BALLAD INDEX
Child 39
Old ballad dating back to at least 1549, adapted many times. Origionates from the Scottish Borderlands. One of the best.
The Story:
We grew up listening to this on and around halloween because that is the night where Janet steals Tam Lin from the Queen of Fairies in the story.
Most of the time the song begins with a warning for young women to avoid the forest of Carterhaugh: Tam Lin lives there and will take their money or their virginity. Janet (or Margaret) goes into the forest (depending on the version either with an air of defiance, to seek a magical lover, or sometimes just seemingly naive!) and picks a double rose. Tam Lin appears asking her why she’s in the woods and picking roses without his permission! She argues with him, either saying that she can do whatever she wants or that its her fathers land and he’s not in charge.
Some songs skip this part, some make it sound consensual, and sometimes “he asked no leave of her // as she lay on the ground” but Janet goes home from this encounter and discovers that she’s pregnant. She returns to Carterhaugh and calls Tam Lin back. A quite interesting thing in this ballad is that in many versions at this point in the story Janet is either considering or threatening an abortion with the herbs she finds in the woods.
She asks Tam Lin if he was ever a human, and he tells his story: he used to be a mortal, but was kidnapped by the Queen of Faeries when he fell in the woods. He’s worried that he (young and hot) will be sacrificed by the Queen because every 7 years they sacrifice one of their own to Hell at midnight on Hallowe’en (that very night.) Tam Lin tells Janet how to free him as they seem to be “true loves” by this point in the song. Here’s Tam Lin’s plan: The Faerie procession will ride that night (Hallowe’en) and he’ll be riding on a white horse. Janet should run up and pull him down from the horse, but the Queen of Fairies will turn him into all kinds of beasts in an attempt to make Janet drop him. In some versions his last transformation is into a burning coal and Janet must throw him into a well before he turns human again, but his final form is a naked man who Janet must hide away. These events all occur as foretold, and Janet wins her love back. The Queen is furious (sometimes it is revealed that Tam Lin is her lover), but is forced to accept the well-earned reversal of her spell.
Really really into this song? Great! You’re not alone. Here is a incredibly iconic website entirely about Tam Lin including this amazing plot point chart comparing the story across 34 versions of the song.
This version is the one I grew up listening to (every year as we carved pumpkins) so in my head this is the one I base the others off of. Ends with the Queen of Fairies saying that if she had known what Tam Lin was up to she would have turned him into a tree so he couldn’t be saved.
This version is the first one I heard where Janet threatens to not have the baby. Other versions of the song allude to an “Herb in the merry green woods // That will scathe thy babe from thee”. So in this version she goes back to the woods and when Tam Lin appears he asks “What makes you pull the poison rose” and “What makes you harm the little babe that I have got with thee?” Janet replies that she would have the baby if Tam Lin was a gentleman and would be a father to the child, but won’t have the baby if he is going to disappear and leave her alone.
This version ends with a sick transition into a speech from the Queen of Fairies (with haunting singing by Maddy Prior) where she goes into more detail about what she would have done to Tam Lin is she had known she would lose him: She would take out his heart and replace it with stone, pluck out his eyes and replace them with berries from the rowan tree, and would have paid her tithe to hell before she lost him.