More on True Thomas and the Lady

I want in this post to continue the outline of the narrative of the first part of the ‘Prophecies’ of Thomas of Erceldoune, outlining points of similarity and difference to the Ballad. In the last post I did this up to the point where the Lady turns into a hideous hag-like figure. This incident is not in the Ballad. But the figure of the ‘Loathly Lady’ is well known in medieval literature. Chaucer used it in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Usually, the hero has to kiss the Loathly Lady, or agree to marry her, after which she becomes a beautiful young woman. ‘Kissing the Hag’ is a test, when a hero has to prove himself worthy and these stories are usually interpreted as ‘sovereignty’ themes, the would-be king or leader having to wed the land as winter as well as summer. But the pattern seems to be reversed here. Thomas has done a lot more than kiss the Lady, and the result is that she is transformed from beauty to hideousness. The ‘test’ here, if it is a test, is that Thomas has to accompany the Lady in her hideous form back to her own land, leaving ‘Middle Earth’ behind them . This involves a frightening journey underground and through water.

In the Ballad, after Thomas has kissed the Elfin Queen, she takes him up on her horse and they ride ‘swifter than the wind’ across a desert leaving the ‘living land’ behind them. In the ‘Prophecies’, following the lady’s transformation, Thomas is distraught and reverts to addressing her as the Queen of Heaven, supposing what they have done will bring him great trouble. But in one of the manuscript sources of the ‘Prophecies’ the wording suggests, rather, that he prays separately to the Virgin Mary and although this is less clear in the other manuscripts, it is a possible reading there too. The Lady’s response is to guide him to a ‘secret’ way under the hill where it is ‘dark as midnight mirk’ and where he must wade through a river. He hears nothing but the constant sound of running water for three days before arriving in a fair garden. In guiding him through the terrible ways to the Otherworld, the Lady, though having refused the title, seems to offer him the help and protection he prays for to ‘Mary mild’. Though he is faint with hunger and reaches out to eat some of the fruit in the garden, she tells him not to touch it or he will never return. This is a common theme of visits to the Otherworld and again, here, the lady is his guide and protector.

The briefer narrative of the Ballad dispenses with most of this but does include references to riding through rivers of blood. Both the Ballad and the ‘Prophecies’, though not in the same place in the narrative, have a scene where the Lady tells Thomas to put his head upon her knee while she points out the different road that could be taken. The Ballad has three of these: ‘the road to righteousness’, ‘the road to wickedness, which some call the road to heaven’, and the ‘bonnie road across the ferny brae’ which will take them to Elfland. In the ‘Prophecies’, the five roads identified are to heaven, to paradise, to purgatory, to hell, and to a castle on a hill which is their destination. The Ballad makes its point without these theological distinctions, simply asserting that ‘Elfland’ is different from heaven and hell.

In the version of the Ballad given by Walter Scott (but not in a later, possibly corrupt version) the Elfin Queen, rather than warning Thomas not to eat the fruit, offers him an apple which will give him ‘a tongue that can never lie’. We are then simply told that he returns after seven years wearing a coat ‘of the even cloth’ and ‘shoes of velvet green’. In both the Ballad and the ‘Prophecies’ Thomas is told not to speak while he is in the Otherworld. In the ‘Prophecies’ the reason given for this is that the Lady doesn’t want him to be questioned by her husband in case he reveals what they have been up to. The Ballad has no explanation except that if he does speak he will never return home.

As they ride towards the castle, the Lady’s beauty returns to her. Thomas stays there for what seems like three days but he is told it is three years (compare the Ballad’s seven years). He must leave, the Lady tells him, as the ‘foul fiend of hell’ will come to claim one of the company and if Thomas is there she fears it will be him. There is a parallel here with the story of Tamlane. Fytte One ends with the lady bringing Thomas back to the Eildon Tree. In fyttes two and three she keeps trying to take leave of him with repeated statements like ‘I must wend my way’ and ‘I may no longer dwell’. But Thomas keeps asking her for ‘ferlies’ and a series of prophecies are delivered.

