Thereby Hangs a (Folk) Tale


In the last post, I suggested that there seemed to be a certain implausible, or perhaps contrived, quality, to the narrative of   “Babylon,” “The Bonnie Banks o’ Fordie,” or “Fair Flowers of the Valley,” (Child 14).  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it has aspects akin to fairy tale or folk tale, and that the story of a highwayman’s woodland challenge along the road doesn’t connect as obviously to the psychological or other dynamics that drive the continued vitality of some other murder ballads. There are obvious differences with the Norwegian fable “Three Billy Goats Gruff” for example, but the journey of siblings into the wilderness to confront some kind of monster there is shared between the two.  Unfortunately for the older two siblings in “Babylon,” the younger, cleverer one comes last. 


Part of the contrived feeling comes for me from the sense that it seemed unlikely that the robber would not recognize the sisters or the sisters the robber.  (We’ll again just move past, at least for the moment, why only the youngest sister thinks to mention it, and then only after her sisters are dead.)  The Traditional Ballad Index entry that I mentioned in the previous post, provides some explanation, indicating that it was often customary for children among the nobility to be raised apart.  We’ll get to some of the implications of that in the next post, whether we want to or not.


You’ll see among the variant lyrics collected by Child that in some instances the assailant is not designated as a robber, but a banished lord or knight.  This lends some credibility (to the extent that credibility really matters) to the possibility that the siblings might have known about each other, or at least the sisters about the brother, but not recognized each other.


Child’s entry on this ballad explains that it is familiar “to all branches of the Scandinavian race,” and that it bears more than a passing resemblance to the Danish tale of “Herr Truels’ Daughters.”  In this folk tale, three robbers kill three sisters on the road, and then happen to lodge at the home of the girls’ parents for the night.  The mother discovers the girls’ things among the items in robbers’ gear, and goes to get her husband.  The husband, Herr Truels, asks the robbers if they know who their father is, and they respond that they had been abducted by robbers fourteen years prior.  Their first crime was killing the three maids in the wood the day prior.  Herr Truels explains that they have killed their sisters, and offers to help them get away.  But they refuse, going to their execution, for “life for life is meet.”


New Tales for Old?


In the midst of a busy work week last week, I was deliberating over what song to take up next, and trying to figure out what really grabbed me.  Normally, I listen to the various iterations of a song, take some time to inhabit the world of the song imaginatively, and figure out a plan from there.  Although I had identified O’Brien’s “Fair Flowers” long ago as a potential subject for the blog, something just wasn’t clicking.  This is not to criticize his arrangement or performance, which I think are both excellent, but there was something about the song that wasn’t hooking me in.  The other versions weren’t much help, either.

Armando Maggi (photo by Jason Smith)

In the course of this deliberation, I happened upon this article about the work of Armando Maggi in the University of Chicago Alumni Magazine, accompanied by this interview with author Robert Coover. Through reading these pieces, I began to get some traction on the issue with which I was wrestling. 


In the first piece, Armando Maggi discusses his belief that fairy tales have become “exhausted,” and no longer carry meaning in the way they once did.  He argues that we still need a comparable mythology in order to sustain meaning within culture.  “We cannot live without mythology.  It’s the way we reason, the way we survive, the way we make sense of our world.  It’s just that the stories we’ve been using–mythic stories, fairy tales, legends, they’re not working anymore.”  One of the reasons this is happening is that we have continued to sift these stories and to strip out elements that seem unrelated.  In Maggi’s discussion in the article, this process is exemplified in the “Disney-fication” of stories that were usually a lot darker, and significantly more untidy.  Elements that were thought to be inessential were stripped away, only to have us much later find out just how essential they were.


So, was “Babylon” an exhausted story?  Had its cultural context faded away too much?  Are there references in the song that earlier listeners would have heard or remembered, but were now stripped away or no longer decipherable?  We’ll see in the next post that there probably are.

