Land of Cokaygne: Analysis

The poem that I will study is entitled the Land Of Cokaygne and it belongs to the “Kildare poems”. The Kildare poems are a group of sixteen poems written in an Irish dialect of Middle English and dated to the mid-14th century. Together with a second, shorter set of poems in the so-called Loscombe Manuscript, they constitute the first and most important linguistic document of the early development of Irish English in the centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. The poems have religious and satirical contents. They are preserved in a single manuscript in the British Library, where they are scattered between a number of Latin and Old French texts. The conventional modern designation "Kildare poems" refers both to the town of Kildare in Ireland, which has been proposed as their likely place of origin, and to the name of the author of at least one of the poems, who calls himself "Michael (of) Kildare". The authors or compilers were probably Franciscan monks So what is a land of Cockaygne : it is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. So it’s actually a utopian world. it’s a theme or a world that belongs to the European folklore
Some critics focused on its Irish provenance and according to them the poems have some relationship with the Old French Fabliau de Cocagne (1250) and the Middle Dutch Dit is van date dele Land van Cockaengen ( but in don’t have the date)
This poem is seen as a satire, a parody and a burlesque text. We can actually say that his text is also content some element of Utopia because it deals with a sort of mythic world which is better than Heaven.
This theme is not something new because according to Professor Bella Millet, it comes from three main traditions: * The classical tradition: and we can refer to True History by Lucian, a Greek work of the