Sir Thomas de Ercildoun, better remembered as Thomas the Rhymer (1220 – 1298]), also known as Thomas Learmont or True Thomas, was a Scottish laird and reputed prophet from Earlston (then called “Erceldoune”) in the Borders. Thomas’ gift of prophecy is linked to his poetic ability. He is often cited as the author of the English Sir Tristem, a version of the Tristam legend. 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” (Child number 37). The romance occurs as “Thomas off Ersseldoune” in the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript. The original romance (from c. 1400) was probably condensed into ballad form (c. 1700). 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 Sir Walter Scott reported to have learned from local legend.
The ballad (Roud 219) around the legend of Thomas was catalogued “Thomas the Rymer,” by Francis 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’.
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 (which they follow). 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 queen wears a skirt of grass-green silk and a velvet mantle, and is mounted either on a milk-white steed (in Ballad A), or on a dapple-gray horse (B, D, E and R (the Romance)). The horse has nine and fifty bells 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), or “lady gay” (E), 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., If he chooses to go with her, 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 by 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 with 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 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” (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 “tiending unto hell”, that is to say, the tithe 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.