Harp of Bone, Land of Green
Today, we find ourselves on Halloween, All Hallows Eve, this most thin of days as it overhangs the abyss of winter like a outcropping of rock floating over a very long drop. And I have a confession to make: Halloween has never been my favorite holiday. I know, I know, but didn’t I just tell you about how I love fall with the zeal of the convert? How could I not love Halloween? Well, the answer, like so many things with me, is an aesthetic one: I find a lot of modern Halloween tacky, at least here in America. I don’t like the cheap polyester costumes that will end up in a landfill, I don’t like the brightly colored drinks that seem to appear, I don’t want to eat anything that looks like worms or eyeballs, I don’t like haunted anything, I have a visceral hatred of face paint, I don’t like the music that shows up in stores, and I don’t like Halloween movies. Except for Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus gets a pass. It also raises my historical hackles since, as with a handful of other holidays, it produces a stinking swamp of bad history that spans the whole of the internet. And I really, really hate bad history.
I know, I’m sorry, I must sound like a terrible snob. But Halloween is the holiday where I most keenly feel the gap between what I want it to be, and what it actually is. Because there are things I love! I like pumpkins, and I like the fact that before we carved pumpkins, we carved turnips. I like bonfires. I like making soul cakes (my husband is getting the ingredients together as we speak), I like cider, I like that the holiday (like any old holiday) is amorphous and has worn many a guise, most of which are simply lost to us. I like how when we lived in Belgium, there’s not Halloween per se, but on All Souls Day families gathered in the cemeteries where their parents and grandparents and great grandparents were buried to have picnics beside the graves of their departed loved ones. I love the bittersweet comingling of love and loss, the quiet boldness of turning toward the dark with a light in hand, the symbolic weight of decaying leaves. The day feels important, and we’ve come up with many different stories to tell us why. And some of those stories are a lot more modern than the internet history swamp would lead you to believe, and it’s probably not the ones you’re thinking of. Alas, it would seem that when it comes Halloween, I am out of step. Adrift.
But not totally! Because while I chafe against so much of the accoutrements of this day, I have one obsession that feels right at home: murder ballads. Yes! Ballads, about murder. As you will know if you’ve read the “Song on Repeat” section of my September Equinox newsletter, I love murder ballads, and have since middle school at least. Which is weird! I don’t like true crime, I don’t generally enjoy horror, so what is going on with my murder ballad obsession? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially since The Carterhaugh School has a course on ballads (including murder ballads! Ahhhh!) starting today, which I am obviously enrolled in. I mean, what is this?
I’ll be honest, it’s not something about myself I bring up at parties. I don’t generally lead with, “I can sing ‘Henry Lee’ from memory. It’s about a woman who murders her lover and throws his body down a well ‘cause reasons. Want to hear it?” To normal people, this is morbid, strange, and eminently suspect, and to another subset of people it telegraphs that I might be into a wide swathe of things I’m—ah—just not into, and then there’s a tiny wonderful subset of people who just get it. I just… like the murder ballads! Maybe it’s because I like the window they provide into the depths of human nature, maybe it’s the music itself, maybe it’s because of the symbolic language they’re rife with, maybe it’s because I imprinted on them at a young age, or maybe it’s because I’m an Enneagram type four and we’re notoriously just a little obsessed with death! Yeah, or all of those! Psychoanalyze away, internet. Your guess is as good as mine. But love them I do, and so for this thinnest of days, here are two of my favorite murder ballads, along with some of my thoughts on what makes each of them so captivating.
Let’s begin with the land of green…
“Lie there, lie there, little Henry Lee
‘til the flesh drops from your bones.
For the girl you have in that merry green land
can wait forever for you to come home.”
The version of Henry Lee I know is from the album Murder Ballads by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, featuring PJ Harvey as a guest artist. Their voices are the perfect vehicles for this weird tale and its weird words, and I can and do sing this song on a loop while doing chores. (My husband would be completely justified in finding this mildly upsetting, but he assures me it’s one of the things he loves about me.) The general plot here is that a man—Henry Lee—tells his lover that he is leaving her for another woman. Overcome by jealousy, she stabs him repeatedly before throwing his body down a well more than 100 feet deep. Here’s the thing about this song that really gets me though: This other woman, the one Henry Lee is leaving his lover for, is referred to as a girl in “that merry green land.” Now, I do want to emphasize that what follows is simply the product of my own musings and not the result of actual research—I have not looked into this at all—but to me, that sounds like Henry Lee has been enthralled by a fairy lover. And that changes things!
What we had was a tale as old as time: unfaithful lover murdered by jealous partner. But if one of the fae is involved? Different! Has Henry Lee been ensnared against his will? Does the jealous lover perceive what she’s done as a sort of mercy killing, freeing him from enslavement to this entity? And the human woman knows that no matter how lovely she is, she cannot compete with the eternal perfect beauty of a fairy woman. Indeed, she even sings “You won’t find a girl in this damn world that will compare with me.” She’s telling the truth! It took a woman from the other world to take her lover away. Imagine the pain of this: One can be the most beautiful, perfect, incomparable woman alive, and it isn’t enough against the lure of the ephemeral, the slightly imaginary. The new. And here we are back in the realm of the mundane, a tale as old as time: Even a perfect woman, when she becomes familiar, once her complexities are revealed, once she requires things of her partner, can be cast aside in favor of a fantasy. In favor of an eternal, unchanging beauty that makes no demands of a man even as she takes his soul as payment. Of course the jilted lover is angry. Of course we’re angry.
