The Two Sisters: Prolegomena to a Critical Study by Phillips Barry 1931
[From Bulletin of the Folk Song Society of the Northeast, Number 3, 1931]
The Two Sisters: Prolegomena to a Critical Study
A critical study of a traditional ballad involves a three-fold process of research. There is first to be considered, the folklore background. In the present case it is related to three ancient psychological-mythological traits; the jealous sibling; the ritual of resuscitation (by assembling the parts of a dead body in order to recreate a symbolic body for the habitation of the departed soul); the concept of melody as the natural speech-form of the spirit world. Secondly, there is the question of the origin of the ballad as the artistic expression, through words and music, of a particular folk-complex, --in what locality it took form, and by what routes it has been diffused. The third problem has to do with the re-creation of the ballad in tradition; the development of textual-melodic versions and version-groups; the interpretation of the psychological laws, in conformity with which the multiplicity of versions and the "ballad styles" of text and air have grown up.
Let us illustrate briefly the operation of the critical method, as applied to a topic under each of the foregoing three heads. In a recent study of "The English, Scottish and American Versions of The Twa Sisters" (JAFL., XLII, 238-246), Dr. Archer Taylor has sought to show that there are but two version-groups of the ballad-tradition in English; one Scottish and one English -- that to a late form of the English traditional group, represented by Child Y, the entire corpus of American texts have come. He has not proved his case. In the first place, there are American versions of Scottish and Scotch-Irish tradition (Barry, Eckstorm and Smyth, British Ballads from Maine, B, P. 42; Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, K, p. 104; Child MSS., XVIII, 20 from Iowa, via County Meath, Ireland). Secondly, Child Y, though taken down in 1770, is from the point of view of the traditional life of the ballad, a late and debased text, though not fallen as low as Child R, which show's the taint of the provincial stage. Furthermore, Dr. Taylor ignores the better tradition of Child Z, printed out of place by Child, II, 509, under the head of the Addenda to "Young Beichan," wherefore it was overlooked by Professor Kittredge, who in JAFL, XXX: 287, quotes the 1st stanza of it as from "an American text in Child's Manuscripts," and whose previous note to Professor Reed Smith led the latter to conclude in JAFL, XXVII, 57, that it was one of the texts suspected as spurious by Child and not used by him. Textually Child Z is related to Child U and Maine A (Barry, Eckstorm and Smyth, p. 40); all three show the emergence of a variation of the theme, but none of them have the detail of the story which shows the late development of Child Y and a large number of southern texts, including Virginia A-H.
Child's judgment, which was aesthetic rather than folkloristic in this respect, fixed on his B (the textus receptus of the Falkland Brown Family tradition), which makes the harper but to string his harp with three locks of the drowned sister's yellow hair, as having preserved a more primitive form of the story than A, --which curries out in detail, despite an undercurrent of the comic, the making of the harp out of parts of the body. The science of folk-lore since Child's day has made great strides, particularly in the work of Antti Aarne and the Krohns, father and son, the real founders of the Finnish School , and it should be readily conceded that, maugre the comic, there are more primitive traits in A than in B. Yet Dr. Taylor seems not to part company with Child. Now a critical study of all known documentary and traditional material bearing on the question of the folk-lore background of the ballad not only places it, as Dr. Lutz Mackensen (who uses, however, only traditional material) shows (Der Singende Knochen, FF, Communications, 49), but fixes once and for all the greater antiquity --that is, in the evolution of the ballad theme-- of Child A. Only the Norwegian form of the ballad has the whole ritual of resuscitation carried out in detail; the making of the harp from parts of the body, the revelation by the spirit-voice in the "harp playing all alone," and, finally, the actual restoration to life in the flesh of the younger sister.
The diffusion of the ballad from Scandinavia to Britain has been rightly and generally accepted. Proof is rendered abiolute by a critical study of the music, In Aberdeenshire, the ballad is sung to an air which is widely diffused in British folk-music, --of which the two best sets are the one printed in Bruce's Northumbrian Minstrelsy, p. 61, and the one obtained by Child'- from Thomas Lugton of Kelso (Child IV, in V, 412). This air, through the operation of the law of suggestive-association melodies has split up into many variants, whose relationship to each other is evident on collation. Its relationship, in turn to the following air to the Swedish form of the ballad, De Tva Systrarna, reprinted here from A. I. Arwidsson's Svenska Vornsanger, no. 99, vol. II,
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shows that it can be only a representative of the earlier Scandinavian form which together with the text, passed over into the English tradition of the ballad. The refrain commonly associated with the Scottish form of the ballad is "Binnorie, O Minnorie. . . . Ba the bonnie mill-dams o' Minnorie." The earliest printed set of the Scando-Scottish air bears the title "The Bonnie Milldams o Balgonie"; published by R. A. Smith in The Scotish Minstrel, VI, 72, from which it is reprinted:
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"This plaintful melody,"--says Campbell, "was noted down by the Editor, from the singing of Thomas Hogg, tailor in Thirelstane, "on the classic banks of the Ettrick, in the presence of his ingenious kinsman, author of 'The Queen's Waker,' &c. who kindly accompanied the present Editor in his excursion through Ettrick-forest, in autumn 1816. The two first lines of the original ballad, as sung by Mr. Hogg, are, 'There lives a priest's daughter in this town, Edinbrie, Edinbrie." (Child 20, I, makes the "cruel mother" to have been "a minister's daughter of New York.") A comparison of the Hogg-phrase under a strong accent, in which the subdominant acts as a secondary tonic with the primary tonic related to it as a secondary dominant.
It seems possible that this air, quite different from the Binnorie air, belonged originally to The Cruel Mother, but that certain singers of The Two Sisters preferred it to the older air. On the other hand, Gavin Greig (Last Leaves, p. 22), found a singer in New Deer who sang The Cruel Mother to a set of the Binnorie aft.
P. B.