I want to start by saying I love a pub quiz. Genuinely. There is no finer way to spend a wet Tuesday than sitting in a corner with a biro that doesn't work, arguing with three other grown adults about which county Daniel O'Donnell is from, while a fella with a microphone tells you all to keep your phones in your pockets. It is one of the great Irish institutions. I have nothing but respect for the form.
That said.
A man wrote to me last week. Earnest fella, signs himself off as new to the session but not to the song, which I thought was a lovely way to put it. He was at a quiz in Cork — I won't name the pub, he asked me not to, and I'm a gentleman — and round four was MUSIC. Grand. And one of the questions was, and I'm quoting his email here because I've read it about nine times now, "How many verses are in the Irish folk song The Rattlin' Bog?"
And lads. LADS. The answer the quizmaster accepted was eight.
Eight.
I had to put the phone down and go stand in the garden for a minute.
Now, before the tidy-minded among you start sharpening your pencils — yes. I know. I'm the one who's forever banging on that you can't put a hard number on a cumulative song, that it's a chain and a chain is as long as the room can hold, that there's no Official Rattlin' Bog Council issuing rulings (though I'd still like to be on it, and I'd still like a hat). I wrote a whole rambling thing about exactly this, you can read the honest version here, and the short of it is the song doesn't really HAVE a fixed length the way a normal song does. So in a deep philosophical sense, you can't be "wrong" about it.
BUT.
There is a difference between "the song resists exact counting" and "the answer is eight." One of those is a beautiful truth about oral tradition. The other is just a man in Cork who half-remembered it from a wedding.
Because here's the thing. If you are going to put a number on it for a QUIZ — if you are going to demand precision from a song that laughs at precision — then you owe it to the room to give the STANDARD number. And the standard, the one you'll hear at ninety percent of sessions, the one I've got documented on the lyrics page, is TEN. Bog, tree, branch, twig, nest, egg, bird, feather, flea, and then the great crashing climb back down to the bog at the end. Ten links. Ten chances to lose your place. Ten.
Where does eight even come from? I've thought about this more than is healthy. My best guess is your man learned a trimmed version somewhere — a school choir does six because that's all they had time for before the Christmas concert, a wedding band does eight because the floor's getting restless and they want to get to the buffet. That's a REAL version of the song! I'd never say it isn't. But it is not the answer you write on a quiz sheet and accept while a poor man at table seven, who happens to subscribe to a certain fan shrine, quietly dies inside.
And he did write the right answer, this is the part that breaks my heart. He put TEN. And it was marked WRONG. He lost the point. They came second by ONE POINT. Second! Because of the bog!
I posted about it on the forum and, predictably, the lads lost the run of themselves entirely. flea_verse_supremacy demanded we drive to Cork and stage what he called a SINGALONG INTERVENTION. session_newbie_cork — who I think might actually BE the fella, the timing's suspicious, I'm not asking — said very gently that he'd made his peace with it, which made it worse. And TradSessionKing, who is the calmest man alive, simply wrote: "Ten. It has always been ten. I will hear no more about it." Which from him is basically a declaration of war.
Now in fairness, ShannonMelody pointed out that maybe the quizmaster was working off the flea verse counting differently, or had nine and an outro, or — and this is the charitable read — was sitting on some regional variant where it genuinely does land on eight, and there are a few of those, I cover the whole muddle in the variations guide. She's right. She usually is. It's possible the man wasn't wrong so much as singing a different song to the rest of us, which is the most Rattlin' Bog problem imaginable. The song got him in trouble and then provided his alibi.
But I'll tell you what I actually want, more than the point back, more than an apology.
I want every quizmaster in this country, before they put our bog in round four, to come HERE first. Read the post. Understand that the honest answer is "ten, but it's complicated, and if a punter says ten you give them the point and you give them a nod of respect." That's the ruling. I'm issuing it. I don't have the hat yet but I'm issuing it anyway.
To the man from Cork: you were right. You'll always have been right. Second place is just first place in a fairer universe. Come to a session some night and we'll do all ten, slowly, and nobody will mark you wrong.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin' was sat on the desk while I typed this and at the exact moment I wrote the word "eight" he stood up, turned around, and sat back down facing the other way. I'm not saying the cat has opinions on Cork quiz nights. I'm saying he made his position clear.