Thomas the Rhymer


Sir Thomas de Ercildoun, better remembered as Thomas the Rhymer, also known as Thomas Learmont or True Thomas, was a Scottish laird and reputed prophet from Earlston in the Borders. Thomas' gift of prophecy is linked to his poetic ability.
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. It is not clear if the name Rhymer was his actual surname or merely a sobriquet.
In literature, he appears as the protagonist in the tale about Thomas the Rhymer carried off by the "Queen of Elfland" and returned having gained the gift of prophecy, as well as the inability to tell a lie. The tale survives in a medieval verse romance in five manuscripts, as well as in the popular ballad "Thomas Rhymer". The romance occurs as "Thomas off Ersseldoune" in the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript.
The original romance was probably condensed into ballad form though there are dissenting views on this. Walter Scott expanded the ballad into three parts, adding a sequel which incorporated the prophecies ascribed to Thomas, and an epilogue where Thomas is summoned back to Elfland after the appearance of a sign, in the form of the milk-white hart and hind. Numerous prose retellings of the tale of Thomas the Rhymer have been undertaken, and included in fairy tale or folk-tale anthologies; these often incorporate the return to Fairyland episode that Scott reported to have learned from local legend.

Historical figure

Sir Thomas was born in Erceldoune, 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 to 1280 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.
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 which the English used as justification for aggression against his countrymen. It became common for fabricated 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.".

Prophecies attributed to Thomas

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

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.
  • "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,''

    Ballad

The ballad around the legend of Thomas was catalogued Child Ballad #37 "Thomas the Rymer," by Francis James Child in 1883. Child published three versions, which he labelled A, B and C, but later appended two more variants in Volume 4 of his collection of ballads, published in 1892. Some scholars refer to these as Child's D and E versions. Version A, which is a Mrs Brown's recitation, and C, which is Walter Scott's reworking of it, were 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 in about 1700, and classed as the 'Greenwood group'..
Child provided a critical synopsis comparing versions A, B, C in his original publication, and considerations of the D, E versions have been added below.

Ballad synopsis

The brief outline of the ballad is that while Thomas is lying outdoors on a slope by a tree in the Erceldoune neighborhood, the queen of Elfland appears to him riding upon a horse and beckons him to come away. When he consents, she shows him three marvels: the road to Heaven, the road to Hell, and the road to her own world. After seven years, Thomas is brought back into the mortal realm. Asking for a token by which to remember the queen, he is offered the choice of having powers of harpistry, or else of prophecy, and of these he chooses the latter.
The scene of Thomas's encounter with the elf-queen is "Huntly Bank" and the "Eildon Tree" or "Farnalie" 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: 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 either on a milk-white steed, or on a dapple-gray horse. The horse has nine and fifty bells on each tett 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.
Thomas mistakenly addresses her as the "Queen of Heaven", which she corrects by identifying herself as "Queen of fair Elfland". In other variants, she reticently identifies herself only as "lady of an unco land", or "lady gay", much like the medieval romance. But since the unnamed land of the queen is approached by a path leading neither to Heaven nor Hell, etc., it can be assumed to be "Fairyland," to put it in more modern terminology.
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 her paramour off" according to Child. Absent in the ballads also is the motif of the queen losing her beauty : Child considered that 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 thought was a blithe tale like that of Ogier the Dane and Morgan le fay. If he chooses to go with her, Thomas is warned he will be unable to return for seven years. In the romance the queen's warning is "only for a twelvemonth", but he overstays by more than three years.
Then she wheels around her milk-white steed and lets Thomas ride on the behind, or she rides the dapple-gray while he runs. He must wade knee-high through a river, exaggerated as an expanse 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. 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 with food to sate his hunger.
The queen now tells Thomas to lay his head to rest on her knee, and shows him three marvels, which are the road to Hell, the road to Heaven, and the road to her homeland. 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 to allow 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" or "tongue that can never lie" or both. Version E uniquely mentions the Queen's fear that Thomas may be chosen as "teinding unto hell", that is to say, the in the form of humans that Elfland is obliged 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 from that peril.

Ballad sources

The ballad was first printed by Walter Scott, and then by Robert Jamieson. Both used Mrs Brown's manuscript as the underlying source. Child A is represented by Mrs Brown's MS and Jamieson's published version. Child C is a composite of Mrs Brown's 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 were provided to Scott and were among his papers at Abbotsford.

Mrs Brown's ballads

Mrs Brown, also known as Anna Gordon or Mrs Brown of Falkland, who was both Scott's and Jamieson's source, maintained that she had 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."