Thomas the Rhymer

The Eildon Hills, where Thomas supposedly entered Elfland.

Sir Thomas was born in Erceldoune (also spelled Ercildoune – presently Earlston), Berwickshire, sometime in the 13th century, and has a reputation as the author of many prophetic verses. Little is known for certain of his life but two charters from 1260–80 and 1294 mention him, the latter referring to "Thomas de Ercildounson son and heir of Thome Rymour de Ercildoun".

Thomas became known as "True Thomas", supposedly because he could not tell a lie. Popular lore recounts how he prophesied many great events in Scottish history, including the death of Alexander III of Scotland.

Thomas' gift of prophecy is linked to his poetic ability. It is not clear if the name Rhymer was his actual surname or merely a sobriquet. He is often cited as the author of the English Sir Tristrem, a version of the Tristram legend, and some lines in Robert Mannyng's Chronicle may be the source of this association.

Popular esteem of Thomas lived on for centuries after his death, and especially in Scotland, overtook the reputation of all rival prophets including Merlin, whom the 16th century pamphleteer of The Complaynt of Scotland denounced as the author of the prophecy (unity under one king) which the English used as justification for aggression against his countrymen. It became common for fabricated prophecies (or reworks of earlier prophecies) to be attributed to Thomas to enhance their authority, as seen in collections of prophecies which were printed, the earliest surviving being a chapbook entitled "The Whole Prophecie of Scotland, England, etc." (1603).

It was hypothesized that a major Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov traces his descent from Sir Thomas, and on September 25, 2015, a monument to Lermontov was unveiled in Earlston.

Descriptions and paraphrases of Thomas's prophecies were given by various Scottish historians of yore, though none of them quoted directly from Thomas.

• "On the morrow, afore noon, shall blow the greatest wind that ever was heard before in Scotland."

• "Who shal rule the ile of Bretaine / From the North to the South sey?"

Popular folkloric prophecies

Walter Scott was familiar with rhymes purported to be the Rhymer's prophecies in the local popular tradition, and published several of them. Later Robert Chambers printed additional collected rhyme prophecies ascribed to Thomas, in Popular Rhymes (1826).

• "At Eildon Tree, if yon shall be,

• "This Thorn-Tree, as lang as it stands,

• "When the Yowes o' Gowrie come to land,

• "York was, London is, and Edinbruch 'ill be,

The Weeping Stones Curse:

• "Fyvie, Fyvie thou'se never thrive,

• "Betide, betide, whate'er betide,

The ballad around the legend of Thomas has been catalogued Child Ballad #37 "Thomas the Rymer," by Francis James Child (1883). Three versions, A, B, C were originally printed by him. Child later appended two more variants in a subsequent Volume 4 (1892). Some scholars refer to these respectively as Child's D and E versions. Version A is Mrs. Brown's recitation, and C is Walter Scott's rework of it, together classed as the 'Brown group' by C. E. Nelson, while versions B, D, E are all considered by Nelson to be descendants of an archetype that reduced the romance into ballad form ca. 1700, and classed as the 'Greenwood group'. (See §Ballad sources).

Child provided a critical synopsis comparing versions A, B, C in his original publication, and considerations for the D, E versions have been augmented below.

Ballad synopsis

The brief outline of the ballad is that As Thomas is lying outdoors on a slope by a tree in the Erceldoune neighborhood, the queen of Elfland appears to him riding a horse, and beckons him to come away. When he consents, she shows him three marvels: the road to Heaven, to Hell, and to her own world. After seven years, Thomas is brought back into the mortal realm. Asking for a token to remember the queen by, he is offered the choice of the gift of a harper or a prophet, at which he chooses the latter option.

Music score to the ballad of "True Thomas", from Scott's Minstrelsy.

The scene of Thomas's encounter with the elf-queen is "Huntly Bank" and the "Eildon Tree" (versions B, C, and E) or "Farnalie" (version D) All these refer to the area of Eildon Hills, in the vicinity of Earlston: Huntly Bank was a slope on the hill and the tree stood there also, as Scott explained, while Emily B. Lyle was able to localize "farnalie" there as well.

The queen wears a skirt of grass-green silk and a velvet mantle, and is mounted on either a milk-white steed (A), or a dapple-gray horse (B, D, E and R (=romance)). The horse has nine and fifty bells on each tett (Scots English. "lock of matted hair") on its mane in A, nine hung on its mane in E, and three bells on either side of the bridle in R, whereas she had nine bells in her hand in D, offered as a prize for his harping and carping (music and storytelling).

