The Miller- Dragon (VT) 1943 Flanders F
[My title. From Flanders, Ancient Ballads, Vol. 1, 1966, Coffin's notes follow. This version is one of the few US versions that mention what Phillips Barry called "resuscitation-ritual," where the murdered girl's hair and body parts are used to make a fiddle or harp. Unfortunately it's not enough to be considered a complete version.
R. Matteson 2014]
The Twa Sisters [Notes by Coffin]
(Child 10)
One finds more confusions and more plot variations in the versions of this song than in those of any other Child ballad. Texts A-C below follow the most common English pattern: the "singing bones" motif is absent; the "bow down, I'll be true" refrain is used; the miller robs the drowning girl, shoves her back in the water, and is later executed; and the events teeter on the edge of comedy. In A and B the elder sister is burned at the stake. C, in which the two sisters, one drowned, flee "beyond the seas"; D, in which the miller is the father and lover of the girls and rescues the younger; and E, in which "to church they all did go" at the end, are quite typical of the mix-ups that can occur in this song. C, it would appear, has been learned in some fashion or other from Lucy E. Broadwood and J. A. Fuller Maitland (English County Songs [London, 1893], 118). For texts similar to D, see JAF, XVIII, 131, and J. Harrington Cox, Folk Songs of the South (Cambridge, 1925), 2A. For one similar to E, see Harold Thompson's Body, Boots, and Britches (New York, 1940), 393. Songs such as the F fragment which actually include the harp made from the dead girl's body are rare in America. See Belden, 17, for a list of the few texts that preserve this trait which Child called the germ of the ballad. Archer Taylor, who studied the British backgrounds of this song in JAF, XLIII, 238 L., concludes that American variants with their use of the "beaver hat" (see A and D below) and their failure to describe the yellow hair of the victim (see A-E below) are from English, rather than Scottish, sources. For a bibliography, as well as an extensive cataloguing of story variations that have been worked off this English theme in America, see Coffin, 38-42. For a start on a British bibliography, see Dean-Smith, 113; Ord, 430 f.; and Greig and Keith, 9 f. Barry includes the song in British Ballads from Maine, 40.
The story itself is widespread in Europe in both tale and ballad form. Paul Brewster has recently done a complete study of "The Twa Sisters" in FFC, No. 147 (1953). He also included a good working bibliography to both the tale and the ballad in his Ballads and Songs of Indiana (Indiana University Publications, Folklore Series No. I [Bloomington, 1940], 42-43). He feels the song began in Norway before 1600, spread through Scandinavia, and then to Britain and the west. However, he indicates that the folktale tradition (see Aarne-Thompson, Mt. 780) is Slavic in origin. Harbison Parker's remarks in JAF, LXIV, 347-60, are not out of sympathy with this point of view.
In the light of this scholarship, it is fascinating to find a Polish version of the ballad like G in New England. Mrs. Stankiewicz' text, in which the younger sister is murdered during a raspberrying contest and in which the flute is made from reeds at the grave, is probably a folk variant of a ballad "Maliny," written in 1829 by Alexander Chodzko (1804-91). See Phillips Barry's detailed discussion of this text in BFSSNE, X, 2-5, and XI, 2-4. Pertinent bibliography beyond what is given there can be had by consulting the following: Paul Brewster's monograph cited above; the earlier study by Lutz Mackenson in FFC, No. 49 (Helsinki, 1923); Child, I, 124-25; and Jonas Balys, Lithuanian Narrative Folksongs (Washington, D.C., 1954), G7, 119-20. In Slavic countries it is more common to find "The Twa Sisters" as a tale than as a ballad. See also, BFSSI/E, VII, 14, for a Swedish-American text.
The five tunes for Child 10 fall into three categories: 1) The versions sung by Eaton, Price, and White are fairly closely related, corresponding to group Ba in BC1 with the Eaton version a simplified form of the other two. The Montague tune corresponds to group Bd in BC1, being distantly related to the others, while the Polish melody does not seem to have musical relationship to any Anglo-American ballad tunes.
F. "The Miller." Title unknown. This fragment was recited by Daniel Dragon of Ripton, Vermont, who learned it from his mother. M. Olney, Collector July 9, 1943.
The miller came out with hook in hand
And dragged this maiden to dry land.
. . . .
He made fiddle-sticks of her golden hair
He made a harp of her breast bone
And the harp began to play alone.