Karly

There’s a particular kind of horror that doesn’t need blood to unsettle you. No screeching violins, no chase scenes, no gory aftermath, just a song.

A soft voice. A recurring refrain.
A sister. A river. A harp.

Before the true crime podcast. Before the Gothic novel. Before Law and Order marathons and folk horror cinema, there were murder ballads. Passed from mouth to mouth, they told stories of betrayal, jealousy, revenge, and grief. Often sung from the perspective of the victim, or with just enough rhythm to make the violence sound almost beautiful.

Murder ballads sit at the eerie intersection of oral storytelling and cultural record. They weren’t just songs. They were warnings, rituals, and sometimes, emotional exorcisms. They invited listeners to confront uncomfortable truths: women killed by lovers, sisters turned against each other, bodies returned from the grave to speak what no one else would.

And no ballad captures that bone-deep chill quite like The Twa Sisters, or Binnorie, as I first came to know it. A girl is drowned by her sister. A harp is strung with her golden hair. And the refrain?

“Binnorie, O Binnorie,
By the bonnie mill-dams o’ Binnorie.”

It loops like a spell. Gentle. Repetitive. Haunting.

I first came across The Twa Sisters when I was deeply immersed in the world of ballads and oral storytelling (the real question here is: when am I not there?), reading everything I could find about their European variations. There are versions of this tale in Denmark, Norway, Hungary, and Ireland. But it was the Scottish one, this version, with its lilting dialect and cold, quiet cruelty, that stayed with me. Maybe it’s part of what drew me to take modules on Scots and Scottish English when I studied in Edinburgh. I wanted to understand the shape of this language, how it sounded when sung, why it hurt in the way it did.

A Jealousy Sung in Soft Tones

Let’s start at the beginning:

There were twa sisters sat in a bower;
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
There came a knight to be their wooer,
By the bonnie mill-dams o’ Binnorie.

Immediately, we’re inside a folk universe. The bower, the knight, the sisters, everything has the clarity of a fairy tale, but it’s closer to grim than Grimm. And from the first line, the refrain enters and stays. Binnorie, O Binnorie. The line turns the setting into something rhythmic, hypnotic, and unshakable.

The knight, of course, prefers the younger sister. And that is all it takes. The elder sister lures the younger one to the river with false kindness and pushes her in. The murder itself is brief:

She took her by the lily-white hand,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
And led her down to the river strand,
By the bonnie mill-dams o’ Binnorie.

The stream ran strong, the stream ran broad,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
The younger’s strength did soon give o’er,
By the bonnie mill-dams o’ Binnorie.

It’s matter-of-fact. Almost polite. The older sister walks away. The body floats downstream.

The Harp That Testifies

The second half of the ballad turns supernatural. A harper finds the body and does what only a ballad harper would think to do: he makes a harp from the girl’s breastbone, and strings it with her golden hair.

He made a harp of her breast-bone,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
Whose sound would melt a heart of stone,
By the bonnie mill-dams o’ Binnorie.

He took the harp to the king’s high hall,
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
And there he played them before them all,
By the bonnie mill-dams o’ Binnorie.

The harp sings, unasked. It names the murderer. It cries out the crime. There’s no need for vengeance, only voice. What was drowned must now be heard.

And this, to me, is what makes the ballad unforgettable: the transformation of the body into sound, the reclaiming of narrative through music, the refusal of silence.

Repetition as Spell, Language as Weapon

From a linguistic perspective, The Twa Sisters is fascinating in its use of ritualised repetition. The Binnorie refrain appears in every stanza, acting not as filler but as a structuring device. It holds rhythm, builds tension, and acts as a reminder: the place of the murder is inseparable from the act. It’s as if the water sings it too.

The sound patterning of Scots also deepens the eeriness. “Twa,” “bower,” “strand”, these words belong to a different lexicon, one that carries centuries of oral tradition. When I studied Scots and Scottish English, we looked at how ballads preserved archaic vocabulary and phonetic features long after they’d fallen out of written use. The Twa Sisters is a perfect example: it lives through sound. It was never meant to be read silently.

And the imagery is consistently binary. One sister fair, one sister dark. One alive, one dead. One voice taken, one voice returned. In literary terms, this is gothic minimalism. The symbols do all the talking.

From Ophelia to Carter: The Literary Legacy

We see echoes of this ballad everywhere. In Hamlet, Ophelia drowns in a river, her death romanticised and mourned too late. In the Grimms’ The Singing Bone, a murdered brother’s bone sings the story of his betrayal. In Angela Carter’s reworkings of fairy tales, women’s rage is often transformed into metaphor, violence, or beauty, or all three at once.

Even in contemporary media, we see the shape of Binnorie. Any story where a girl is punished for being desired. Any tale where the victim becomes the narrator through art, song, or haunting. The ghost who tells the truth is everywhere, but Binnorie might be where she first sang.

A Voice That Won’t Go Quiet

October is the perfect time to revisit ballads like this. As the days shorten and the air chills, the idea of stories sung in low light takes on a new kind of power. The Twa Sisters is not just a song about jealousy. It’s about voice. About what we do with the dead. About how repetition can resurrect.

And about how sometimes, when you try to silence someone, they come back louder than ever, playing a harp made of bones.