Obari Gomba hasoften deployed his poetry to illuminate the materialrealities of the Niger Delta; nowhere in his corpus is thismore particularly evident than in Pearls of theMangroves (1999), a volumetrenchant in its denunciation of the despoliation of theoil-rich region by transnational oil corporations. However,the Niger Delta makes a passing appearance in his latestpoetry collection, For Every Homeland. Inthis volume, the world is the lens through which he casts asweeping eye across our shared (at times contested/ negated)humanity. The themes explored are familiar, and evenresonate more than ever, in this era of neo-fascism andultra-nationalism.

Gomba has sofar authored seven poetry collections, and For EveryHomeland is his seventh. He teaches Literatureand Creative Writing at the University of Port Harcourt,Nigeria, and was longlisted for the 2017 LNG Nigeria Prizefor Literature, an award for which a previous collection ofhis, Length of Eyes, was earlier longlistedin 2013. Taken together, his poetry has earned him criticalacclaim from notable Nigerian poets such as JPClark-Bekederemo, Tanure Ojaide, and Lindsay Barrett. OdiaOfeimum, another renowned Nigeria poet, has praised hispoetic vision for having ‘the freshness of aninsurrection’.

ForEvery Homeland is composed of forty-three poemsgrouped under three sections. Most of the poems run intothree or four pages; the longest is ‘The Wood Revolt’, aneight-page long poem. Poems such as ‘To Firefly’, ‘I SpeakNiglish’, ‘To See or not to See’, ‘A Few Words’, ‘Is it YourFingerprint’, etcetera, barely span two pages. The poemsdeal with death and genocide, terror and terrorism, racismand American supremacy. Family, sex, travel, and nostalgiaare also touched upon. The moods evoked oscillate betweenthe solemn and the satiric, mediated in a way that neverundercuts the urgency of the personal and the political. Thepoet's diction is precise and unencumbered, his imagerydevoid of opacity. Myth is utilised in a few poems toheighten narrative resonance, and much of the poetry ismarked by musicality, thus attesting to the poet's fidelityto lyricism.

The volumeopens with ‘Unfinished Ballad’, a poem narrating thecommunal killing of a child and the tragedies that follow.Dark and haunting, it foreshadows the motif of deathaddressed in some poems.

If you asked a room full of African theatre people to choose six plays to publish you would have, not consensus, or even amicable argument, but trouble. So we didn't ask: we decided. We did have a few guiding principles. Given that African Theatre only recently – in 2014 – published a volume on the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Wole Soyinka we would not include these most famous of names. However we would, given that these are the regions of our best knowledge, focus on West and East Africa. We would only include plays we really liked, but we would try to offer a wide variety of authorship, form and subject matter; and we would try to bring to wider notice some works, notably plays not written in English, that we thought would be of interest to an international audience.

There are not many anthologies of African plays in circulation. We edited one many years ago (Methuen, 1999), Biodun Jeyifo edited another in 2002 (Norton), and Ubu Repertory Theatre Publications brought out two volumes of francophone plays in 1987 and 1991; and that's it for collections that are not the work of one playwright or drawing on work from just one country. We thought the world might like another place to access some of the best of African theatre in one volume.

We also thought that people coming new to the work might appreciate a little help in understanding and contextualizing the plays they were encountering. So we asked a range of theatre scholars, many leading voices in the field along with a few newcomers to keep things fresh, to write us accompanying essays for each play. We asked them to tell us something about the playwright, her or his times, work and thought, and then to discuss, in whatever terms they chose, the play in question. The results, several by people who have known the playwrights, or else by scholars deeply knowledgeable on their chosen playwright, are hugely informative and thought provoking.

It is sadly true that the number of women playwrights in Africa, though significantly growing, is still limited. African playwriting remains dominated by men.

