Sandy Denny – vocals
Dave Swarbrick – fiddle
Dave Mattacks – drums
Richard Thompson – lead guitar
Simon Nicol – guitar
Ashley Hutchings – bass
Track 7 on the album Liege & Lief (1969)
I forbid you maidens all that wear gold in your hair
To travel to Carterhaugh, for young Tam Lin is there;
None that go by Carterhaugh but they leave him a pledge,
Either their mantles of green or else their maidenhead.
Janet tied her kirtle green a bit above her knee
And she’s gone to Carterhaugh as fast as go can she.
She’d not pulled a double rose, a rose but only two,
When up then came young Tam Lin, says, “Lady, pull no more.
And why come you to Carterhaugh without command from me?”
“I’ll come and go,” young Janet said, “and ask no leave of thee.”
Janet tied her kirtle green a bit above her knee
And she’s gone to her father as fast as go can she.
Well, up then spoke her father dear and he spoke meek and mild,
“Oh, and alas, Janet,” he said, “I think you go with child.”
“Well, if that be so,” Janet said, “myself shall bear the blame.
There’s not a knight in all your hall shall get the baby’s name,
For if my love were an earthly knight, as he is an elfin grey,
I’d not change my own true love for any knight you have.”
So Janet tied her kirtle green a bit above her knee
And she’s gone to Carterhaugh as fast as go can she.
“Oh, tell to me, Tam Lin,” she said, “why came you here to dwell?”
“The Queen of Fairies caught me when from my horse I fell,
And at the end of seven years she pays a tithe to hell;
I so fair and full of flesh and fear it be myself.
But tonight is Halloween and the fairy folk ride;
Those that would let true love win, at Mile’s Cross they must bide.
So first let past the horses black and then let pass the brown,
Quickly run to the white steed and pull the rider down.
For I’ll ride on the white steed, the nearest to the town,
For I was an earthly knight, they give me that renown.
Oh, they will turn me in your arms to a newt or a snake,
But hold me tight and fear not, I am your baby’s father.
And they will turn me in your arms into a lion bold,
But hold me tight and fear not and you will love your child.
And they will turn me in your arms into a naked knight,
But cloak me in your mantle and keep me out of sight.”
In the middle of the night she heard the bridle ring;
She heeded what he did say and young Tam Lin did win.
Then up spoke the Fairy Queen, an angry queen was she;
Woe betide her ill-far’d face, an ill death may she die.
“Oh, had I known, Tam Lin,” she said, “what this night I did see,
I’d have looked him in the eyes and turned him to a tree.”
A.L. Lloyd noted that many consider “Tam Lin” “the best of all English-language ballad stories.” It was numbered #39 by Francis Child, who collected 15 variants of it and gave each an alphabetic extension. It also appears under a variety of different names in the Folk Song Index compiled by Steve Roud: “Lady Margaret,” “A Fairy Song,” “True Tammas,” “Janet of Carterhaugh,” etc.
The essential narrative thread is as follows. A beautiful young maiden of high degree meets a mysterious but attractive young man, and the next thing you know, she’s pregnant. The man reveals to her that he’s a prisoner of the fairies, and that his life is in danger. The fairies must send a human tribute to hell every seven years, and he may be the next. He gives her instructions on where, when, and how to rescue him. She’ll have to be brave, as the fairies will resist her by transforming him into a series of hostile entities. If she can cling on to him long enough, he’ll be disenchanted into his true human shape and he and she will be able to resume normal life together with the baby they’ve made. She follows his instructions to the letter and saves him, incurring the wrath of the Queen of the Fairies, who planned to keep him for herself.
There are an enormous number of variants of the narrative. “Janet” can appear as “Lady Margaret,” while “Tam Lin” can be “young Tamlane” or a host of other minor variations on that name. The child’s conception sometimes seems to be described as the result of force, as in 39G: “He’s taen her by the milk-white hand, / And by the grass-green sleeve, / And laid her low on gude green wood, / At her he spierd [i.e., asked] nae leave.” However, Tam Lin is often described as “her true-love” immediately after they have sex, and in no variant is the narrative unambiguously couched as a rape scenario.