Thomas mistakenly addresses her as the "Queen of Heaven" (i.e. the Virgin Mary), which she corrects by identifying herself as "Queen of fair Elfland" (A, C). In other variants, she reticently identifies herself only as "lady of an unco land" (B), "lady gay" (E) much like the medieval romance. But since the unnamed land of the queen lies in a path leading neither Heaven nor Hell, etc., it can be assumed to be "Fairyland," to put it in more modern lingo.

In C and E, the queen dares Thomas to kiss her lips, a corruption of Thomas's embrace in the romance that is lacking in A and B though crucial to a cogent plot, since "it is contact with the fairy that gives her the power to carry he paramour off" according to Child. Absent in the ballads also is the motif of the queen losing her beauty (Loathly lady motif), but Child says the "ballad is no worse, and the romance would have been much better" without it, "impressive" though it may be, since it did not belong in his opinion to the "proper and original story," which he thinks was a blithe tale like the one of Ogier the Dane and Morgan le fay. If he chooses to go, Thomas is warned he will be unable to return for seven years (A, B, D, E). In the romance the queen's warning is "only for a twelvemonth", but he overstays more than three (or seven) years.

Then she wheels around her milk-white steed and lets Thomas ride on the crupper behind (A, C) or she rides the dapple-gray while he runs (B, E). He must wade knee-high through a river (B, C, E), exaggerated as an expanse of blood (perhaps "river of blood"), in A. They reach a "garden green," and Thomas wants to pluck a fruit to slake his hunger but the queen interrupts, admonishing him that he will be accursed or damned (A, B, D, E). The language in B suggests this is "the fruit of the Forbidden Tree", and variants D, E call it an apple. The queen provides Thomas food to sate his hunger.

The queen now tells Thomas to lay his head to rest on her knee (A, B, C), and shows him three marvels ("ferlies three"), which are the road to Hell, the road to Heaven, and the road to her homeland (named Elfland in A). It is the road beyond the meadow or lawn overgrown with lilies that leads to Heaven, except in C where the looks deceive and the lily road leads to Hell, while the thorny road leads to Heaven.

The queen instructs Thomas not to speak to others in Elfland, and leave her to do all the talking. In the end, he receives as present "a coat of the even cloth, and a pair of shoes of velvet green" (A) or "tongue that can never lie" (B) or both (C). Version E uniquely mentions the Queen's fear that Thomas may be chosen as "teinding unto hell", that is to say, the tithe in the form of humans that Elfland is subjected to pay periodically. In the romance, the Queen explains that the collection of the "fee to hell" draws near, and Thomas must be sent back to earth to spare him the peril. (See § Literary criticism for further literary analysis.)

Ballad sources

The ballad was first printed by Walter Scott (1803) then by Robert Jamieson (1806). Both used Mrs. Brown's manuscript as underlying source. Child A is represented by Mrs. Brown's MS. and Jamieson's published version (with only slight differences in wording). Child C is a composite of Mrs. Brown and another version, in fact, 13 of the 20 stanzas are the same as A, and although Scott claims his version is from a "copy, obtained from a lady residing not far from Ercildoun" corrected using Mrs. Brown's MS., Nelson labels the seven different stanzas as something that is "for most part Scott's own, Gothic-romantic invention".

Child B is taken from the second volume of the Campbell manuscripts entitled "Old Scottish Songs, Collected in the Counties of Berwick, Roxburgh, Selkirk & Peebles", dating to ca. 1830. The Leyden transcript, or Child "D" was supplied to Walter Scott before his publication, and influenced his composition of the C version to some degree. The text by Mrs. Christiana Greenwood, or Child "E" was "sent to Scott in May of 1806 after reading his C version in the Minstrelsey, and was dated by Nelson as an "early to mid-eighteenth-century text". These two versions provided to Scott and were among his papers at Abbotsford.

Mrs. Brown's ballads

Mrs. Brown, aka Anna Gordon or Mrs. Brown of Falkland (1747–1810), who was both Scott's and Jamieson's source, had maintained she heard them sung to her as a child. She had learned to sing a repertoire of some three dozen ballads from her aunt, Mrs. Farquheson. Mrs. Brown's nephew Robert Eden Scott transcribed the music, and the manuscript was available to Scott and others. However different accounts have been given, such as "an old maid-servant who had been long as the nursemaid being the one to teach Mrs. Brown."