Many years ago, F. W. Maitland reminded his readers of the centrality of livestock and, hence, of pasture to the functioning of the medieval economy. ‘A householder cannot have arable land’, he wrote, ‘unless he has pasture rights’, stating a fundamental truth of medieval society, even in the arable villages of lowland England which were his principal concern. How much more important were grazing resources to the more pastoral societies of northern England and southern Scotland with which this chapter is concerned. In these regions a bias towards livestock rearing created a rural world which differed markedly from that in southern and Midland England, the areas which have generated so many of our conceptions of the medieval economy and society. While cultivation – indeed, open-field farming – existed in plenty in the lowlands of northern England and of Scotland, it is generally agreed that a more pastoral economy pervaded the region, especially in the uplands. An enduring pastoral slant is suggested by the survival of ancient cattle renders (cornage/noutgeld) from the early medieval centuries and is attested by the evidence for lordly income from pastures and fulling mills and from demesne and monastic sheep and cattle stations by 1300. At the heart of a pastoral economy lay the use and management of the grazing on which the livestock depended. In the medieval context, much of the pastoral resource lay on the ‘waste’, the open rough ground between and beyond settlements and their farmland on which livestock grazed in common. How the wastes were used and managed as grazing grounds in the centuries before 1300 forms the heart of this chapter.

Across Scotland and the north of England, the extent of ‘waste’ was significantly higher than farther south. Until land reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps as much as one-quarter to one-third of the land surface of lowland areas, and a majority of land in the hills, usually termed ‘moor’ / ‘muir’ or ‘fell’, remained as unenclosed waste. As late as the early seventeenth century, waste accounted for a majority (58 per cent) of the land surface of County Durham. The extent of unenclosed waste was a combination of environmental factors (much of the uplands was incapable of reclamation for intensive use, for example) and economic forces, including population pressure, which drove seigneurial policy.

The Mediterranean is one of those seas which is instantly familiar to every European who has had any sort of education or has been on holiday. Its shape, its weather, its food, its waters, its beaches, are all as familiar to any European as his and her own homeland. Not only that, but it has long been one of the most important strategic regions of the world, a region of warfare from its earliest mention in history. Control of the Mediterranean has long been one of the keys to world power – as it still is; and that was one of the keys to the development and maintenance of the British Empire. This sea is the scene of this book, but there are certain additional points which must be made at the start.

The instrument of power used by the British in the Mediterranean was always the Royal Navy. For a century and a half from the defeat of Napoleon that force dominated the sea, and for three centuries before that English, then British, sea power was an intermittent intruder into the complex conflicts and relationships of the sea's other powers. The purpose of this account is therefore to consider the extent, the purpose, and the vicissitudes of British naval power in the Mediterranean. But it is first necessary to understand some of the geography of the sea and to modify to some extent the general understanding of that geography.

The geography of the Mediterranean is complex and intricate; it is an area of bays and gulfs, islands and peninsulas and subordinate seas, narrow passages and straits. It is well over 2000 miles long from west to east, but from north to south it varies from 600 miles between the heel of Italy and the Libyan coast of the Gulf of Sirte, to only sixty miles between eastern Sicily and Cape Bon. It is also much subdivided into distinct sections. Starting from the east there is the Eastern Basin, an open sea with only one island – Cyprus – which stretches from Syria and Egypt to the Sicilian Narrows, where Sicily and Malta and Tunisia compete for strategic importance and to control those narrows.

In 1855, after travelling through Victoria for two years, the English author William Howitt reflected in his diaries on the energy expended by Scots on commercial endeavours in the colonies. ‘We give the Scotch much unbounded credit for enter¬prise and the quality which their own word ‘canny’ so well expresses’, wrote Howitt, ‘that we are not surprised to find a host of Scotchmen on whatever shore we may step, where money is to be made. Neither the snows of Canada nor the heats of India present any obstacles to them.’ At home, the commercial class of Scotland considered the British Empire a place of great potential for entrepreneurial dyna¬mism and enterprise. Indeed, central to Scotland's imperial mission was the pres¬ence of Scottish business within the apparatus of Empire.

The imperial hunger for new lands, resources, and markets would extend, even¬tually, to the Australian colonies, and with the migration of thousands of indi¬viduals over the nineteenth century Scotland made a significant contribution to the European colonisation of the continent. In conjunction with the export of its people, Scotland's commercial connections also spread into the Antipodean colo¬nies with a substantial investment of capital and labour in the nascent Australian pastoral industry. Scottish commerce in colonial Australia operated at various scales – from large investment companies and the extensive mercantile class, to intricate social and familial networks – and formed the vital commercial arm of Scotland's imperial endeavours. Scots and Scottish money were in the vanguard of Australia's nineteenth-century pastoral industry, which dramatically remade the landscape – culturally and physically – and had far-reaching consequences for both the new arrivals and Australia's First Peoples. As Mairi Stewart and Fiona Watson have written, during the nineteenth century in Scotland ‘there developed an over¬whelming imperative to dominate nature … Increasingly, nature became a focus for “improvement”, and in time, across the land it is likely that change was realised to a far greater extent than had ever been known before in terms of human impact.’ The drive for agricultural improvement proceeded apace in Australia.

