'Faerie smut' is having a moment — just like it did in 1500

National Geographic

13-02-2025

From the Renaissance to ACOTAR: Tam Lin's many interpretations
As with many stories that emerge out of oral tradition, it's impossible to trace Tam Lin's roots to its source. The first mention likely appears in the 16th century Complaynt of Scotland, a Scottish political text that includes a long tangent about the songs and stories shared between shepherds. The first full, published versions began appearing in print in the late 1700s, a moment of intense interest in 'antiquarian' things, when educated gentlemen dedicated their ample leisure time to collecting curiosities and tales, gathering up endangered bits of history against the advance of modernity and theorizing about their origins and what that might say about the national character of the places that produced them. Strange songs about fairies fit the bill perfectly, including Tam Lin. There's a version in David Herd's The ancient and modern Scots songs, heroic ballads, etc, published in 1769; and another that appears in the Scots Musical Museum of 1771, commonly attributed to the poet Robert Burns. Tam Lin also appears in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, the 1802 collection that kickstarted the career of Sir Walter Scott, who claimed that his version is a blend of available printed versions and "several recitals from tradition.' Like Maas, these men took a liberal amount of artistic license with their source material.
The most important place the ballad appeared is the work of an American: Francis James Child's multi-volume opus The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published between 1882 and 1898. Child, an English professor at Harvard, set out to compile the most authentic traditional ballads, looking for what he believed to be true folk traditions. He combed thousands of options, and eventually chose 305, including ballad number 39: Tam Lin. Child's work was influential, creating an authoritative Bible of folk ballads and making Tam Lin widely available.
The ballad was picked up by 20th century folk music revivalists, like singers Anne Briggs and Ewan MacColl, who produced stark, stripped-down versions. The British folk rock group Fairport Convention took it up-tempo and added electric guitars. The tale even made its way into the British movie genre of folk horror, in a lurid 1970 adaptation featuring Roddy McDowell, Ian McShane, and Ava Gardner as an aging, manipulative Faerie Queen.
Tam Lin's most enduring interpretation, and the one ACOTAR draws from, is that of a woman who defies social convention and triumphs. That's reflected in writers that took Tam Lin as inspiration in the second half of the 20th century, as women were reevaluating traditional stories on their own terms in the wake of the feminist movement. Janet gained a reputation as a rare woman character from traditional stories who has an absolutely blazing sense of her own agency.
Writer Susan Cooper turned it into a picture book, as did Jane Yolen, who made explicit what appealed to her about the tale: 'I have always loved the Scottish border ballad Tam Lin, first mentioned in a ballad book of 1549. It's one of the only ones (maybe THE only one) in which the woman does the rescuing.' Pamela Din moved the action to a fictional Midwestern liberal arts college for her 1991 novel Tam Lin. Dianne Wynne Jones blended Tam Lin with another ballad to create her 1984 novel Fire and Hemlock, about a young woman struggling against enchanted memory loss. These books play with the paths available to young women in this world, using the fairies and the forces of enchantment to place obstacles in those paths. None of them were bestsellers like ACOTAR, but they were influential forerunners of today's flourishing Romantasy books.