Walter Scott's ballads in three parts

In Minstrelsy, Walter Scott published a second part to the ballad out of Thomas's prophecies, and yet a third part describing Thomas's return to Elfland. The third part was based on the legend Scott said he was familiar with, that "while Thomas was making merry with his friends in the Tower of Ercildoune," a news "a hart and hind.. was parading the street of the village," at which Thomas got up and left, never to be seen again. The popular belief being that he had gone to Fairyland but is "one day expected to revisit earth." Murray cites Robert Chambers's suspicion this may have been a mangled portrayal of a living local personage, and himself recounts a more pedestrian traditional rumor of Thomas's disappearance given by an informant.

In Walter Scott's "Third Part" to the ballad, Thomas finds himself in possession of a "elfin harp he won" in Fairyland in a minstrel competition, which is a departure from either the traditional ballad or the medieval romance, where the queen tells Thomas to choose whether "to harpe or carpe," that is pick a choice of either the gift of music or speech. The "hart and hind" is now being sung as being "white as snow on Fairnalie" (Farnalie has been properly identified by Lyle, as discussed above). Some prose retellings incorporate some features derived from this third part (See §Retellings).

The surviving medieval romance is a lengthier account which agrees with the content of the ballad.

The romance is written in the first person, but probably is not genuinely Thomas's own work: Murray dated the authorship to "shortly after 1400, or about a hundred years after Thomas's death", but more recent researchers set the date earlier, to the (late) 14th century. The romance does often refer to "the story," and Child has opined if the "older story," if any such thing actually existed, "must be the work of Thomas".

Like ballad C, Huntley banks is the locale where Thomas made sighting of the elfin lady. The "Eldoune, Eldone tree (Thornton, I, 80, 84)" is also mentioned as in the ballad. Thomas is captivated by her, addressing her as queen of heaven, and she answers she is not so lofty, but hints she is of fairy kind. Thomas makes proposition, but she warns him off saying the slightest sin will undo her beauty. Thomas is undaunted, so she gives the "Mane of Molde" (of Earth, mortal man) ( I,117) consent to marry her and accompany her. And "seven tymes by hyr he lay," (I, 124), but she transforms into a hideous hag immediately after sleeping with him, and declares he shall not see "Medill-erthe" (I,160) for twelvemonth ("twelmoneth", "xij Mones" vv.152, 159). As in the ballad, the lady points one way towards heaven and another towards hell before they arrive in her dominion. (ca.200–220). The lady is followed by grayhounds and raches (=scent dogs) (249–50). Thomas is entertained with food and dancing, but the lady tells him he must now leave. It seemed three days to Thomas, but the lady says three years ("thre ȝere") or seven years ("seuen ȝere," depending on manuscript) have passed (284–6), and he is brought back to the Elidon tree.

Fytte II is mostly devoted to prophecies. In the opening. Thomas asks for a token to remember the queen by, and she offers him the choice of becoming a harper or a prophet ("harpe or carpe"). Rather than the "instrumental" gift, Thomas opts for the "vocal (rather oral) accomplishments." Thomas asks her to abide a bit and tell him some ferlys (marvels). She now starts to tell of future battles at Halidon Hill, Bannockburn, etc., which are easily identifiable historic engagements. (Murray tabulates them in his intro.)

The prophecies of battles continue into Fytte III, but the language turns symbolic. Near the end Thomas asks why Black Agnes of Dunbar (III,660) imprisoned him, and she predicts her death. The mention of Black Agnes here is noted as being an anachronism, Thomas of Erceldoune living a whole generation earlier, and presumably was a confusion with an earlier Countess of the March.

Manuscript sources

The medieval romance survives complete or in fragments in five manuscripts, the earliest of which is the Lincoln codex compiled by Robert Thornton:

• Thornton MS. (olim. Lincoln A., 1. 17) - ca. 1430–1440.
• MS. Cambridge Ff. 5, 48 - mid 15th century.
• MS. Cotton Vitellius E. x., - late 15th century.
• MS. Landsowne 762 - ca. 1524–30
• MS. Sloane 2578 MSS. - 1547. Lacks first fitt.

All these texts were edited in parallel by J. A. H. Murray in The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune (1875).