Scotland's Commercial Empire

Australia offered Scots a regional platform for extending their commercial interests in the southern hemisphere and further throughout the Empire. Scots were already disproportionately represented in the lucrative commercial empire of the East India Company (EIC).

At theUniversity of Michigan-Flint, I teach a First YearExperience course (UNV 100) titled, ‘Sites and Sounds ofAfrica’. The course was designed among other things, ‘tohelp students see the world through the eyes of anotherculture’. The focus is on Africa, the second-largestcontinent in the world, famous for its human and naturalresources. Two words describe Africa perfectly – ‘Diversityand Contrast’. Students ‘explore’ the continent'sdiversities and contrasts using four selected countries forillustration. The countries represent four differentgeographic regions of the continent: Egypt (North), Kenya(East), Nigeria (West) and South Africa (South).

Integrated intothe course are various ‘experiential learning components’,exposing the students to real-world examples of the basiccourse concepts and ideas. Visits to the Detroit Instituteof Arts and the Charles Wright Museum of African AmericanHistory (also in Detroit) have been a field triprequirement. The focus at the Institute is on African artsand artistic productions over the centuries, while at theMuseum it is on Africa as the genesis of humankind and thesource of the historic transatlantic slave trade.

One year, thevisit to the Detroit Institute of Arts produced anunexpected dilemma for both the students and theirprofessor. The purpose of the visit was to study the vastarray of African works of art on display at DIA. Studentswere to make a close study of the art works and notecarefully any documentation about them. Each student wouldidentify three favourite works of art, study and payparticular attention to them, collect information about themsuch as name of object, information about the artist, placeof origin of both the artist and the object, description ofthe piece, its purpose and cultural significance … and itsjourney from Africa to its present location. At the end ofthe visit students would write a well thought-out paper on,‘My Impressions of African Art at the Detroit Institute ofArts’.

It turned outthat the exhibits of Egyptian works of art were displayed ata location separate from those of the continent of Africa!The tourist guide and the curator did not see anythingunusual about that as evident in their conscious effort to‘educate’ the professor and his students that Egypt was inthe Middle East and not Africa! The dialogue that ensued andthe professor's enthusiastic attempts to elucidate were tono avail.

On April 11, 1928, with a crowd of 8,000 present, the T.S.S. Hobson's Bay left Prince's Pier in Melbourne for Scotland with over 600 Scots on board, who were taking part in a delegation and variously seeking to encourage others to migrate, to develop trade and commerce, and to holiday and visit family. The farewell was a thoroughly Caledonian affair. The Melbourne Highland Pipe Band and the Royal Caledonian Pipe Band attended, and ‘in kilt and sporran, completed the Gaelic atmosphere’. The bands struck up versions of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Pibroch O'Donaldhu’ and, ‘as the ship, festoons of streamers hanging from her side, moved into the channel the pipes were wailing “Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?”’ The captain of the ship was a ‘braw hielanman from up beyond Inverness’, and ‘practically every officer hails from the Land o’ Cakes and Cookies’. In a farewell speech, the chairperson of the delegation to Scotland, Archibald Gilchrist, told the crowd:

Manifested in a range of cultural activities and artefacts, including the Scot¬tish regiments, monuments to national heroes, and more broadly in the activi¬ties of ethnic associations, the cultural traditions Scots maintained in the diaspora often affirmed the worth of the British Empire and highlighted their own posi¬tion within it. Many Scottish cultural organisations in Australia were, however, limited in their actual links to ‘home’, and were more involved in the re-creations of culture in a new country than in the active maintenance of overseas connec¬tions. Links were forged, nonetheless.

In the last year and a half of Hitler's War the Mediterranean theatre was steadily downgraded in importance. The U-boats withdrew late in 1944, and by the time of the German surrender in Italy on 2 May 1945 the only active naval operations were in the northern end of the Adriatic, the Gulf of Genoa, and the Aegean, where some small German ships were able to operate for short periods before being found and usually sunk. The demands of the Normandy and North Sea campaigns from early 1944 pulled most British naval strength to those areas; then the need to finish off Japan quickly took the main British naval strength to the Pacific.