In several variants Tam Lin assures Janet that he’s a Christian and/or of high birth, and in one version (39I) he indicates that Janet and he knew and loved each other as children. Some variants (e.g., 39F) include angry relatives who recommend abortifacient herbs when they learn of the female protagonist’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy: “Up starts Lady Margaret’s mother, / An angry woman was she: / ‘There grows ane herb in yon kirk-yard / That will scathe the babe away.’” And almost all the variants include a variety of metamorphoses: in Janet’s arms Tam Lin may turn into a toad, a newt, an adder, a deer, a bear, a lion, a wolf, a burning coal, a red-hot piece of iron, etc., etc.
There’s no doubt that this ballad as it comes down to us is of Scottish origin. Google Maps confirms that Carterhaugh is a real place, a farm and woods in southeast Scotland. In his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), Sir Walter Scott goes deeply into the fairy legends of the area that infuse what he calls “The Tale of Tamlane”:
“Carterhaugh is a plain, at the conflux of the Ettrick and Yarrow, in Selkirkshire, about a mile above Selkirk and two miles below Newark Castle; a romantic ruin which overhangs the Yarrow, and which is said to have been the habitation of our heroine’s father, though others place his residence in the tower of Oakwood. The peasants point out upon the plain, those electrical rings which vulgar credulity supposes to be traces of the Fairy revels. Here, they say, were placed the stands of milk, and of water, in which Tamlane was dipped in order to effect the disenchantment; and upon these spots, according to their mode of expressing themselves, the grass will never grow. Miles Cross (perhaps a corruption of Mary’s Cross), where fair Janet waited the arrival of the Fairy train, is said to have stood near the Duke of Buccleuch’s seat of Bowhill, about half a mile from Carterhaugh. In no part of Scotland, indeed, has the belief in Fairies maintained its ground with more pertinacity than in Selkirkshire.”
Fairport Convention, formed in 1967, pioneered the performance of traditional British folk song with electric instruments. Their version of “Tam Lin” makes some very effective choices about what to include and, more important, what to omit. Above all, it grants Janet agency, depicting her as a strong woman who knows her own mind. She makes a reproductive choice that conforms to her deepest emotional inclinations rather than to the conventions of the patriarchy, and it turns out to be the right one in the end.
The Fairport ballad starts with the warning to maidens not to go to Carterhaugh, or they may lose their virginity, willingly or not, to Tam Lin. But Janet regardless hurries to Carterhaugh wearing her “kirtle green.” (Green was a colour supposed to attract the fairies.) In this way the narrative implies that Janet has known Tam Lin for some time and deliberately seeks him out as her lover. To pluck the roses is a provocative act, and by doing so Janet is invoking Tam Lin, apparently risking being herself deflowered. Tam Lin warns, “Lady, pull no more,” and asks, “Why come you to Carterhaugh without command from me?” She replies, “I’ll come and go and ask no leave of thee.” Fairport’s Janet doesn’t justify her act by saying the roses are on her father’s land, as she does in 39B: “Fair Carterhaugh it is my ain, / My daddy gave it me.” She simply refuses to defer to traditional systems of ownership, including patriarchy’s claim to her own female body.
There’s no sex scene in Fairport, an interesting but effective omission. It’s not withheld from modesty, as Janet is no shrinking heroine, but because the singer trusts her audience to fill in the blanks so she needn’t spell out what Basil Fawlty calls “the bleeding obvious.” Next thing we know, Janet runs back home, and her father says, “Oh, and alas, Janet … I think you go with child.” If father seems less angry with his wayward unmarried daughter than you might expect, that’s surely because he’s yielding to what he knows at some level to be her inevitable and by no means ominous fate. Janet then reveals to him her love for Tam Lin, takes full responsibility for her pregnancy, and refuses to agree to any marriage her father might arrange that would conceal her baby’s paternity.
On Halloween, the one night of the year that mortals can be reclaimed from the fairies, Janet returns to Carterhaugh and learns from Tam Lin how his predicament came about. She obeys his instructions about how to rescue him, and in doing so successfully outfaces several hostile shape-shifts. And she wins her lover back from the Queen of the Fairies, who in Scottish folklore was sometimes viewed as an agent of the devil.
To my mind, Fairport’s is the definitive rendition of this fairy ballad for a contemporary audience, who can surely be counted on to admire Janet’s feisty spirit. It was arranged by ace fiddler Dave Swarbrick, and sung by Sandy Denny in her pomp on Liege & Lief,* often considered the most influential album of the UK traditional folk-rock revival. Denny (1947-78) was a superb vocalist who with tremendous attack and commendable clarity conveys Janet’s indomitable strength. Fairport’s version of the ballad is anglicized, and Denny makes no attempt to sound Scottish … and gets away with it.
