"Averoigne" by Clark Ashton Smith

The structure of this poem is quite interesting, the stanzas having nine lines each, but the rhyming lines are 1-8-9, 2-7, 3-6, and 4-5.

Anyways, welcome to medieval France! While Averoigne is purely fictional, if you were to try to place it on the actual map of France, it might roughly corresponds with the department of Auvergne, in the southern half of France.

If you ever played D&D, and I mean going way back to the Moldvay basic and expert boxed sets of the early 1980s, you may recognize many of the names and places in this series from the module X2 Castle Amber (a.k.a. Château d'Amberville), as the module is explicitly based upon the Averoigne stories. (With plenty of other elements added in, like Poe and Zelazny, but that's beyond the scope of our current subject.)

shoon: plural of shoe, in some dialect or another

The picture used is the maps of Averoigne, both its location in France and the locales within the province which will appear in the stories to come. (Today France's administrative divisions are called departments, but prior to the Revolution of 1789, they were provinces.)

To follow along: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/43/averoigne