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 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 / An Ah growd in a bonnie wee doodoo.

The doo-doo, or dove, sings to a watchmaker, a toymaker and an ironmonger. She then flies to the roof of her former home and calls down to her father to go to the chimney and hold out his hand. He receives a watch. She calls to her sister, who receives a doll.

Oh an the mother, she’s fair excitit, she doesnae ken whit tae dae, ye see. “Is ma mammy there?” “Aye, she’s here.” “Well tell her tae look up the chumney!”’ She goes an she’s lookin up the chumney. An [the doo-doo] lops this big exe, an she gies it a throw doon, and cuts the heid clean aff the mammy. (Stewart, 1972)

Bones, then, are all about truth and justice.

Swearing oaths on the relic bones of saints was so common in the Middle Ages that ‘at the Synod of Nicaea (787) it was commanded that no church should be consecrated which was not in possession of such a relic, under penalty of excommunication’ (Brinton, 1890:21). Breaking an oath so sworn was a terrible sin, due to a ‘magical virtue supposed to reside in bones’ (ibid.). The permanence of bones after the rest of the corpse has decomposed makes them the quintessential emblem of death, close to the afterlife, imbued with knowledge beyond human ken. They insist on honesty.

In a 1955 interview, Jeems Wilson (1885-1962) recounted a Shetland belief that bones— ‘beens’ —could be used to determine the guilt of accused witches: hung at the church door, the suspects ‘were made to touch the beens and the beens drapped blud [blood], and aa were convictit of witchcreft.’ In the Highlands, the shoulder-blade of a sheep or other animal could determine the future within ‘the circle of the ensuing year’:

Before the shoulder-blade is inspected, the whole of the flesh must be stripped clean off, without the use of any metal, either by a bone, or a hard wooden knife, or by the teeth. Most of the discoveries are made by inspecting the spots that may be observed in the semi-transparent part of the blade; but very great proficients penetrate into futurity through the opaque parts also. (Thoms, 1878:178)

In Pennsylvania, the severity of the upcoming Winter could be predicted ‘by inspecting the breast-bone of a goose killed in November. If the surface has dark stains, the winter will be bitter; if the bone is white and clean, an open season may be anticipated’ (Brinton, 1890:18). And how many of us conclude a roast dinner by pulling the wishbone of the chicken or turkey to determine whose wishes will come true?

Bones have also been used as amulets and charms:

If you are bewitched, get a toad, kill it and take the breast-bone out ... [and] burn the bone. As the bone is burning, if the person who has bewitched you does not tell somebody, he or she will burst. (Bales, 1939:70)

In parts of Eastern England, an animal’s ‘witchbone’ would be carefully extracted and carried by horsemen, who believed it would make any horse obey them (Rudkin, 1933:199) and any locked barn door open for them (Bales, 1939:69). Here are East Anglian instructions for getting hold of a witch-bone:

Take a walking toad (you must watch it to see that it does not hop), and hang it on a line by one leg, or bury it in an anthill until only the bones remain. Take these bones and throw them into a running stream. Keep the bone that goes “against the tide” as it sinks (this does not always happen). This is the witch-bone. (ibid)

According to a Lincolnshire man, ‘you must get 'old of this 'ere bone afore the Devil gets it, an' if you get it an' keep it alius [always] by you ... then you can witch; as well as that, you'll be safe from bein' witched yourself’ (Rudkin, 1933:200).

