Song View

Three ravens find a fallen knight and want to eat him. But the dogs sit faithfully by his side, and the falcons also keep watch. His beloved (symbolized here as a doe) carries him away and buries him. The plot belongs to the genre of late-medieval English knightly ballads. Even for 1611, the language already seems somewhat archaic.

The Scottish version is the somber counterpart to the English version. Two ravens are about to devour the fallen knight. His dogs and falcons are gone, and his beloved has long since found another. In the end, all that remains is the wind blowing over the bare bones. The melodies to which both versions are sung have changed over the centuries and are not entirely identical. The lyrics have also been rewritten; the best-known German lyrics for both versions—from which many other versions are derived—were written by Theodor Fontane in 1898.