The Bonny Swans
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The Bonny Swans
"The Twa Sisters" ("The Two Sisters") is a traditional murder ballad, dating at least as far back as the mid 17th century. The song recounts the tale of a girl drowned by her jealous sister. At least 21 English variants exist under several names, including "Minnorie" or "Binnorie", "The Cruel Sister", "The Wind and Rain", "Dreadful Wind and Rain", "Two Sisters", "The Bonny Swans" and the "Bonnie Bows of London". The ballad was collected by renowned folklorist Francis J. Child as Child Ballad 10 and is also listed in the Roud Folk Song Index ( Roud 8)., Whilst the song is thought to originate somewhere around England or Scotland (possibly Northumbria), extremely similar songs have been found throughout Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. Synopsis Two sisters go down by a body of water, sometimes a river and sometimes the sea. The older one pushes the younger in and refuses to pull her out again; generally the lyrics explicitly state her intent to drown her younger sister. Her ...
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Murder Ballad
Murder ballads are a subgenre of the traditional ballad form dealing with a crime or a gruesome death. Their lyrics form a narrative describing the events of a murder, often including the lead-up and/or aftermath. The term refers to the content, and may be applied to traditional ballads, part of oral culture. Defining the subgenre The term ballad, applied to traditional or folk music, means a narrative song. Within ballads, the "event song" is dedicated to narrating a particular event, and the murder ballad is a type of event song in which the event is a murder. This definition can be applied also to songs composed self-consciously within, or with reference to, the traditional generic conventions. Atkinson, referring to traditional English ballads, comments that "there is no shortage of murders in the corpus of ballads ..and few of them are concealed with any success." Perspectives are numerous. Some murder ballads tell the story from the point of view of the murderer, or atte ...
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The Types Of The Scandinavian Medieval Ballad
''The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: A Descriptive Catalogue'' (TSB) is the designation for a cataloguing system for Scandinavian ballads. It is also the title of the underlying reference book: ''The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: A Descriptive Catalogue'', edited by Bengt R. Jonsson, Svale Solheim and Eva Danielson, in collaboration with Mortan Nolsøe and W. Edson Richmond, published in 1978 in two places: as volume 5 of the series Skrifter utgivna av svenskt visarkiv (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv), and as volume 59 of series B of Oslo's Instituttet for sammenkignende kulturforskning (The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture) (Oslo, Bergen, and Tromsø: Universitetsforlaget; ). It attempts to classify all specimens of traditional ballads known in one or more of the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faeroese, and the extinct Norn). Structure and scope Cognate ballads are assigned the same "TSB No." such as "A ...
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Balladyna (drama)
''Balladyna'' is a drama written by Juliusz Słowacki in 1834 in Geneva and published in 1839 in Paris. It is a notable work of Polish romanticism, focusing on the issues such as thirst for power and evolution of the criminal mind. The story revolves around the rise and fall of Balladyna, a fictional Slavic queen. One of the most famous and controversial stagings of ''Balladyna'' took place in 1974 at the Grand Theatre in Warsaw. It was directed by Adam Hanuszkiewicz with Anna Chodakowska playing the titular role. The story was set as an opera, ''Goplana'', in 1897. ''Balladyna'' was performed as tragi-comedy in English for the first time in the United Kingdom in November 2018 by Passing Stranger Theatre Company at Drayton Arms Theatre in Kensington, London and directed by Emma Blacklay-Piech, with a Polish actress Anna Krauze in title role. Power and ethics in tragedy ''Balladyna'' has been compared to ''Macbeth'', both being dramas which show how evil and prone to sugge ...
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Romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, clandestine literature, paganism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, libe ...
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Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous member state of the European Union. Warsaw is the nation's capital and largest metropolis. Other major cities include Kraków, Wrocław, Łódź, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Szczecin. Poland has a temperate transitional climate and its territory traverses the Central European Plain, extending from Baltic Sea in the north to Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains in the south. The longest Polish river is the Vistula, and Poland's highest point is Mount Rysy, situated in the Tatra mountain range of the Carpathians. The country is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west. It also shares maritime boundaries with Denmark and Sweden. ...