The Mediterranean was thus a quiet area in the greater scheme of things in the last year of the fighting, but then a series of specifically Mediterranean problems developed and brought the Royal Navy back to the sea. These issues were largely concentrated in the eastern part of the sea – in effect, they were the continuation of, or relics of, the Eastern Question and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire - and their resolution compelled the navy eventually to retire from the region. There were three main problem areas – Greece, Palestine, and Egypt – and several minor ones – Trieste and Libya, for example – and over all these came the gradual realisation that the navy no longer had the power to impose itself on events, though the attempt was usually made. That is, the navy still carried with it the attitude which had made it so powerful before 1939, but it did not have the political support at home. Its role was now taken up by the United States Navy, after a time at least, and to its admirals the Royal Navy was only a minor, if rather annoying, ally. For ten years the two navies jockeyed for influence; the larger, as usual, won.

Civil warfare in Greece involved British forces from December 1944. This was both an outcome of the German and Italian conquest in 1941 and their subsequent occupation of the country and a precursor for the British of the end of their power in the Mediterranean.

The way lawyers constructed and responded to ‘wrongdoing’ in Spain in the period 1800–1936 is a complex tale of formal sources and underlying movements in legal thought. The progression of legal forms does not represent a simple progression towards a communally agreed goal. Rather, legal actors responded to shifts and currents within intellectual movements, and different groups, with different interpretations, held sway at different times. In addition, it is unclear how much the lawyers’ reality reflected, or created, the reality of the citizen. Lawyers had aims and objectives, in part reflecting what reformers viewed as the pinnacle of legal thought. That thought was almost certainly not the same as that of the citizens on the street. In addition, the pattern of change was complicated by a blending of many legal sources. In particular, legal change in the era of codification did not take place through an extirpation of earlier legal rules and legal culture. Rather, new and old ideas merged in a system where tradition was both respected and rejected, and where contradictions, whether in legal rules or in the way those rules played out in practice, were common.

This chapter will attempt to introduce the lawyers’ construction of wrongdoing and the relationship between that view and society's view in the period from 1800 to 1936. It will consider in turn the topics of constitutionalism and codification, the unity of criminal law, the objects of the criminal law and the punishments of the criminal law. In so doing it will serve as an introduction to the way that wrongdoing was conceived of over this period. It will also provide a context for seeing how wrongdoing was responded to. This legal perspective is arguably fed by, but certainly feeds back into, non-legal contemporary views of wrongdoing. The chapter will focus on formal legal sources, especially the criminal codes of the period.

The form and purposes of the law changed significantly from 1800, with the legal framework within which society operated being reshaped (though not entirely replaced) through the influence of new liberal intellectual movements. Spain had for centuries used a detailed and advanced set of legal rules, in the form of the Siete partidas de Alfonso el Sabio, originally simply called the Livro de las legies or ‘book of the laws’, and most likely completed around 1265.

CAST

Sia Yatabere

Kaya Maghan

Wakhane Sakho

Mamadi the Silent

Kerfa the Fool

First Priest

Second Priest

Third Priest

Sia Yatebere's Father

Sia Yatabere's Mother

Kaya Maghan's Griot

Chief

Assistant Chief

Flunky

The Masked Chorus

Shackled Chorus

Blind Chorus

Mute Chorus

Kaya Maghan's Court

(When speaking as the MASKED CHORUS, the CHIEF, the ASSISTANT CHIEF and the FLUNKY don masks.)

The Prologue

MASKED CHORUS

Chief Night is falling over Kumbi. Here and there, perhaps, curtains go up, life goes on …

Assistant Chief The whole panorama of life, the actors coming and going, perspiring and aspiring.

Flunky … and eventually expiring …

Chief … and you're becoming boring, Flunky, with all those unsuitable puns. We're here to talk about beginnings, not endings. I turn it over to you, Assistant Chief.

Assistant Chief We have actors appearing on the stage of life. Great and not-so-great, good and bad, famous and unknown. There are Kaya Maghan, Wakhane Sakho, as well as Mamadi the Silent, and Sia Yatabere … they need no introduction.

Chief And then there are others, the nameless horde, those who drift along on the waves of that great river known as Time, which endures for eternity while they float on …

Assistant Chief … as colourless as indifference …

Flunky … as transparent as poverty …

Chief As odourless as pain.

Assistant Chief As well as being barely presentable.

Flunky Because of all the flies on their eyes and buzzing around them.

Chief Their hands misshapen as their feet.

