Listen to Medieval Covers of “Creep,” “Pumped Up Kicks,” “Bad Romance” & More by Hildegard von Blingin’

All ye bully-rooks with your buskin boots

Best ye go, best ye go

Outrun my bow

All ye bully-rooks with your buskin boots

Best ye go, best ye go, faster than mine arrow

If bardcore is a thing—and trust us, it is right now—Hildegard von Blingin’ is the brightest star in its firmament.

The unknown vocalist, pure of throat, pays heed to the fascinating 12th-century abbess and composer Saint Hildegard of Bingen by choice of pseudonym, while demonstrating a similar flair for poetic language.

Von Blingin’s nimble lyrical reworking of Foster the People’s 2010 monster hit, "Pumped Up Kicks," makes deft use of fellow bardcore practioner Cornelius Link’s copyright-free instrumental score and the closest medieval synonyms available.

For the record, Webster’s 1913 dictionary defines a "bully-rook" as a bully, but the term could also be used in a joshing, chops-busting sort of way, such as when The Merry Wives of Windsor’s innkeeper trots it out to greet lovable reprobate, Sir John Falstaff.

And as any fan of Game of Thrones or The Hunger Games can attest, an arrow can prove as lethal as a gun.

Songwriter Mark Foster told Billboard’s Xander Zellner last December that he had been thinking of retiring "Pumped Up Kicks," as listeners are now convinced it's a bouncy-sounding take on school shootings, rather than a more generalized attempt to get inside the head of a troubled—and fictional—youngster.

With school out of session since March, it's an excellent time for von Blingin’ to pick up the torch and bear this song back to the past.

Ditto the timing of von Blingin’s ode to Lady Gaga’s "Bad Romance":

I want thine ugly, I want thy disease

Take aught from thee shall I if it can be free

No Celtic harp, wooden recorders, or adjustment of possessive pronouns can disguise the jolt those opening lyrics assume in the middle of a global pandemic.

(St. Hildegard escaped the medieval period’s best known plague, the Black Death, by virtue of having been born some 250 years before it struck.)

Von Blingin’s latest release is an extremely faithful take on Radiohead’s "Creep", with just a few minor tweaks to pull it into medieval lyrical alignment:

Thou float’st like a feather

In a beautiful world

The comments section suggest that the peasants are eager to get in on the act.

Some are expressing their enthusiasm in approximate olde English...

Others question why smygel, eldrich, wyrden or wastrel were not pressed into service as replacements for creep and weirdo..

To borrow a phrase from one such jester, best get your requests in “before the tiktoks come for it.”

Listen to Hildegard Von Blingin’ on Sound Cloud and check out the bardcore sub-reddit for more examples of the form.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Help contain the plague spread with her series of free downloadable posters, encouraging citizens to wear masks in public settings. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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