Family-Unfriendly Death/Ballads

""We will pinch him, we will prick him,
 * In the Scottish ballad "The Twa Sisters", two constantly bickering princesses who have fallen in love with the same man go for a walk on the banks of a swollen river. One comes back and says the other one fell in and drowned. No one can find the body - but a few months later a wandering bard shows up with a harp made from the dead princess's bones and strung with her hair. The harp plays itself and sings that her sister pushed her into the river. In Patricia C Wrede's retelling of the story, there is a third princess, who knows her sister was a liar and suspects the harp might, too -- especially since there are lies in what it said.
 * Loreena Mckennitt performs an excellent version of this ballad called The Bonny Swans (which is easily findable on YouTube).
 * In yet another version (one with a particularly upbeat and sunny tempo), the elder sister's punishment for drowning her sibling is being boiled in lead. So much fun to sing with one's actual sisters!
 * Ballads in general are full of this sort of thing. Perhaps the most horrifying of the lot is "Long Lankin" (Child #93), in which an itinerant serial killer murders a lord's baby (spectacularly averting Infant Immortality in the process) and then his wife:

we will stab him with a pin,

And the nurse shall hold the basin

for the blood all to run in."

So they pinched him and they pricked him,

then they stabbed him with a pin,

And the false nurse held the basin

for the blood all to run in."


 * Followed by Long Lankin being hanged and the nurse being burned on a pyre at the end of the song.