Flunky And their tongues – they say that they're deadly poison.

Chief In short, they're not really quite presentable … but present them we must. When the time comes, they'll make an appearance! And of course, as always, the usual precautions have been taken.

Assistant Chief Look, there, on the left, the Shackled Chorus. As their name indicates, their hands are shackled, but only at night. In the morning, it's their feet.

(The SHACKLED CHORUS slowly crosses the stage.)

Chief That's to avoid any unpleasant complications. If they were unchained, they could walk on their hands and salute with their feet.

In 2005, theNational Intelligence Council of the US publishedpredictions that African countries, especially Nigeria,would disintegrate by the year 2015. Edwin Madunagu calledthat ‘wishful thinking’ in his column for TheGuardian and theorized that the Nigerian statewas still strong enough to withstand disintegrationpressures. In 2010, the former US Ambassador to Nigeria,John Campbell, followed up with a book that called Nigeria a‘bastard child of colonialism’ and said that the country was‘Dancing on the Brink’ of collapse unless resources weremade available to fight poverty in the Northeast, withoutmentioning the lack of educational opportunities as a majorcause of poverty. Why did Nigeria manage to survive thepredicted collapse in 2015?

NaijaMarxisms by Adam Mayer reads like anintelligence report of the sort that British colonialadministrators commissioned from 200 colonialanthropologists, following the Women's War of 1929, tofigure out why the Igbo were difficult to subject tocolonial rule. Mayer is obviously aware of this implicitmeaning of his book because he cited Ikenna Nzimiro (110) onthis point as if pre-empting any suspicions that he wasconducting counter-insurgency style surveillance on thestate of revolutionary thought in Nigeria today. Thesuspicion that the book is, knowingly or unknowingly, a spystory was raised in the preliminary pages where the authorthanked one of his doctoral thesis advisers, a ‘ProfessorColonel’ in Hungary, for pointing him in the direction ofthe security implications of his topic. The suspicion wasthickened by the fact that the author used the assertions ofJohn Campbell as the theoretical framework for the book frombeginning to end. Campbell is positioned by the author asthe ‘foremost expert on Nigeria’ and his prediction that‘Nigeria may well produce a Fidel Castro’ is the‘problematique’ that the Hungarian author tried toinvestigate with the admission that the emergence of aCastro in Nigeria would be ‘a very unwelcome idea’ from thepoint of view of the US (3).

In answer tothe security query raised by Campbell, the author observedthat ‘… there was no violent Marxist group in Nigeria thatwould have advocated terrorist methods, nor do we find anyNigerian Marxist thinkers who embraced left communism andits theories’ (37).

The spread of the Scots, and their impact on the lands in which they settled, has been marked in stone. In 1886, at his own cost, James Dawson dedicated a seven-metre obelisk of grey granite to mark the burial place of Wombeetch Puuyuan, who was believed to be the last living member of the local Indigenous community. Situated in Camperdown, Victoria, its front inscription reads, ‘In memory of the Aborigines of this district. Here lies the body of the Chief Wombeetch Puuyuun and last of the local tribes.’ The two dates inscribed on the obelisk, ‘1840–1883’, mark the forty-three years it took for European settlers to displace the Djargurd wurrung from the area. In August 1886, Dawson wrote to the Australian Town and Country Journal, explaining that other settlers around Camperdown would not contribute to the project because the monument would ‘point for all time to our treatment of this unfortunate race – the possessors of the soil we took from them, and we gave in return the vices belonging to our boasted civilisations’.

The efficiency of Scottish settlers and their enthusiasm for colonisation is attested to in monuments and memorials around Australia. There are close to 100 ‘Scot¬tish sites’ remembering various prominent Scots or Scottish Australians, including monuments dedicated to Scottish colonial pioneers, statues of the Scottish politi¬cians, depictions of Scottish national heroes, memorials to Scottish military units and fallen soldiers, and a handful of ‘cairns’ commemorating the Scotland–Australia connection. There are over sixty public monuments to famous, prominent, or influ¬ential Scots in Australia. Found across Australia are at least nine monuments dedi¬cated to Scottish colonial pioneers more generally and, among other colonial and twentieth-century politicians, four statues of the Scottish governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie. It is likely there are more to be recorded, such as private statues erected by families. Add these to a variety of other Scottish marks on the landscape – including cemeteries, churches, streets, and place names – and the sum is a remarkable and persistent record of the Scots in Australia and the variety of ways they have represented and commemorated their culture and identities. The mark of the Scots in Australia attests to the fact that their colonial endeavours were substantial and influential, and it was this – their efficiency and enthusiasm for colonisation – that they chose to celebrate.