And the Mabinogi? There are no obvious parallels, but consider the ‘penance’ that Rhiannon has to perform at the horse block when she is suspected of killing her son. She doesn’t become a loathly lady, but she has to endure a humiliation and a diminution in status until Pryderi is returned. As for Pwyll, he is ‘tested’ by the incident when Gwawl, the prospective husband Rhiannon does not want, outwits him and he needs Rhiannon’s help to regain the advantage.

The Rhymer, The Prophet and The Lady

The Tree planted at the 'Rhymer's Stone' to mark the spot of the 'Eildon Tree'

The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer runs to between eighty and ninety lines according to which of the several versions are consulted. The corresponding narrative in Fytte One of the ‘Prophecies’ of Thomas of Erceldoune runs to 308 lines, with a partial extension into Fytte Two. So the material in the ‘Prophecies’ is obviously more detailed. This will need several posts to cover the different things I’d like to discuss, though I might eventually put them all together elsewhere.

The Ballad is widely available in different versions. My standard reference in these discussions will be to the version that appeared in Walter Scott’s Border Minstrelsy(1802). A slightly anglicized version of this can be found HERE

The texts from the various manuscript sources for the ‘Prophecies’ were published in James Murray’s Early English Texts Society edition in 1875. The earliest manuscript source dates from c.1430, a little more than a hundred years after the historical Thomas of Erceldoune died.

Here are the opening lines of the ‘Prophecies’ in their transcribed original form. I give this for a flavour of the text, but will after this quote from the text in my translation from the northern dialect of Middle English in which it is written.

Als j me wente Þis Eldres daye
Ffull faste in mynd makand my mone,
In a mery mornynge of Maye
By huntle bankkes my selfe alone,
I herde Þe jaye & Þe throstyll cokke,
The Mawys menyde hir of hir songe,
Þe wodewale beryde als a belle
That alle Þe wode a-bowte me ronge.
Allonne in longynge thus als j laye
Vndre-nethe a semely tree,
J was whare [of] a lady gaye
Come rydynge ouer a longe lee.
If j solde sytt to domesdaye,
With my tongue, to wrobbe and wrye,
Certanely Þat lady gaye
Neuer bese scho askryede for mee.
Hir palfraye was a dappill graye
Swylke one ne saghe j neuer none
Als dose Þe sonne on someres daye
Þat faire lady hir selfe scho schone.
Hir selle it was of roelle bone
Full semely was Þat syghte to see
Stefly sett with precyous stones
And compaste all with crapotee,
Stones of Oryente, grete plente,
Hir hare abowte hir hede it hange;
Scho rade ouer Þat lange lee
A whylle scho blewe, a-noÞer scho sange.

The first thing to notice here is that, unlike the Ballad, this is written in the first person. The Ballad is about Thomas. This purports to be written by him, though there are parts of the narrative that change to third person narration and I will discuss these in a future post. Another difference is that the Ballad launches straight into the action while the ‘Prophecies’ spend some time setting the scene. It is a May Morning, the birds are singing and, as the Lady comes riding towards him, she is described in great detail. Thomas is overwhelmed. He says, ‘If I were to live until Doomsday, I couldn’t describe her splendour’. She is ‘shining like the sun on a summer’s day’ as she approaches with her jewel be-studded trappings. As she comes, she sings out and blows upon her horn like a hunter. It takes 72 lines to describe her approach. The Ballad does it in eight lines.

Now, for comparison, consider this from the First Branch of Y Mabinogi:
“As they were sitting on this hill a woman dressed in shining gold brocade and riding a great pale horse approached the highway which ran past them. Anyone who saw the horse would have said it was moving at a slow steady pace as it drew adjacent to the hill. "Men," said Pwyll, "does anyone know that horsewoman?" "No, lord," they answered. "Then let someone go and find out who she is." A man rose to go after her but by the time he reached the highway she had already gone past. He tried to follow her on foot, but she drew farther ahead of him. When he saw his pursuit was in vain he returned and told Pwyll, "Lord, it is pointless for anyone to follow her on foot." "All right. Go to the court and take the fastest horse you know and go after her." The man fetched the horse and set out after her. Once he reached open country his spurs found his mount, but no matter how much he urged the steed onward the farther ahead she drew, all the while going at the same pace as before.”

