Two Sisters: A Song History

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“The Two Sisters” is Child ballad No. 10 and Roud 8, a story in which a knight courts two sisters, favours the younger, and the elder drowns her.[1] Its many titles include “The Twa Sisters,” “Binnorie,” “The Bows of London,” “The Berkshire Tragedy” and “The Wind and Rain.”[2] Francis James Child’s earliest text is a broadside of 1656 called “The Miller and the King’s Daughter,” reprinted two years later in the miscellany Wit Restor’d.[3] In his headnote, Child counted it among the very few old ballads still alive in tradition in the British Isles, with versions from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.[3]

Lithograph sketch of two women in a room, one seated upright and one reclining on a sofa

James McNeill Whistler, The Sisters, transfer lithograph, 1894. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Two sisters of a gentler kind, shown for the title.

Child judged the ballad “as popular with the Scandinavians as with their Saxon cousins,” listing Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese and Icelandic versions, the oldest Icelandic one from the seventeenth century.[3] Paul G. Brewster, in a book-length study, went further and argued that the song began in Norway and travelled to Scotland and England from there.[2] In what Child regarded as the complete form of the story, the drowned girl’s body is made into a harp or fiddle that then exposes the murderer, and in English texts the instrument-maker may be the miller, a harper or a fiddler.[3] The idea of a bone that sings out a crime also turns up in the Grimms’ tale “The Singing Bone,” though the surrounding plot is different.[1] Most versions collected in more recent times have dropped the magical instrument.[2]

Child himself printed one text from Long Island, New York, sent to him by W. W. Newell.[3] Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians gives fourteen texts with tunes, and the Traditional Ballad Index also lists finds from Newfoundland and Jamaica.[1] Sharp took down a version with a “rosemary” refrain from Jane Gentry of Hot Springs, North Carolina, in 1916, and album notes by Kenneth S. Goldstein report that Tristram Coffin listed fourteen story types in America, more than for any other Child ballad found there.[2] Jean Ritchie reported that her family alone knew a dozen versions, and the Ballad Index notes a variant recorded by Kilby Snow in which the killer is the girl’s lover.[1]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Twa Sisters, The [Child 10]".
  2. Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music: "The Twa Sisters / The Two Sisters / The Bows of London / The Wind and Rain".
  3. Project Gutenberg: "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 1 (of 5)" by Francis James Child (No. 10, The Twa Sisters).