LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,102)
  • Text Authors (19,442)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

sometimes misattributed to Walter Scott, Sir (1771 - 1832) and by Robert Surtees (1779 - 1834)

Barthram's dirge
Language: English 
They shot him dead on the Nine-Stone rig,
  Beside the Headless Cross,
And they left him lying in his blood,
  Upon the moor and moss.
 
They made a bier of the broken bough,
  The sauch and the aspen grey,
And they bore him to the Lady Chapel,
  And waked him there all day.
 
A lady came to that lonely bower
  And threw her robes aside,
She tore her long yellow hair,
  And knelt at Barthram's side.
 
She bath'd him in the Lady-Well
  His wounds so deep and sair,
And she plaited a garland for his breast,
  And a garland for his hair.
 
They rowed him in a lily sheet,
  And bare him to his earth,
(And the Grey Friars sung the dead man's mass,
  As they passed the Chapel Garth).
 
They buried him at the midnight,
  (When the dew fell cold and still,
When the aspen grey forgot to play,
  And the mist clung to the hill).
 
They dug his grave but a bare foot deep,
  By the edge of the Nine-Stone Burn,
And they covered him o'er with the heather-flower,
  The moss and the Lady fern.
 
A Grey Friar staid upon the grave,
  And sang till the morning tide,
And a friar shall sing for Barthram's soul,
  While Headless Cross shall bide.

Text Authorship:

  • sometimes misattributed to Walter Scott, Sir (1771 - 1832)
  • by Robert Surtees (1779 - 1834), "Barthram's dirge", included by Walter Scott in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

    [ None yet in the database ]

Settings in other languages, adaptations, or excerpts:

  • Also set in German (Deutsch), a translation by Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810 - 1876) , "Barthram's Grablied" ; composed by Adolf Jensen.
      • Go to the text.

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2011-07-18
Line count: 32
Word count: 213

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris