COCKAIGNE

also spelled Cockayne, imaginary land of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand. References to Cockaigne are especially prominent in medieval European lore. These accounts describe rivers of wine, houses built of cake and barley sugar, streets paved with pastry, and shops that gratuitously give goods to everyone. Roast geese wander about inviting people to eat them, and buttered larks fall from the skies like manna. The origin of the word Cockaigne has been much disputed, but all versions tend to see it as adapted or derived from a word meaning cake. An outstanding early Irish version of the legend is Aislinge Meic Conglinne (The Vision of MacConglinne), a parody of the traditional saint's vision in which a king possessed by a demon of gluttony is cured by a vision of the land of Cockaigne. A 13th-century French fabliau, Cocagne, was possibly intended to ridicule the idea of the mythical Avalon, the Island of the Blest. An English poem The Land of Cockaygne of about the same period satirizes monastic life. The name Lubberland displaced that of Cockaigne in the 17th century. The Big Rock Candy Mountain of American hobo folklore expresses the same idea.