"My tongue is my ain,' true Thomas said; At fair or tryst where I may be. "I dought neither speak to prince or peer, "He has gotten a coat of the even cloth, True Thomas on earth was never seen." The gift of the Fairy Queen from the fruits of fairyland, which True Thomas seeks, with amusing naïveté, to decline, is evidently connected with his alleged prophetic powers. Indeed, this ballad appears, from other sources,1 to be merely an introduction to a larger poem on the prophecies attributed to the hero.2 The legend further tells, that although Thomas was allowed to revisit the earth and there deliver his prophecies, yet he continued under an obligation to return to fairyland whenever the Queen of the Fairies should intimate her wish. "Accordingly, while Thomas was making merry with his friends in the Tower of Ercildoune, a person came running in and told, with marks of fear and astonishment, that a hart and hind had left the neighbouring forest, and were, composedly and slowly, parading the street of the village. The prophet instantly 1 See the English ballad above referred to as given by Jamieson. 2 His prophecies will be found, with interesting historical comments, in Chambers' " Popular Rhymes of Scotland," pp. 210-224. D arose, left his habitation, and followed the wonderful animals to the forest, whence he was never seen to return. According to the popular belief, he still 'drees his weird' in fairyland, and is one day expected to revisit the earth.' 1 There is one element in the development of this legend, which has dropt out of the above ballad; I refer to the reason why the hero was restored to the earth after seven years' residence in fairyland. This element, which we are able to supply from the English ballad on the subject,2 is founded on one point of the creed about fairies, which looks almost like a satisfaction to Christian dogma for allowing the existence of such beings. Though they belonged to no limbo in the peculiar world of Christian thought, it was believed that they required every seven years to pay a "teind" or "kane" to hell, similar to that which the Athenians, in the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, used to pay to the 1 Scott's "Border Minstrelsy,” vol. iv. pp. 114–15. 2 "To morne of helle the foulle fende Among these folke shall chese his fee; "Ffore all the golde that ever myght be "She broght hym agayn to the Eldyntre, In Huntley Banks ther for to be, Ther foulys syng bothe nyght and daye." 8 Teind is technical Scotch for tenth, English tithe. Kane, Cane, or Kain is a duty paid in kind by a tenant to a landlord. Minotaur of Crete; and this was supposed to explain that dreaded hankering of the elfin world's inhabitants after human beings, which moved them to spirit away a beautiful bride or bridegroom on the eve of a wedding, or to rob the cradle of a chubby little infant, leaving in its place a hideous, withered changeling of their own. In the legend of Thomas the Rhymer the Fairy Queen appears under the same amiable aspect which is given to the large-hearted Zee by the author of "The Coming Race,”—that of a mistress who disinterestedly saves her alien lover from the doom to which he would have been consigned by her own people. There are other legends, however, in which the hero achieves his restoration to earth in defiance of the fairy powers; and the ballad now to be described derives its fascinating terror from the account of the elfin stratagems set at work to prevent the recovery of the hero from the fairy world. The Young Tamlane will probably be acknowledged by most critics to be the finest of the legendary ballads of Scotland. The hero is known under considerable variations in his name, among which it is worth while to compare Tamlane, Tamlene, Tam-a-line, Tam o' the Linn, Tom Linn, Thom of Lynn, Thomalin, and Thomlin. Amid these varieties none can hesitate to pronounce an original identity; and methods of research, which our modern comparative mythologists have already followed to valuable results, enable us, without much difficulty, to trace the name, with the main features of the legend gathering round it, to the same source which has given to the nursery the numerous tales of Thumbling or Tom Thumb, and of Jack the Giant-killer.1 Everyone acquainted with the science of nursery stories knows that Thumbling, whatever degradation he may have suffered in his later history, was originally no other than the god Thor, who, in his wandering from Asgard, the home of the Aesir, to Ugard, the home of the Giants, put up one night in the glove of the Giant Skrymir, which he mistook for a house, and, on being frightened by a seeming earthquake, sought refuge in what he supposed to be an adjoining building, but which turned out to be the thumb (German Däumling) of the glove. This is not the place to follow the myth of Thor, from this incident of his lodging in the thumb of Giant Skrymir's glove, through all the transformations he has undergone in the popular literature of Europe. Probably no branch of that literature presents, among the later offshoots of the Thor-myth, such a luxuriant outgrowth as the Scottish ballad of The Young Tamlane. The hero is, indeed, a favourite in Scottish verse. He 1 The original identity of Thumbling and Tamlane does not seem to have been surmised by our collectors of ballads. It was asserted, however, so long ago as in the Quarterly Review for January 1819, p. 100, in an article on the "Antiquities of Nursery Literature," to which my attention was drawn by the eulogistic language in which it is spoken of by Grimm (“Kindermährchen,” vol. iii. p. 315). “Among the popular heroes of romance enumerated in the introduction to the history of Tom Thumbe (London, 1621,bl. letter), occurs ‘Tom a Lin, the devil's supposed bastard."" (Scott, in the "Border Minstrelsy," vol. i. p. 223.) It would be interesting to know whether there is here indicated any connection between Tom Thumb and Tom a Lin. Simrock, who traces numerous ramifications of the Däumling legend ("Deutsche Mythologie," pp. 270-288), does not appear to know of Tamlane. Uhland has a monograph on the Mythus von Thor (Stuttgart, 1836), but it has not come in my way; and I cannot therefore say whether he recognizes the connection of Tamlane with his subject. does not, it is true, always bear the heroic character which he displays in this ballad. He appears in an enigmatical sort of nursery rhyme, as undergoing a series of undignified adventures, in which, if the rhyme be not wholly meaningless, we may still perhaps recognize a few shattered and distorted fragments of the original image of Thor, as well as some resemblance to the mishaps of Tom Thumb. "Tam o' the Linn came up the gait Wi' twenty puddings on a plate, And every pudding had a pin; 'We'll eat them a',' quo' Tam o' the Linn. "Tam o' the Linn had nae breeks to wear, "Tam o' the Linn he had three bairns, "Tam o' the Linn gaed to the moss, The moss was open, and Tam fell in ; 'I've stabled mysel',' quo' Tam o' the Linn." 1 Chambers' "Popular Rhymes of Scotland," p. 33. In Chambers' "Scottish Songs" (p. 455) occurs a slightly varied version of this rhyme, with the chorus Fa la, fa la, fa lillie, between each line, and with the additional opening verse— "Tam o' the Lin is no very wise, He selt his sow, and boucht a gryce: 'The deil gae wi' her!' quo' Tam o' the Linn." |