Maja (Thesilée) Ilisch IF

Thesilée is a filker and writer from Germany. Coming from a folk background, her songs are inspired by classic English folk ballads not only in their tendency to be rather long, but also in them focusing on bloodshed, murder, vengeful spirits, and death. It's less known that she's also keen on writing sloppy love songs, but luckily she manages to mix in a little death with those as well. She writes songs in German and English and likes to translate not only her own songs but also fellow filkers' works from one language to the other, and though she claims she does so to further international understanding, actually she's in it for the fun.

She was part of Lord Landless, together with Loewenthal's Silva and Kjenjo, and now performs solo or, together with husband Peredar, as Pavlov's Duck. Thesilée is notoriously left-handed and plays the guitar, mandola or bass as long as it's strung the other way round. Asking to borrow a guitar is a running gag she'll never grow tired of.

A former librarian and trained bookseller, she has given up the idea of being actually paid for her work and became a freelance writer in 2012, writing and publishing books that are just as full of blood, death and fairies as her songs. She has also won awards for her children's books in spite of them being a little less macabre.

All of her lyrics can be found at www.thesilee.de - for information on her writing, which is all in German, got to www.ilisch.de

Thesilée is non-binary and goes by whatever pronouns he can lay their hands on.

Representative Work for the 2025 Pegasus Awards

Vineta (mp3)

Copyright © by Thesilée
All Rights Reserved - Used by Permission

Stand by the seaside and gaze down the water,
the city down there lies asleep.
Where dwell nought but fish and the souls of the restless,
a name's all she's left for to keep.
One hundred years ago no one would save her,
no one would spend but a dime:
Join me tonight on my way to Vineta,
lets bring this town back to time.

Come, come, come to Vineta,
the city of streets paved with gold.
Come, come, come to Vineta,
the city, once prosperous and bold,
now drowned in the Baltic so cold.

Look, there she's rising all out of the water,
the town, once so proud and so gay.
No one saw her her rooftops, her pavements a-sparkle
for one hundred years and a day.
Deep down below in the dark we must dwell, we
cannot breathe the light but today -
six hundred years we have prayed for redemption,
child, don't leave us in dismay.

Come, come, come to Vineta,
come and bring coins in your purse.
Come, come, come to Vineta,
buy something, one penny's worth,
and thus set us free from this curse.

Purchase our goods, gorgeous combs, splendid brooches
of corals, of seashells, of stone.
Purchase this shawl here, of kelp it was woven -
All of this could be your own!
Speak of your age, of the century you live in,
the face and the shape of your time:
Don't speak of killings, of wars and of hunger -
Take us to a world most sublime.

God drowned us, God bound us proud folks to the deep
we spent all of plague and the world-wars asleep.
The curse gave us peace and the curse kept us save
We sleep and we sleep by the sound of the waves
We sleep and we sleep by the sound of the waves
the waves and the waves and the waves and the waves ...

Go, take your money of paper and plastic,
go, take your time, take it home.
Once there'll be live in the streets of Vineta,
once in a century to come.
Give it a try hundred years from tomorrow,
if there's a world left to be.
Stay till that day with us down in Vineta,
join in the song of the sea.

Come, come, come to Vineta
where hundred years last but a day.
Come, come, come to Vineta,
where waves wash the centuries away
eternity's here for to stay.