Tam Lin October

If you’d like to participate, please tag your Tam Lin-themed artwork, edits, recordings, analyses, reviews, meta, and discussions as #tam lin october or submit directly to the Tam Lin October blog.

[wizardysseus]

ladyhawke + more posts

[storminormins]

Ladyhawke propaganda part 1 (part 2)

Phillipe:

[tamlinoctober]

just watched ladyhawke for the first time and I am sooooo super into the tam lin-ness of it all

[a-r-welm]

It’s been my privilege to do the illustrations for a folk-rock cantata reimagining of the 18th century Scottish ballad, Tam Lin. 

The piece was composed by Fiona Gillespie & Elliot Cole, and has now been performed before a live audience twice: first, at its debut in Manhattan in January 2020 (left) and second at its album release in Brooklyn in October 2021 (right).

It’s wildly exciting to finally be able to share the lyrics video & all of my illustrations with the world at large, and I hope lovers of the original Tam Lin story get a kick out of what we created! If so, please Like the video on YouTube. The track is available on all streaming services. 

[sheep-tunes]

First I’ll change all in your arms / But hold me tight and fear me not 

[interspacing]

Janet (of Tam Lin fame) is a sass master. One day I will play a Changeling concept based on this boss woman. “Oh Father, if I go with child, this much to you I tell: There’s none among your gentlemen that I would treat so well. And Father, if I go with child, I must bare the blame: There’s none among your gentleman shall give the babe his name.”

[visardistofelphame]

Tam Lin Remembers the Fairy Queen by Theodora Goss She had eyes like apple seeds. A small, angular face that reminded me of a fox’s mask. Was it a mask she wore the whole time I was with her?…

Tam Lin Remembers the Fairy Queen by Theodora Goss

————————————–

She had eyes like apple seeds.

A small, angular face that reminded me of a fox’s mask. Was it a mask she wore the whole time I was with her?

The thing about fairies is, they’re not like us, material. Indeed, they most resemble assemblages constructed from our dreams. Their visible forms are for our benefit.

Sometimes, as we lay together in bed under a canopy of spider silk, I would turn and find she had become a tree, branches for arms, a bird’s nest between her legs, with three blue, speckled eggs. Were they our children? I’d blink, and she would be a woman again, yawning and stretching as human women do. She’d smile at me with a fox’s sly, wise smile as though she had tricked me.

The castle was sometimes made of rough gray stone covered with moss, sometimes of murky water with fish swimming in the walls. When we danced, the music came from viols or the buzz of a hundred bees. I sat on chairs that were either toadstools or clouds, and ate from plates that stared back up at me, blinking iridescent eyes. What did I eat there? Air? Insects? Salads of delicate herbs? The bread tasted like ashes.

Sometimes she loved me, and we would ride together on robins, or was it flowering hawthorn branches whose thorns would prick my legs through leather trousers? With her strange retinue: the fairy knights riding on weasels, the goblin standard-bearers holding thistle spears. They were always half something else, with the heads of toads or owls, a bat’s black wings. Everything there was always half something else, except the fairy women, wholly themselves, and so luminous you had to look at them through tinted spectacles. It was the fashion to sew living butterflies to their shoulders, so they moved in a halo of colored dust and panicked flapping. Awkwardly, at the rear of the procession, walked a stray cat she had turned into a boy, who mewed and tried to scratch me.

I was mostly unhappy, but sometimes happy. The problem is this: I would rather be unhappy in fairyland than happy elsewhere.

At night, I lie beside a woman who never turns into a tree, who bears me human children. And all I can think of is her hard black eyes, which sometimes looked at me with such disdain, her small red mouth that never told me the truth and laughed when I believed her. That fox’s face, which was probably always a mask.

Sometimes I go into the forest alone and whisper into the hollow knot of an oak: I’d rather spend an hour in fairyland than a lifetime elsewhere. Then I stand in the green silence, with only the cries of birds, the shush of the oak leaves high above, and wonder if she’s listening.

[turbinis]

untitled by jcarroza on Flickr.

[hartteart]

[tam-nonlinear]

The Lady Was As Glad At That As Any Mortal Thing from: Johnson, R. Brimley. Popular British Ballads Ancient and Modern. London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1894.

[deactivated-user-00008915842310]

things I didn’t figure out in tam lin until around the fourth or fifth time I read it:

-  the classics majors don’t follow janet and the schiller bust through the pond and creek because fairies don’t cross running water

- margaret was the name of the heroine of tam lin in some of the variants of tam lin and in pamela dean’s version, margaret roxburgh was one of the blackstock students who committed suicide because she found out she was pregnant

-  peggy, who is possessed by the fourth ericson ghost, has the same first name as margaret roxburgh

-  victoria thompson’s last name literally means son of thomas

-  schiller collaborated with goethe, who wrote ‘the sorrows of young werther,’ which is about an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide, and faust, about a deal with the devil

- medeous’s name is a variant of medea, who in greek mythology killed her own children after her husband’s betrayal. medeous teaches classics and the only way to escape her curse is for her marked victim to get another woman pregnant.

