"The Carnal and the Crane" is
Child Ballad 55 (
Roud
The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud (born 1949), a former librarian in the London ...
306) and a
Christmas carol
A Christmas carol is a carol (a song or hymn) on the theme of Christmas, traditionally sung at Christmas itself or during the surrounding Christmas holiday season. The term noel has sometimes been used, especially for carols of French ori ...
. It depicts a conversation between two birds—apparently, although the species of the "carnal" has never been identified with any certainty, though crow is generally assumed.
Synopsis
A carnal tells a crane about the birth of
Jesus
Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label= Hebrew/ Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religiou ...
: that he was born in a stable, of a virgin, and slept in a manger; that the
Magi
Magi (; singular magus ; from Latin '' magus'', cf. fa, مغ ) were priests in Zoroastrianism and the earlier religions of the western Iranians. The earliest known use of the word ''magi'' is in the trilingual inscription written by Darius t ...
told
King Herod of the birth, Herod said that if it were true, the cock on his table would revive and crow, and the cock did so; that Herod ordered the
Massacre of the Innocents, that
St. Joseph had to flee to Egypt and beasts worshipped Jesus on the way; that a husbandman's seed were miraculously sown and brought to harvest when Jesus passed, he reported that to Herod, and Herod, assuming that the growth has been natural, pulled back because he would never have been able to catch them if they were three-quarters of the year ahead.
Variants
While no very old manuscripts have been found, internal evidence points to the work being older than the texts.
[Francis James Child, ''The English and Scottish Popular Ballads'', v 2, p 7, Dover Publications, New York 1965] It includes several popular legends of the life of Jesus.
The miraculous restoration of a rooster to life is a common motif in European ballads; it frequently appears in a tale in which an innocent person condemned to death is miraculously saved from death, and in which someone expresses disbelief in that miracle as it was unlikely as the rooster's resurrection. This story, with St. Stephen featuring as the hero, appears in Child Ballad 22, "
Saint Stephen and Herod
"St. Stephen and Herod" is Child ballad 22 and a Christmas carol. It depicts the martyrdom of Saint Stephen as occurring, with wild anachronism, under Herod the Great, and claims that that was the reason for St. Stephen's Day being the day afte ...
".
[Francis James Child, ''The English and Scottish Popular Ballads'', v 1, p 233, Dover Publications, New York 1965]
See also
*
List of the Child Ballads
The Child Ballads is the colloquial name given to a collection of 305 ballads collected in the 19th century by Francis James Child
Francis James Child (February 1, 1825 – September 11, 1896) was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, ...
*
List of folk songs by Roud number
This is a list of songs by their Roud Folk Song Index number; the full catalogue can also be found on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website. Some publishers have added Roud numbers to books and liner notes, as has also been done with ...
References
External links
"The Carnal and the Crane"
with notes
Child Ballads
Songs about birds
Songs about Jesus
Christmas carols
Year of song unknown
{{Folk-song-stub