The Cotton MS. gives an "Incipit prophecia Thome Arseldon" and an "Explicit prophetia thome de Arseldoune", thus this was the version that Walter Scott excerpted as Appendix. The Sloan MS. begins the second fytte with: "Heare begynethe þe ij^d fytt I saye / of Sir thomas of Arseldon," and the Thornton MS. gives the "Explicit Thomas Of Erseldowne" after the 700th line.

Relationship between romance and ballad forms

The romance dates from the late 14th to the early 15th century (see below), while the ballad texts available do not antedate ca. 1700-1750 at the earliest. The preponderance of opinion seems to be that the romance spawned the ballads (as we know them) at a relatively late period, though there are detractors.

Walter Scott stated that the romance was "the undoubted original", the ballad version being corrupted "with changes by oral tradition". Murray flatly dismisses this oral transmission notion, characterizing the ballad as modernization by a contemporary versifier. In fact Scott, too, privately held his "suspicion of modern manufacture."

C. E. Nelson argued for a common archetype (from which all the ballads derive), composed around the year 1700 by "a literate individual of antiquarian bent" living in Berwickshire. Nelson starts off with a working assumption that the archetype ballad, "a not too remote an ancestor of [Mrs.] Greenwood['s version]" was "purposefully reduced from the romance" The linchpin that makes his argument plausible was his reminder that the romance was in fact "printed as late as the seventeenth century" (a printing of 1652 existed, republished Albrecht 1954), a point missed by a number of commentators, and failed to be accounted in Murray's "Published Texts" section. Localizing the archetype to Berwickshire is natural, since the Greenwood group of ballads that closely abide by the romance belong to this area, and it is the "home area" of the traditional hero, Thomas of Erceldoune. After his examination, he pronounced his assumptions justified by evidence, leading him to conclude the "eighteenth-century origin and the subsequent tradition of [the ballad of] 'Thomas Rhymer'", which covered not just the Greenwood group but extendable to the Brown group also.

Additional books that had anything to say about the interrelationship, that pronounce that romance is the basis of the ballad, include Katharine Mary Briggs's folk-tale dictionary of 1971, and others.

On the opposite side of the camp, Child did express the opinion that the ballad "must be of considerable age", though the earliest available to him was datable only to ca. 1700–1750. E. B. Lyle, a researcher prolific on papers on Thomas, hypothesizes the existence of an earlier form of the ballad, which predated the romance and was the source of it. One proponent of the view is Helen Cooper who says that the ballad "has one of the strongest claims to medieval origins," and another is Richard Firth Green who states "continuous oral transmission is the only credible explanation". However Cooper and Green draw these conclusion under the mistaken assumption that the "romance.. had not yet been printed at the time of Mrs Brown's performance".

Literary criticism

In the romance, the queen declares that Thomas has stayed three years but can remain no longer, because "the foul fiend of Hell will come among the (fairy) folk and fetch his fee" (modernized from Thornton text, vv.289–290). This "fee" "refers to the common belief that the fairies "paid kane" to hell, by the sacrifice of one or more individuals to the devil every seventh year." (The word teind is actually used in the Greenwood variant of Thomas the Rymer: "Ilka seven year, Thomas, / We pay our teindings unto hell,.. I fear, Thomas, it will be yerself".) The situation is akin to the one presented to the title character of "Tam Lin" who is in the company of the Queen of Fairies, but says he fears he will be given up as the tithe (Scots: teind or kane) paid to hell. The common motif has been identified as type F.257 "Tribute taken from fairies by fiend at stated periods" except that while Tam Lin must devise his own rescue, in the case of the Rymer, "the kindly queen of the fairies will not allow Thomas of Erceldoune to be exposed to this peril, and hurries him back to earth the day before the fiend comes for his due." J. R. R. Tolkien also alludes to the "Devil's tithe" as concerns the Rhymer's tale in a passing witty remark

Influences

It has been suggested that John Keats's poem La Belle Dame sans Merci borrows motif and structure from the legend of Thomas the Rhymer.

Washington Irving, while visiting Walter Scott, was told the legend of Thomas the Rhymer, and it became one of the sources for Irving's short story Rip van Winkle.

Retellings

There have been numerous prose retelling of the ballad or legend.

John Tillotson's version (1863) with "magic harp he had won in Elfland" and Elizabeth W. Greierson's version (1906) with "harp that was fashioned in Fairyland" are couple of examples that incorporate the theme from Scott's Part Three of Thomas vanishing back to Elfland after the sighting of a hart and hind in town.