The emerging restive youth culture in Nigeria has been a critical subject in Nigerian writing recently, with Obafemi's Dark Times Are Over? one of the pioneering plays. The play opens with a series of activities by university student associations, ranging from ‘Kegite’ (palm-wine club), to ‘Yepa’ (a religious cult group) and ‘Aristo Girls’ (campus ‘sex workers'). The groups, under the guise of freedom of association, constitute themselves into different forms of lethal nuisance on campus and, in the fight for supremacy, violence ensues. The emergence of ‘Man O’ War’ – a voluntary informal para-military group – provides hope for the restitution of the campus from the stranglehold of terror. The return of the campus to a conducive environment for learning is, however, short-lived. Obafemi berates the decay in the education and legal systems, two arms of national development. The young generation constitute the main focus of the play, which laments their vulnerability to the vices pervading tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Instead of being the fulcrum of the development of young people into industrious and patriotic citizens, he argues that the institutions have turned into breeding grounds of decadence and corruption – portrayed in the play as an extension of national life. The anti-social behaviour is attributed to maladministration and a debased judicial system. The play is a warning of the danger posed by unruly youths in a country overtaken by a youth explosion.

The desperate need for political reform is viewed via historical antecedents in Running Dreams. The playwright decries the deep involvement of superpowers in steering the political affairs of African and other so-called Third World nations through their conglomerates. This, in his view, has allowed for mediocrity in the political system whereby unpatriotic citizens with international connections, or identified as instruments to fulfil foreign economic agendas, are sponsored.

The plot revolves around Yohanna, a former diplomat and economic guru, who is caught in a conflict between the capitalists’ insatiable quest for wealth and the urgent need for national rejuvenation. A dream trope employed by the playwright gives him recourse to history and a mediation between the past and the present to navigate the future. Nationalists from various African countries constitute the realm of Yohanna's dream. Their persistence in the dream enlivens the patriotic demand for self-appraisal and rejuvenation to initiate national reforms.

‘Auf dem See’ Op. 59 no. 2 (comp. spring 1873, publ. Dec. 1873)

‘An den Mond’ Op. 71 no. 2 (comp. March 1877, publ. July–Aug. 1877)

BRAHMS'S GENERATION was familiar with the work of the distinguished folksong scholar Karl Simrock, which included folk poetry, proverbs, sagas, religious texts and poems for children, and was as popular as Uhland's. It is therefore unsurprising that a seam of Simrock's work runs throughout Brahms's life. In a handwritten catalogue of music and books, probably compiled in March–April 1856, Brahms noted that he owned the three volumes of Simrock's 1843–4 reworking of the Nibelung legends, the Heldenbuch. Brahms's collection of proverbs, compiled in March 1855, contains several which probably stem from Simrock's collection of German proverbs, Die deutschen Sprichworter. Brahms's folk poetry sources cannot be considered here, but he may have found the Rhenish text ‘Soll sich der Mond’ for his Op. 14 no. 1 in Simrock's 1851 Die deutschen Volkslieder. For a number of years, he also believed the first verse of his ‘Wiegenlied’ Op. 49 no. 4 came from Simrock's Deutsches Kinderbuch, although he later corrected this when he realised that the poem was unattributed and actually from his favoured Arnim–Brentano collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Widmann also recommended Simrock as a potential source of opera libretti to their mutual friend the violinist Friedrich Hegar in 1867, and might have done the same for Brahms. In 1878, Brahms turned again to Simrock, this time his 1850 Lauda Sion, a collection of religious texts in German and Latin, in search of a translation in connection with his Motets Op. 74. Finally, there was a personal link: the poet was also the uncle of Brahms's publisher, general factotum and friend Fritz Simrock, and the family publishing firm only relocated from Bonn to Berlin in 1870.

Brahms loved Simrock's city, Bonn, and the folksongs of the Rhine. It therefore is a mystery why he did not try to establish a friendship with Simrock. The evidence that Brahms met Simrock at all is slender. Opportunities were not lacking. Brahms made his first brief visit to Bonn when he came to see the Schumanns in Düsseldorf in September 1853, having visited Hoffmann shortly before.