Latest news with #TamLin
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: An adder, back from the ‘dead' in a burial cairn
Two days of sunshine at Fairy Hill croft and it has triggered some early spring action here. Young badgers are gradually emerging from the safety of their setts, while the volume has been turned up in the woods, with rooks, woodpeckers, red kites, buzzards, an early chiffchaff and 60 pink-footed geese cutting through the vapour trails above me. A mile 'doun the brae', on a hillside of recently felled forest that looks like Desperate Dan's chin, I was stopped in my tracks by a sitting woodcock. I spotted a glint in his left eye, which was lucky because the birds' cryptic colouration in the undergrowth makes them virtually invisible. The eyes of a woodcock are set further back on the head, enabling 360-degree vision. I played 'What's the time, Mr Wolf?' and crept up within arm's reach before the bird took flight. On my return to the croft, however, an even more thrilling sight awaited me. I passed the neolithic burial cairn that is over the wall from my vegetable plot, and while I was communing with the long-dead incumbents who lived here 6,000 years ago, I was delighted to see another resident of the stones – an adder, fresh from hibernation. It was easy to spot, away from any undergrowth, basking in the sun. It's not unusual to see adders in early to mid-March in southern Scotland, and this one was no doubt lured out by the brief sunny spell. The silver-grey colour and the timing identified this one as a male (the females' colouration ranges between bright copper and dark brown, and they tend to emerge a few weeks later). I moved closer, hoping to get a closeup photograph of its beguiling red eyes, but decided against disturbing it and observed from a safe distance. He hardly moved, but his forked tongue flicked in every direction, collecting scent molecules from the air to detect both prey and potential mates. I was reminded of the song Tam Lin by Robert Burns, my erstwhile neighbour at Ellisland Farm. He wrote of Tam's dalliance with the beautiful Janet, and his fears of his captors, the fairies, if he was not an honest man: 'They'll turn me in your arms, lady / Into an ask [newt] and adder.' Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
National Geographic
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- National Geographic
'Faerie smut' is having a moment — just like it did in 1500
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.
