Margaret MacArthur - Margery Grey
This was evidently a local legend in the region of the township of Rockingham, Vermont during the late 1700s/early 1800s which became the inspiration for a narrative poem. Subsequently, the poem was adapted into a popular ballad (a version of which was recorded by Margaret MacArthur -- see above).
The poem (in the words of the author) was "founded on a half a dozen lines that caught my eye in some newspaper, simply stating the fact that a woman of the pioneers, being lost in the woods and unable to cross the Connecticut River, had wandered northward round its source and come down the other side."
The following link to a newspaper archived in the Library of Congress contains the reprint of an earlier published account of the story (thought to be what originally caught the poet's eye), along with the narrative poem that she based on her memory of it.
The events of the story seem to have happened sometime in the 1700s.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn98060050/1909-10-29/ed-1/?sp=5
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What I find most remarkable is that in this sequence of documents and recordings, we may have a window into the passage of actual human events into legend, from legend into verse, and from verse into the traditional New England folk ballad 'Margery Grey'...
I bring all of this up by way of illustration of the fact that how long a story or folkloric motif has been present in the imagination of a people, and how long a particular ballad has circulated within the living corpus of songs, can be (and often are) two very different things.
What we know as 'The Twa Sisters'/'Binnorie'/'Harpa' are variants of a traditional ballad based on a pre-existing story.
I hope to research certain questions related to the origin and evolution of the ballad as time goes on.
With regard to the story-kernel of 'The Twa Sisters', this is undoubtedly very ancient.