There are so many resonances here. I think of the ballet La Sylphide. Set in Scotland, it tells the story of how a young man leaves his fiancée—a lively, beautiful, flesh and blood woman—to chase after a sylph, a spirit that embodies a fantasy of perfect demure femininity. He ends up losing both, and his best friend marries his fiancée instead. This ballet has been interpreted (sorry, I don’t remember where I first read this, but it was in an actual book, not the internet) as a commentary on the unattainable feminine ideals that permeated Victorian culture. No woman could live up to them, yet men kept looking for them, forever projecting them into the face of the woman just around the corner. And now, what of the advent of AI girlfriends? The fairy lovers are suddenly real, and they live in the merry green land of the matrix. (And yes, that is an interesting idea for a short story, and yes, I am working on it!) The technology is new, but the dynamics aren’t, and we could do worse than look to a murder ballad to help us make sense of those dynamics. But because this is the internet, and I need to be extra clear: Please don’t look to the ballads for what to actually do.
And now, onto our second ballad…
“I’ll give you neither hand nor glove
a hey ho and me bonny-o
unless you give me your own true love
the swans swim so bonny-o.”
Loreena McKennitt’s “The Bonny Swans” was one of my first murder ballads. This is her version of “The Twa Sisters,” and it involves an older sister pushing her younger sister into a river and refusing to help her out unless the younger sister gives up her beloved to the elder. The younger sister refuses, and the elder lets her drown. Eventually, the younger sister’s body washes up on a miller’s dam where the miller’s daughter mistakes her for a swan. A harpist then makes a harp from the younger sister’s body: harp pins from her fingers, the sound box from her breast bone, and strings from her hair. Upon completion, the harp begins to play on its own and it tells the younger sister’s story, and ultimately accuses her older sister, who drowned her for the sake of a man.
Like “Henry Lee” above, it might seem that we are again dealing with jealousy and betrayal, and yes, we are, on at least one level. But there’s another lens I like to look at this ballad with: ATU Type 403: The White Bride and the Black One. I think I first made this connection while reading Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman’s Life by the journalist Joan Gould, and it’s stuck with me. She doesn’t reference “The Twa Sisters,” but the parallells are there to see. These stories play out much like the ballad above, an older sister murders, attempts to murder, or in some way attempts to usurp a younger sister for the sake of man. And the connection is further strengthened by the golden, fair hair of the younger sister in the ballad, as she would be the so-called “white bride” making the older sister the “black bride."
While I don’t generally love heavily psychological approaches to fairy tales, which Gould certainly veers into, what she had to say about the black bride and the white bride intrigued me: “Just when a woman thinks she is about to enter a permanent union with a man, when there seems to be nothing to do but live happily conjoined ever after, this fairy tale tells us that she splits in two (193)” and well, yeah, I could feel that. I was planning my own wedding at the time, so it was all at the front of my mind. The “white bride” wants to be married, part of a partnership, and has a trust and idealism that isn’t entirely warranted given the realities of yoking yourself to another messy human being, something she has precisely no experience in, while the black bride is like “You little idiot, you are in no way ready for this! You have not seen the things I’ve seen, you have not met the men I’ve met. Just stay down there, and let me handle this. I will force him through a sieve and if he comes out the other side alive, maybe, maybe I will get out of the way and let you marry him.” In a weird way, there’s definitely some protective big sister energy going on with the “black bride” there.
But there’s more to find in the text of the ballad. After being pushed into the river, the younger sister says “Oh sister, oh sister, pray lend me your hand…and I will give you house and land.” Because this is the thing, the white bride can provide for the black bride. Through marriage, she gains “house and land” but the black bride either cannot be bought or she finds her independence to be too high a price, and she lets her sister, the innocent part of herself, drown. Going even deeper down the fairy tale rabbit hole, in addition to the white bride and the black bride, we have the miller’s daughter dressed in red. Black, white, red: the three primordial colors of the fairy tale. I don’t have a theory for what is going on there, and that’s okay, because I think if you pin things down too neatly, you kill them even as you misunderstand them, but I love the possibilities the appearance of those three colors offers. Now, I’m not at all sure that “The Twa Sisters,” would be categorized as an ATU 403 tale type, but they seem to be sister tales you might say, like Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard, and I like reflecting the ballad off of the fairy tale to see what emerges in the relationship.
But when I think of why I find “The Bonny Swans” to be so absorbing, it’s not the philosophizing, it’s the image of the bone harp telling its story. Guys, I think about this song all the time. I think about it while driving, I hum it to myself as I walk along river banks (morbid, I know), I swim for hours in the bottomless image contained in the line “He made a harp from her breastbone.” Aren’t all our breastbones harps? If there’s anything I learned from being a dancer, it’s that the set of the chest communicates the things we cannot say, the things that must remain unsaid, the things our bodies know that we don’t, the things that can only come out sideways in art. Sadness sits there in a certain way, while love and joy make it weightless, fear constricts the breastbone like a python constricts its prey, while betrayal, betrayal hollows it out, like the soundbox of a harp. For me, the body as storyteller, as ensouled instrument, as keeper and knower of the truth, speaks to some of the very hard to articulate reasons I became a dancer in the first place. I don’t want to own a bone harp, I want to be a bone harp. A living instrument capable of transmuting suffering into beauty and truth.
So there you have it, two murder ballads accompanied by my wild thoughts to keep you company on your All Hallows Eve. For all the thoughts I just threw out there though, they feel rather like the shadows of the songs rather than their marrow. Where they really come alive is in the way the violin floats up and then slides back down as Loreena McKennitt sings “sometimes she sank, sometimes she swam” or in the way PJ Harvey hits the low notes at the end of her verses; you can feel the walls of “that deep, deep well that’s more than 100 feet.” Ballads are living things, go listen to them. Who knows, you too may become obsessed.
The art featured with today’s post is “Young Girl Carrying a Pumpkin” by the Italian artist Fausto Zonaro, 1889. Sourced from Artvee.
