"The Twa Corbies" is a Scottish ballad of extraordinary bleakness and compression. In just sixteen lines, two ravens discuss where they will dine and settle on a newly slain knight whose hawk has gone hunting, whose hound has run off, and whose lady has already taken another lover. No one will come for him. The ravens will pick out his eyes, line their nest with his golden hair, and let the wind blow over his bare bones forever.

The ballad dates from the seventeenth century and is the Scottish counterpart to the English "Three Ravens," though where that ballad offers loyalty and mourning, "The Twa Corbies" offers total abandonment. It is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of the Scottish ballad tradition -- a poem in which the entire tragedy of faithlessness is told from the outside, by scavengers, without a single word of lament.

This text appears in Hamilton Wright Mabie's A Book of Old English Ballads (1903), which collected both English and Scottish ballads.

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a maen:
The tane unto the t'ither did say,
"Whaur shall we gang and dine the day?"

"O doun beside yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

"His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
Sae we may mak' our dinner sweet.

O we'll sit on his white hause bane,
And I'll pyke out his bonny blue e'en;
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We'll theek our nest when it blaws bare.

"Mony a ane for him makes maen,
But nane shall ken whaur he is gane.
Over his banes when they are bare,
The wind shall blaw for evermair."

Colophon

From A Book of Old English Ballads, edited by Hamilton Wright Mabie, with illustrations by George Wharton Edwards (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1903).

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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