Robert Coover

Coover, for his part, makes a distinction between myth and tale.  “Tale is the underbelly of myth.  Myth is head, tale body; myth power, tale resistance; myth nice, tale naughty; myth structure, tale flow; myth king, tale fool; myth sacred; tale profane.”  He appears to agree with Maggi that we continue to think from within these tales, but that the fit is often not comfortable.  “We are all caught up in tales dreamed up by others long dead.  Most people accept these imposed narratives; it’s easier to get through life that way.  But that mindless surrender to one’s mythic environment is what these characters [in my stories] are resisting, and they might show the way for readers to recognize and resist their own entrapments.”  


The important passage of the interview with Coover, relative to my reflections about this song, is at the end, when he states, “The very arbitrariness of bringing a story to a clean ending–this happened and then that happened, and here’s the inevitable result–can be reassuring and momentarily delightful, but it’s too unlike life itself to be ultimately satisfying.  Being left, instead, with a larger vision of the whole, with all its paradoxes and potential, is or can be more fulfilling than simply knowing that they killed the wolf and put stones in his belly.”  Perhaps it wasn’t the contrived situation, but the apparently relatively tidy resolution.  Perhaps it was that the murderer only thought his life was properly forfeit once he realized that it was his sisters, and not some other innocent damsel, that he had killed.  Whatever moral complexity was involved didn’t attach to the murder per se.  


So, what was going on with this song?  It obviously fit within our realm of discussion.  It was a traditional murder ballad, with tragic elements of misunderstanding, repentance of a kind, and a final, fatal gesture of atonement, but it wasn’t ringing true.   And, by “ringing true,” I suppose I’m identifying here that it wasn’t really inviting me back to further reflection, at least in the same way some of the other songs do.  


There are probably a few reasons for this, some of which I’ll get into in the next post, but the one to highlight for now is probably the sense that the idea of a roadside confrontation among siblings met as strangers was probably nowhere near as foreign to the listeners of that time as it is now, or as it may be now.  If you read the Traditional Ballad Index entry linked above, you’ll see that the author there gives some scope to the possibility that advances in reproductive may change this situation back a bit.  Again, we’ll get to that more in the next post.  


A Tidier Resolution?

Nic Jones

Then, looking at the variants of the song, I began to suspect that some others were reckoning with this, too.  Child’s Variant E for this ballad pursues a different kind of reckoning.  This web site contrasts Nic Jones’s version with Jon Boden’s.  Boden’s verses, while different, essentially contain the exact same narrative as Tim O’Brien’s.  Jones’s version is a bit more along the lines of Variant E.


“The Bonnie Banks of Fordie,” by Nic Jones (Spotify)


“Banks of Fordie,” by Jon Boden (Spotify)


The pivotal change in the Variant E versions, of course, is that the assailant is no longer the victims’ brother, but is driven away and killed when the sisters’ actual brother happens by–too late for the first two sisters, but just in time for the third.


But, with this different turn of events something happens to the song.  In the same motion, the song makes a whole lot more sense as a narrative (at least to modern ears), but simultaneously becomes significantly less tragic.  So, ironically, the only elements of the song that make it seem worth singing, that make it tragic rather than just brutal, are the ones that make it seem the most unlikely.  This is telling me that something within the song is hanging in there.


Next up


In the next post, we’ll take a look at the importance of refraining.  


But, before moving on, and because this post has been relatively low on the musical front, I’ll add another strong performance of “Babylon.”  This time “The Bonnie Banks of Vergie-O,” performed by Newfoundland’s Jean Hewson.  This one, per the person posting the video, is a North American variant of the song.  It’s more energetic than most–not as poignant in its arrangement as O’Brien’s, perhaps, but clearly presented as a going concern, if you will, musically speaking, and not a museum piece.  








(Disclaimer:  This is a fan video of still shots set to the music, not a production of Hewson’s own devising.)