The People’s Songbag Fairy Godmothers

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30983, 12 February 1966, Page 5

The People’s Songbag Fairy Godmothers

(Specially written for “The Press’' by DERRICK ROONEY.)

The wistful fairy tales of frogs which turned into princes and sleeping beauties who turned into princesses are not without their parallels in folk-song. Indeed, even in as bloodthirsty a lore as the Scottish border minstrelsy they just about outnumber the songs of feudin’, fightin’ and fussin’.

The majority of fairy ballads are interesting only insofar as they are part of a pattern; but many have intrinsic merit, either in beauty of language or novelty of denouement.

One of the best, and certainly one of the oldest fairy ballads is the story of Tam Lin, the fairy knight who fathered the child of a mortal woman. The song opens with a warning:

O I forbid you, maidens all, That wear gold in your hair, To come or go by Carterhaugh, For young lam Lin is there

There’s none that goes by Carterhaugh, But they leave him a wad (pledge); Either their rings, or green mantles, Or else their maidenhead.

Fair Janet was one of those who left behind her maidenhead: but she was a determined lass and refused to let her bairn go fatherless. So she crept out one midnight when the fairies were riding,

seized Tam Lin from his milkwhite steed shod with silver and gold, and dumped him in a well. Whereupon he turned into a naked, but very handsome, knight and they lived happily ever after.

The existence of such a song fails to surprise, for it is not too many centuries since fairies were the usual explanation for an inconvenient pregnancy. The “Ballad of Tam Lin” made its first appearance in print, as far is is known, in Vedderburn’s “Complaynt of Scotland,” printed at St. Andrews in 1549. A few years later it was somewhat incongruously quoted as part of a Christmas medley in Wode’s manuscript of the Psalms of David, set to music “in 1111 partes be an honorable man; David Peables, I.S. Noted and wreattin by me Thomas Wode, 1 December, A.D. 1566.”

Sir Walter Scott, in his “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” said that “Tam Lin” had been frequently parodied as a burlesque ballad, and that he had seen it alluded to in another ancient manuscript in the possession of an Edinburgh lawyer. Scott preceded his version of “Tam Lin” with a long essay on the fairies of popular superstition. Carterhaugh, the scene of the ballad, is a plain of the Yarrow near Selkirk; and Scott said that “the peasants point out, upon the plain, those electrical rings which vulgar credulity supposes to be the traces of the fairy revels.

“Here, they say, were placed the stands of milk and water, in which Tamlane was dipped, in order to effect his disenchantment; and upon these spots, according to their mode of expressing themselves, the grass will never grow.”