We’ve already met Celtic Woman — and their friend the German singer formerly known as Oonagh. To avoid retreading familiar ground here, let me just say that it shouldn’t exactly be a surprise that a group called Celtic Woman sings a lot of Irish songs…
Which includes the catchiest song about seaweed you will ever hear.
I’ve mentioned that the second Endless Ocean game featured a soundtrack by Celtic Woman. Most of the dive sites had songs that where at least kinda-sorta thematically linked to what was going on at that point in the story. However, the clear winner is when Duláman starts playing when you first reach the Cortica River. When you first arrive at a dive site in a river full of weeds and mangroves, the game starts blasting a jaunty Irish folk song about seaweed at you.
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
“Dúlaman” [the word seems to have an accent on both the u and the second a, but the song title seems to have an accent only on the u] is the Irish word for a kind of seaweed, specifically, the genius Pelvetia, common name channelled wrack — which Wikipedia categorises as an algae. Now, I’m not an expert, but my brief read of the situation is that all seaweed is algae, but not all algae is seaweed.
The important thing is that the seaweed in question has historically been harvested as both food and fuel. The song is about a girl going out to gather seaweed.
Except I think the seaweed is a metaphor:
“There is a yellow gold head on the Gaelic seaweed
There are two blunt ears on the stately seaweed
The Irish seaweed has beautiful black shoes
The stately seaweed has a beret and trousers.”Lyrics via Musixmatch.
Now, my Gaelic isn’t great — which is to say, I don’t know any Gaelic beyond a handful of words…
But, I’ve never known seaweed to wear berets, so what I think is happening is that at least one of those seaweeds is a guy trying to marry the girl. Now, at one point, the Irish seaweed basically asks “What are you doing with my daughter?”, so I think that one’s one of the girl’s parents.
I did find a post citing an earlier forum post explaining that the stately seaweed is the guy trying to marry the girl and the Irish seaweed is her dad giving him a hard time. I can’t confirm that authoritatively, but it jives with what I’ve been able to glean from the lyrics.
As to why the specific metaphor is seaweed, I got nothing. Maybe because the girl lives near the coast?
Well, whatever is actually going on here, it’s a catchy song:
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