heroic rescues, combat with sea creatures
* Features of the immediate environment - waves, fish, wind - typically either in comparison or rivalry to the crew.
While sailors are typically affiliated with the green god, Suradan in traditional Centreland religious beliefs, and while some shanties may implicitly be understood to be an invocation of the god, very few shanty lyrics are known to mention the god's name directly. Indeed, in Pemblish and Rubellite maritime folklore, direct mention of the Suradan's name while onboard a vessel is believed to be bad luck. This may contribute to Suradan's status as the 'humble god', and may also contribute to the potential power of shanties, which tend to directly invoke 'green' elements as a substitute for the god's name.
== Great Shanties ==
Sometime after 500BGE, the development of new shanty techniques by the pirate clans of the Inland Sea....
Category:Music
Category:Folklore
Category:Science
Category:Pirates