Animal bones may be used in this way, but human bones must be treated with the utmost respect. Desecrating human remains was and is deeply taboo in many cultures. It was an early belief that ‘the soul continued to dwell in the bones, and that their disturbance or destruction was ... a direct attack on the individual, and very much more than a mere insult to his memory or his relatives’ (Brinton, 1890:19). In many traditions, we find tales involving ghosts chasing and tormenting those who have taken their bones (ibid, p18), and of bad luck following those who do not heed the injunction to leave the dead in peace. In another legend from Shetland, collected from Alex Laurenson (1899-1981) in 1974, a landowner called Nicolson was promised fine livestock if he brought a human bone from under the pulpit at Weisdale Kirk back to his own local church. It took Nicolson three attempts to reach Weisdale, as first his mare, then his gelding refused to take him all the way there; finally, he arrived on a stallion. Inside the church, he dug up a bone, but—

he heard a voice tellin him to lay back that one, that was his... grandfather’s bone. He laid it back, he picked up a second one and he heard another voice tellin him to drop that, that was some of his ancestors’ bones. He took the third one and he says “Ah’m takin this, come what may.” And he got onto his horse again and he come back, and he were annoyed all the way, sounds and lightening and all these sort o thing that cud be goin, and at the Loch o Voe there was three heavy stones thrown at him, big rocks, they can be seen there yet. [...] An he got there to the kirk and lodged the bone under the pulpit, but when he come oot again his horse was dead outside the gate.

Nicolson received his promised livestock, but the animals didn’t prosper, and the laird put a legal claim against him that caused the loss of the title deeds to his lands. The dead have a bone to pick with those that disrespect them.

Many communities have believed that ‘the personality of the individual clung to his skeleton’ (Brinton, 1890:18), that the bones carry something of the essence of the self. I think there’s something of that at work in the ballad of The Two Sisters: the harp or fiddle made of bones cannot just be an instrument, but must express the sorrow of the deceased person. Another of my favourite bone motifs is found in The Green Man of Knowledge, in which the Green Man’s daughter helps the protagonist, Jack, outwit her father by completing three impossible tasks. The first task is to retrieve a ring from the bottom of a deep well; to achieve this, she makes him a ladder from her bare bones. “Just be careful not to slip and crack one of the rungs,” she warns him. “Otherwise you may break my neck.” What a visceral image of love and selfsacrifice. To my mind, Jack doesn’t really deserve her— ever feckless, he does slip, luckily only breaking her pinkie finger. This is the ‘heart finger’ (Taylor, 1933), the finger of pacts and promises (Burne, 1914:288). Later in the tale, after the thankless heroine has completed the tasks for the useless Jack, rescued him from the castle and even murdered her father (is Jack really worth all this?!), she has to go away for a time. Jack is enchanted to forget all about her; only when she turns up at his wedding and shows him her crooked pinkie finger does he remember all she’s done for him. Once again, the bone— broken, like his promise and her heart — reveals the truth.

References

Bales, E.G. (1939) ‘Folklore from West Norfolk’, in Folklore, 50(1):66-75

Brinton, D.G. (1890) ‘Folk-Lore of Bones’, in The Journal of American Folklore, 3(8):17-22

Burne, C.S. (1914) The Handbook of Folklore. Sidgwick & Jackson: London

Child, F.J. (1904) English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Houghton Mifflin Co: Boston. Full text available on archive.org

Evans, A. (2011) ‘The Levitating Altar of Saint Illtud’, in Folklore, 122(1):55-75

Grimm, J. & W. (1812) Children and Household Tales. Compiled, translated, and classified by D.L. Ashliman. sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html [accessed 11/11/21]

Nagy, J.F. (1984) ‘Vengeful Music in Traditional Narrative’, in Folklore, 95(2):182-190

Rudkin, E.H. (1933) ‘Lincolnshire Folklore’ , in Folklore, 44(2):189-214

Taylor, M.P. (1933) ‘Evil Eye’, in Folklore, 44(3):308-309

Thoms, J.W. (1878) ‘Divination by the BladeBone’, in The Folk-Lore Record, 1(1): 176-179

Stewart, S. (1972), ‘Appley and Orangey’, recording in the Terry Yarnell English & Irish Folk Music Collection, sounds.bl.uk/Worldand-traditional-music [accessed 04/11/2021]

Interviews available from the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches website, www.tobarandualchais.co.uk:

Jeems Wilson: Track 27429

Alex Laurenson: Track 72776