However, if you want the ballad sung in Scots, try Kirsten Easdale’s rendition of most of Robert Burns’s 43-verse version entitled “O I Forbid You, Maidens A’” in Volume 11b of Robert Burns: The Complete Songs (2002). Her vocals are lively, but her accompaniment by two accordionists is sadly pedestrian. This ballad, by the way, long predates Robert Burns, who “communicated” his version in his own handwriting to the editor, James Johnson, of a 1796 collection of Scottish songs called The Scots Musical Museum (Vol. V., pp. 423-5).
While many of Robert Burns’s original songs can only be effectively performed in the Scots dialect in which they were written, traditional ballads like “Tam Lin” often include so much folklore, legends, and mythology from all over that they can’t be considered the exclusive property of any one nation. For example, the scene in which Janet resists the hostile transformations of Tam Lin descends from episodes in classical literature. In Homer’s Odyssey, Proteus continually shape-shifts while he’s being held by Menelaus; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Peleus must cling on to protean sea-nymph Thetis if he is to win her hand in marriage.
This ballad is suited equally to both male and female singers, as the dialogue has major contributions from both sexes. Of unaccompanied versions, Mike Waterson does an extended “Tamlyn” on his self-titled album (1977). Frankie Armstrong does a better one on I Heard a Woman Singing (1984). Anne Briggs does the best of all on her self-titled 1971 album, bringing a long version of “Young Tambling” to a thrilling climax: “And the Queen of Elfin she called from a bush, / She’s red as any blood. / “I should have tore out your eyes, Tambling, / And put in two eyes of wood, of wood, / And put in two eyes of wood.” Purists may prefer Briggs’s version, though I stick to my preference for the more concise Fairport narrative, with its focus on the determined heroine.
Sandy Denny left Fairport Convention before Liege & Lief was released, as she wasn’t keen to continue performing traditional material and wanted to showcase her own songs. She did rejoin Fairport for a short time in the mid-70s.** Sadly, she suffered from depression, the tendency to self-harm, and dependencies on drugs and alcohol. Her life was tragically cut short by a head injury sustained from a fall down a staircase – an accident that some might have considered waiting to happen. But her legacy as a songwriter and singer is considerable. In 2007, the audience of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards voted her performance of her own 1967 composition “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” on Fairport’s Unhalfbricking album (1969) as their favourite folk track of all time. And do check out her four excellent solo albums, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971), Sandy (1972), Like an Old-Fashioned Waltz (1974), and Rendezvous (1977), which, together with Gold Dust (1998), a live recording from her final tour, were released as a five-CD compilation by Island Records in 2018.
*A nonce phrase from two archaic words that as adjectives mean something like “loyal and eager.” The album title is probably intended to convey the idea that its contents are full of traditional virtues. Cf. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI III.i.: “And you, my sovereign lady, with the rest, / Causeless have laid disgraces on my head / And with your best endeavor have stirred up / My liefest liege to be mine enemy.”
**The Cropredy Festival has been held in rural Oxfordshire since 1976, and is usually headlined by Fairport Convention. In 2007, the reformed “Fairport 1969” performed the whole Liege & Lief album there, with vocals by Chris While, who did a pretty good job of simulating Sandy Denny’s classic performance of “Tam Lin.”
PS. “Tam Lin” is so popular these days that it has its own website. There you’ll learn that its narrative was adapted as The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970), the only film ever directed by Roddy McDowall. Set in the Swinging Scotland of the late 1960s, it stars grande dame Ava Gardner in the role of the Queen of the Fairies, a “mystical goddess who stole eternal youth from the young men who worshipped at her altar,” and Ian McShane as her toyboy Tom Lynn, “trapped in a life of luxury and perversion.” McShane is insufferably smug, the script is execrable, the cinematography is incompetent, and there’s a superfluous new version of the ballad on the soundtrack sung by Jacqui McShee with Pentangle. Janet, the heroine of the ballad, is relegated to the part of the victim of a final horror that is so badly filmed you have no idea what’s going on, which is probably just as well. You can sometimes find this travesty on YouTube as The Devil’s Widow: The Ballad of Tam Lin.
Holmström Ruddick 