Northern frights

In Competition No. 3021 you were invited to compose terrifying lullabies.

Lorca wondered why ‘Spain reserved the most potent songs of blood to lull its children to sleep, those least suited to their delicate sensibilities’, but the Scandinavians set the bar pretty high too: the unsoothing–sounding ‘Krakevisa’, from Norway, tells of gruesome uses for the carcase of a crow: ‘… from the entrails he made twelve pair of rope/ and the claws he used for dirt-forks.’

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While the entry was crawling with the usual nasties — wolves, trolls, goblins, malign crows, Harvey Weinstein — there was also Alun Morris’s not unconvincing contention that a 21st-century nipper’s worst nightmare might be not the Bogeyman or the Sandman but — shudder! — being deprived of the internet: ‘A silent spy is watching, his name is Curfew Jack./