Vengeful Music in Traditional Narrative

Abstract

IN this paper I will be examining a cluster of story motifs and ideas relating to music and poetry that appears in several European narrative traditions of both the preChristian past and recent times. This cluster-which I call the Singing Bone Pattern-is to be found in stories that have to do with the invention of a special musical instrument. In these narratives, the instrument-or music in general-functions as a means of taking revenge and gaining retribution for the instrument itself or the performer who plays upon it. Music serves to protect fundamental cultural realities (such as marriage and the family) or even to uphold the cosmogonic structure. Although music clearly has a cultural purpose in these stories (which include myths-stories about gods-as well as stories with more mundane characters), this powerful expression of human creativity also reveals a 'natural' side. Music, as it is represented in tales that feature the Singing Bone Pattern, proves to be an unclassifiable phenomenon, a sine qua non of human society that paradoxically transcends the distinctions between culture and nature, living and dead, animate and inanimate. The performance of music in these tales is in effect a shamanic journey undertaken by the musical performer and the musical instrument. In the course of examining these stories from various European traditions, we detect a fascinatirng ideology of music and musical performance which probably is not limited to one cultural area and may well be found, with further research, in traditions of ritual, story, and belief worldwide. The outstanding example of our narrative pattern is the mdrchen catalogued as Type 780, 'The Singing Bone,' in the Aarne-Thompson Folktale Index. But, while this mdrchen provides an excellent introduction to the pattern (as well as the name by which I designate it), in fact any of the narratives that I will be discussing could be used as a starting point for this analysis of a story pattern which appears in many different narrative traditions and genres. The numerous versions of the mdrchen that have been collected in Europe and elsewhere were studied by Lutz Mackensen, who published his findings in 1923.' Mackensen's study of 'The Singing Bone' was very much a product of the Finnish method of folktale scholarship. So, even though the monograph remains an invaluable bibliographical resource, it does not shed much light on the possible meanings and dynamics of the mdrchen's themes, or on the story pattern underlying it. In British and Scandinavian oral traditions there exists a ballad known as 'The Two Sisters,' which is a localized variant of Tale Type 780. Paul Brewster published a monograph on this ballad in 1953;2 like the Mackensen work, Brewster's is dominated by historical-geographical concerns and thus does not offer much insight into the thematic structure of the ballad. As we shall see later, the miirchen and the ballad not only are generated by the same story pattern but also present virtually identical stories. In the majority of collected versions, the marchen begins with two or three siblings