Family-Unfriendly Death/Ballads
- 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 pinch him, we will prick him, |
- Followed by Long Lankin being hanged and the nurse being burned on a pyre at the end of the song.