Interview with Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots

Yeah of course! So, the story is a retelling of a 17th century-ish ballad type, that gets called “The Cruel Sister,” but you hear a lot of different names of it, it’s like “The Bonny Swans” as Loreena McKennitt did it, “Two Sisters” and so on. The general gist is that there are two sisters in the ballad, who are being courted by the same man who is never the villain of the song, mysteriously, but he prefers the younger sister, this older sister gets jealous, kills the younger sister, and then in being murdered the younger sister goes through this series of transformations, that usually ends up in her being an instrument at the end that sings the song of her murder.

I love ballads, I love this particular ballad, I have for a long time, but it’s always sort of itched at me as an elder sister, as the eldest of four, to be like, “But what if sisters loved each other the way my sister and I love each other?” and “What if the villainy was located in the correct person in this scenario?” So, the story in question is about two sisters who love each other very much, and whose sort of job is to sing to these willows that stand at the borders of faerie land and their mundane English village.