ix: Foraging through Folklore
Making no bones about the truth Ella Leith What did he doe with her breast-bone? He made him a violl to play thereupon. What did he doe with her fingers so small? He made him peggs to his violl with-all. ...And then bespake the strings all three, ‘O yonder is my sister that drowned mee.’ These lines are found in a 1656 broadside entitled The Miller and the King’s Daughter, one of the earliest printed versions of the famous ballad usually known as The Two Sisters (Child, 1904:18-20). In the story, a girl is drowned by her jealous sister and her corpse washes up on the shore, where a passing musician uses her bones to fashion a musical instrument which, ‘to its owner's surprise, ... proves to have a mind of its own: it repeatedly sings a song telling about the wicked sibling's crime’ (Nagy, 1984:183). Bones, it seems, are the ultimate truth-tellers. The tale of The Two Sisters belongs to a category of world folktales known as International Tale Type 780: The Singing Bone. Musical bones appear often in tales from this category, but bones also appear in category Type 720: The Juniper Tree. The tale that gives this category its name was collected by the Brothers Grimm. In it, the bones of a little boy’s mother are buried beneath a Juniper (Juniperus spp.). Later, the poor boy is killed by his stepmother and fed to his father in a stew. His bones are then collected by his 38
grieving stepsister and laid under the tree where his mother is buried: The branches moved apart, then moved together again, just as if someone were rejoicing and clapping his hands. At the same time a mist seemed to rise from the tree, and in the center of this mist it burned like a fire, and a beautiful bird flew out of the fire singing magnificently, and it flew high into the air, and when it was gone, the juniper tree was just as it had been before, and the cloth with the bones was no longer there. (Grimm, 1812) The bird sings to various craftsmen in exchange for gifts. Appley and Orangey— a Scots version of this tale, with a female protagonist —contains a particularly creepy song: Ma mammy killt me Ma daddy et me Ma sister Jeannie pickit my bones And pit em between twa marble stones