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The Singing Bone
"The Singing Bone" (german: Der singende Knochen) is a German fairy tale, collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 28. It is Aarne-Thompson type 780. Synopsis A boar lays waste to a country, and two brothers set out to kill it, with the prize being given the princess's hand in marriage. The younger meets a dwarf who gives him a spear, and with it, he kills the boar. Carrying the body off, the man meets his older brother, who had joined with others to drink until he felt brave. The older brother lures him in, gives him drink, and learns of the younger brother's adventure. They then set out to deliver the body to the king, but on passing a bridge, the older kills the younger and buries his body beneath it. He takes the boar himself to the king and marries the king's daughter as prize. One day a shepherd sees a bone under the bridge and uses it to make a mouthpiece for a horn, which sings of the brother's fate: "Ah! Dear shepherd, you are blowing your horn With one of my b ...
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Slovenian Language
Slovene ( or ), or alternatively Slovenian (; or ), is a South Slavic language, a sub-branch that is part of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken by about 2.5 million speakers worldwide (excluding speakers of Kajkavian), mainly ethnic Slovenes, the majority of whom live in Slovenia, where it is the sole official language. As Slovenia is part of the European Union, Slovene is also one of its 24 official and working languages. Standard Slovene Standard Slovene is the national standard language that was formed in the 18th and 19th century, based on Upper and Lower Carniolan dialect groups, more specifically on language of Ljubljana and its adjacent areas. The Lower Carniolan dialect group was the dialect used in the 16th century by Primož Trubar for his writings, while he also used Slovene as spoken in Ljubljana, since he lived in the city for more than 20 years. It was the speech of Ljubljana that Trubar took as a foundation of what lat ...
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Sveriges Medeltida Ballader
''Sveriges Medeltida Ballader'' (''SMB'') is a scholarly edition which compiles, in principle, all of the known Swedish medieval (traditional) ballads in existence, including those from Swedish-speaking parts of Finland. The collection was published between 1983 and 2001 by the Svenskt visarkiv, and edited by , and Sven-Bertil Jansson. The ballads are cross referenced to the corresponding TSB number (''The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad''). Not only that, the ''SMB'' numbers were assigned in the order of ascending TSB type numbers, i.e., SMB 1 was assigned to TSB A 4, ending with SMB 260 assigned to F 75, at the point in time when 260 ballad types were recognized in the collection. But 263 types were given in the final count when the 5th volume was published 2001. (See §Contents of the published volumes). For each ballad type in the collection, all variants in full text have been printed, up to a maximum of 25 variants, arranged chronologically (This means that for abo ...
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Norwegian Language
Norwegian ( no, norsk, links=no ) is a North Germanic language spoken mainly in Norway, where it is an official language. Along with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a dialect continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional varieties; some Norwegian and Swedish dialects, in particular, are very close. These Scandinavian languages, together with Faroese and Icelandic as well as some extinct languages, constitute the North Germanic languages. Faroese and Icelandic are not mutually intelligible with Norwegian in their spoken form because continental Scandinavian has diverged from them. While the two Germanic languages with the greatest numbers of speakers, English and German, have close similarities with Norwegian, neither is mutually intelligible with it. Norwegian is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age. Today there are two official forms of ''written'' Norwegian, (literally ...
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Icelandic Language
Icelandic (; is, íslenska, link=no ) is a North Germanic language spoken by about 314,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language. Due to being a West Scandinavian language, it is most closely related to Faroese, western Norwegian dialects, and the extinct language, Norn. The language is more conservative than most other Germanic languages. While most of them have greatly reduced levels of inflection (particularly noun declension), Icelandic retains a four- case synthetic grammar (comparable to German, though considerably more conservative and synthetic) and is distinguished by a wide assortment of irregular declensions. Icelandic vocabulary is also deeply conservative, with the country's language regulator maintaining an active policy of coining terms based on older Icelandic words rather than directly taking in loanwords from other languages. Since the written language has not changed much, Icelandic speakers can read classic ...
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Faroese Language
Faroese ( ; ''føroyskt mál'' ) is a North Germanic language spoken as a first language by about 72,000 Faroe Islanders, around 53,000 of whom reside on the Faroe Islands and 23,000 in other areas, mainly Denmark. It is one of five languages descended from Old West Norse spoken in the Middle Ages, the others being Norwegian, Icelandic, and the extinct Norn and Greenlandic Norse. Faroese and Icelandic, its closest extant relative, are not mutually intelligible in speech, but the written languages resemble each other quite closely, largely owing to Faroese's etymological orthography. History Around 900 AD, the language spoken in the Faroes was Old Norse, which Norse settlers had brought with them during the time of the settlement of Faroe Islands () that began in 825. However, many of the settlers were not from Scandinavia, but descendants of Norse settlers in the Irish Sea region. In addition, women from Norse Ireland, Orkney, or Shetland often married native Scandinavian m ...
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