Loreena McKennitt: Difference between revisions

* [[Christmas Songs]]: ''To Drive the Cold Winter Away'', ''A Winter Garden'', and ''A Midwinter Night's Dream'' all have a number of such songs. Three of the five on ''A Winter Garden'' are traditional carols ("Coventry Carol", "Good King Wenceslas", and "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"), but the entirety of ''A Midwinter Night's Dream'' is Christmas music, not merely winter-themed.

* [[Composite Character]]: Although nothing in the song suggests it, the music video for "Bonny Swans" strongly implies that the harper who brings the youngest daughter as a harp to her father's hall is also the true love for whom her oldest sister drowned her; the actor and costume for both is the same. This does add a rather powerful resonance to the song's denouement, however.

* [[The Crusades]]: The Scottish knight in ''English Lady and the Knight'' took the "cross divine" and died "in Palestine".

* [[Everything's Louder with Bagpipes]]: Justified, since she ''is'' a Celtic-inspired musician.

* [[Literary Allusion Title]]: Aside from the songs which are directly taken from poems that reference literature ("The Lady of Shalott", "Cymbeline", "The Dark Night of the Soul", "The Two Trees", "Prospero's Speech", "The Highwayman", "The English Ladye and the Knight", and more), two songs also have more oblique allusions: "Dante's Prayer" references the fact she was reading the ''Inferno'' while riding a train through Siberia and contrasted the text with what she saw out the window; and "Penelope's Song" is written as a lament from [[The Odyssey|Odysseus's]] wife waiting for him to come home.

* [[Merchant City]]: Marakesh(Marakesh Night Market), Venice(La Serenissima).

* [[Mood Whiplash]]: [[Invoked Trope|Invoked]] in "The Death of Queen Jane"--while all the people outside are dancing, singing, and celebrating the birth of the heir, "poor Queen Jane...lay cold as a stone".

* [[Motifs]]: Aside from her love of tragic ballads, a thread which begins in ''The Visit'' and weaves its way more fully into ''The Mask and the Mirror'' is that of the [[Unicorn]]. It first appears in "Courtyard Lullaby" (which [[Shown Their Work|also references]] the pomegranate tree, the fruit of which was often depicted in medieval times as the end of a unicorn's tail to represent the fecundity that was the unicorn's opposite), but images from [[wikipedia:The Hunt of the Unicorn|the Unicorn Tapestries]] are used on the cover and liner sheets from ''The Mask and the Mirror'', and in the music video for "Bonny Swans" both the characters of the song and Loreena herself are shown literally becoming part of the tapestries.