[cloudworx]

A work in progress of Janet on the borders of Carterhaugh

dedicated to my beautiful Chrisanne

May come back to it sometime

[brionymaysmith]

Janet sews her green mantle

[hamartiaes]

FAIRY TALES | THE BALLAD OF TAM LIN

“But Carterhaugh is not your own Roses there are many I’ll come and go all as I please And not ask leave of any” 

And he has took her by the hand  Took her by the sleeve And he has laid this lady down Among the roses green 

And he has took her by the arm Took her by the hem And he has laid this lady down Among the roses red

[brumality]

Peter Nevin’s incredible artwork for Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer’s 2013 EP, Child Ballads. 

[feytag]

the ballad of tam lin | traditional scottish ballad

and pleasant is the faerie land, but an eerie tale to tell ay, at the end of seven years we pay a tithe to hell

[tam-nonlinear]

A rant on traditional Tam Lin retellings

I have read a lot of Tam Lin retellings. Though I love researching the ballad, I have to take a break every now and then or the stories start to blur together. For instance, far too many of the traditional retellings of Tam Lin (meaning those set in Scotland in a historical setting) starts to look like this:

Janet’s mother died when she was very young, so she was mostly raised by her kindly old nurse. Her father overindulged her because she was his only child. She has a heart of gold and everyone loves her, but, because she was a little spoiled, when she hears she’s not to go to Carterhaugh, she gets a little smile on her face and sneaks off to get some pretty flowers anyway, because who can tell her no? It’s also fairly likely she’s trying to get away from her family’s efforts to arrange a marriage for her. She’s startled when a handsome young man appears and she doesn’t know what to make of him, and she hesitates to ask questions of the mysterious stranger, to whom she feels so drawn. She blushes when he compliments her, and then he shows her some of the wonders of the forest. And possibly sex.

STOP WRITING THIS STORY. Almost none of it is derived from the actual ballad, it’s been done, and it is boring. Basically, the default is a Janet who is demure and hesitant. Plus, for some reason, her mother is dead (stop it right now with that, authors! There’s no reason to keep killing Janet’s mother off! Quit it! Killing off the mother is a cheap, lazy, stupid bit of character development and heavily implies you either can’t write women or don’t find them interesting). A girl who is a little spoiled and a little naive, but basically so goddamn good and sweet that she can cure people with her love.

Bleah.

I have read this set up so many times that the last traditional retelling Tam Lin book I started to read that used it, I had to put it down and go read other stuff for several weeks, because I couldn’t read so much as a paragraph of it without thinking “Yeah yeah, I think I’ve read this part already”, even though the specific book was new to me. It said, very clearly, this book has nothing new to say.

I want a Janet who has a backbone. A Janet who is used to arguing with people, because that’s most of her lines in the ballad- challenging, contradicting, questioning, and outright insulting others, from her true love to her family to the Queen of Fairies. There are versions where the Queen tries to talk her out of rescuing Tam Lin, offering them riches,  and Janet replies with “No thanks, we’re good already!”. She argues and she fights and she speaks out for herself.

Give me a Janet who has a living mother - there are versions of the ballad where they argue with each other, but I don’t care if you don’t have her do anything, just stop killing her for no reason. A Janet who is brave and headstrong and who kilts up her green kirtle and heads down to Carterhaugh to beat about the rose bushes until a hot guy pops out.  A woman who is entirely ready to tackle her true love if necessary.

I don’t get people who read the traditional ballad and think that Janet is someone demure (please consider she’s the one who responds to critics with “Hold your tongue, ugly, and may you die a horrible death”). Or, more directly, I don’t get people who say they love the ballad and then want Janet to be someone nice.

She’s not demure. She’s not a fine lady who was overly protected. She may very well be a brat, but she’s also someone who, when she wants something, grabs onto it and doesn’t let go. She has no hesitation to face down anyone. She’s used to living in the border regions - not a peaceful region for the time period the ballad comes from- she’s grown up with mythology and warfare, she knows her own mind, and she’s fearless. 

I hate stories about women where their character is framed just in terms of how much they love someone. Especially when the woman is someone who, canonically, will go out on a liminal night in a land of shifting borders and she will claim what she wants. I don’t get the idea of trying to force Janet into this particular weird pre-existing mold, because seriously, what the hell is up with all the dead mothers and kindly old nurses? Please stop.