Beads on a necklace, memory-amber
Call them Northern Songlines.
Some remember by books, but for us the Land itself bears memory. All landscapes are mythic, at least potentially.
I've traveled Route 61 south along the Mississippi to the pagan land-sanctuaries of the Driftless Area for so many decades now that it has become, for me, a pilgrimage-route.
So I've re-cast the journey along the lines of the list of place-names in the Táin that recounts the way taken by Medb's army to fateful Cúailnge.
Each place a bead on a necklace, memory-amber.
Journey to the Driftless
This was their route, east, south and east again from Minneapolis on the Mississippi, Father of Waters:
eastward through Pig's Eye of the Sow, called St. Paul,
southward through Newport of the Red Rock,
through Hastings,
through Red Wing of the Clays, under Barn Bluff,
through Lake City on Pepin, where the water-horse swims,
through Wabasha,
past Trempeleau, Rattlesnake Island, where the Horned came down from Heaven,