Barbara Ker Wilson's retold tale of "Thomas the Rhymer" is a patchwork of all the traditions accrued around Thomas, including ballad and prophecies both written and popularly held.

Additional, non-exhaustive list of retellings as follows:

• Donald Alexander Macleod (ed.), Arthur George Walker (illus.) "Story of Thomas the Rhymer" (ca. 1880s).
• Gibbings & Co., publishers (1889).
• Mary MacGregor (ed.), Katharine Cameron (illus.) (1908).
• Donald Alexander Mackenzie (ed.), John Duncan (illus.), "Story of Thomas the Rhymer" (1917).
• George Douglas (ed.), James Torrance (illus.), in Scottish Fairy Tales (sans date, ca. 1920).
• Judy Paterson (ed.), Sally J. Collins (illus.) (1998).

Musical adaptations

The German version of Tom der Reimer by Theodor Fontane was set as a song for male voice and piano by Carl Loewe, his op. 135.

An outstanding early recording, in German, is by Heinrich Schlusnus, on Polydor 67212, of 1938 (78 rpm).

Recent versions of the "Thomas the Rhymer" ballad include renditions by the electric folk act Steeleye Span which recorded two different versions for their 1974 album Now We Are Six and another for Present--The Very Best of Steeleye Span, released in 2002. Singer Ewan MacColl has also recorded his version of the ballad.

The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams left an opera by the title of Thomas the Rhymer incomplete at the time of his death in 1958. The libretto was a collaboration between the composer and his second wife, Ursula Vaughan Williams, and it was based upon the ballads of Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin.

The British country/acid house band Alabama 3 drew upon the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer in a 2003 recording entitled Yellow Rose. Alabama 3's lyrics give the ballad a new setting in the American frontier of the 19th Century, where an enchanting woman lures the narrator to a night of wild debauchery, then robs and finally murders him. Yellow Rose was released as Track 11 of Alabama 3's 2003 album Power in the Blood (One Little Indian / Geffen).

Kray Van Kirk's Creative Commons–licensed song The Queen of Elfland is based on the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, and he has released a music video to the song, recreating the story in a modern setting.

Literary adaptations

• Rudyard Kipling's poem, The Last Rhyme of True Thomas (1894), features Thomas Learmounth and a king who's going to make Thomas his knight.
• John Geddie, Thomas the Rymour and his Rhymes. [With a portrait of the author], Edinburgh: Printed for the Rymour Club and issued from John Knox's House, 1920.
• William Croft Dickinson wrote a children's book titled "The Eildon Tree" (1944) about two modern children meeting Thomas the Rhymer and travelling back in time to a critical point in Scottish history.
• Thomas is a major character in Alexander Reid's play The Lass wi the Muckle Mou (1950).
• Nigel Tranter, Scottish writer, wrote the novel True Thomas (1981).
• Ellen Kushner's novel Thomas the Rhymer (1990).
• Bruce Glassco's short story "True Thomas", in Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling's fairy tale anthology Black Swan, White Raven (1997), posits Thomas' prophetic powers were a gift of alien abduction – the Queen of Faerie from the ballad was the Queen of an extraterrestrial Hive sworn to protect Languages.
• "Erceldoune", a novella by Richard Leigh (co-author of Holy Blood, Holy Grail), features a folk-singer named Thomas "Rafe" Erlston, in: Erceldoune & Other Stories (2006) ISBN 978-1-4116-9943-4
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's novel The Last Watch, Thomas is described as an actual person, a prominent Other, which has survived until today and currently occupies the post of the Head of the Scottish Night Watch.
• Thomas appears in John Leyland's ballad "Lord Soulis", where after failing to bind William II de Soules with magical ropes of sand, he determines that the sorcerer must be wrapped in lead and boiled.

• Thomas the Rhymer and the Queen of Faerie (1851), by Joseph Noel Paton
• Thomas the Rhymer and the Queen of Faerie print by John Le Conte, after Sir Joseph Noel Paton, published W & A K Johnston (1852).
• Beverly Nichols's A Book of Old Ballads (1934) reprints the Greenwood version of the ballad, with a print of "Thomas the Rhymer" by H. M. Brock
• Beneath the Eildon Tree is a painting by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law depicting Thomas the Rhymer and the Faery Queen.

• A Book of Old Ballads at Project Gutenberg