These and other parallels will be considered later.

As the Lady approaches him, Thomas assumes that she is must be the Virgin Mary and he addresses her as such, but she informs him he is mistaken. She is, rather, as the ballad has it, The Queen of Elfland, though in the ‘Prophecies’ she simply says that she is from ‘another country’. Rhiannon, in Y Mabinogi is clearly of a faery nature from the outset and not mistaken for Mary, though she only identifies herself by her name and her father’s name.

In the Ballad, the Queen invites Thomas to give her a kiss and then almost immediately carries him off to Elfland after identifying other possible roads they could take. But in the ‘Prophecies’ much more happens. After being told that she is not Mary, Thomas begins to suggest that they ‘lie down’ together. At first she refuses, saying that it would ‘mar’ and ‘spill’ her beauty. But Thomas persists and she then agrees:

Down then came that lady bright
Underneath the greenwood spray
And if the story tells it right
Seven times with her he lay.
She said ‘man you like your play'

But after this, as she predicted, she is transformed and her appearance is hideous. All of this is covered by the kiss in the Ballad, after which he is under her spell. In Y Mabinogi, Rhiannon tells Pwyll she has come because she wants him for a husband and he agrees to visit her to formalize the arrangement.

At which point, I’ll pause and postpone more until the next post.

The Prophecies of True Thomas

The Rhymer's Stone

The identity of Taliesin in the Welsh literary tradition has been mixed up with his status as the repository of legendary and prophetic material which clearly must be later than the supposed dates for the bard of Urien of Rheged in the sixth or seventh centuries. Much the same is true of Arthur as a legendary chieftain supposed to have lived at around the same time or a little earlier. The real identities of these figures, such as they can be established at all, are therefore uncertain. I find myself reflecting on these matters in the context of a much later case of an historical character who has gained legendary status. Thomas of Ercildoune has for some time been known to me as a character in the Scots ballad of ‘True Thomas’, or ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, who was carried off by the Queen of Faery and given ‘true speech’. During a recent trip to Scotland I visited the place where this is said to have happened. It is possible to follow a trail from the medieval abbey in Melrose up onto the Eildon Hills and then to descend to Huntley Bank by Bogle Burn (‘Goblin Brook’) and down to the ‘Rhymer’s Stone’, a memorial to mark the spot where Thomas sat, according to the ballad, under the ‘Eildon Tree’. A hawthorn has also been planted by the memorial stone to represent this tree.

As well as exploring the physical geography of the ballad I have also been researching its background. It appears in most anthologies of traditional ballads, having featured in Child’s English and Scottish Ballads(1862) and in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). Robert Graves discussed the ballad in his ‘historical grammar of poetic myth’ The White Goddess (1949) and suggested that the true speech conferred on Thomas was the gift of poetic inspiration. He also points out that the ballad was a source of John Keats’ poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. I had for some time, therefore, thought of the ballad as having independent existence arising from an oral tradition and representing a typological expression of a folklore motif of the Faery Queen on a horse. In this way it is possible to link it with other such expressions in, for instance, the ballad of Tamlane and, indeed, other literary formulations of the motif like the arrival of Rhiannon on a white horse in the First Branch of Y Mabinogi. This sort of typological approach enables one to see the use of the motif by poets such as Keats as touching on archetypal themes in both the written and the oral tradition of story telling or, we might say, myth making.

While still being persuaded of the validity of this approach, there is another way of viewing the bare facts. Thomas was an historical character who lived in the thirteenth century in a tower – now a ruin but still partly standing – in the village of Ercildoune (now Earlston) in the Tweed Valley. He was dubbed ‘The Rhymer’ because of his reputation for penning prophetic verses. But like Taliesin before him many later events became attached to his list of prophecies, in the case of Thomas mostly related to conflicts between England and Scotland. He is said to be the author of a work in three ‘fyttes’ or sections containing prophecies in Fytte Two and Three but telling the story of his being carried off by the Faery Queen in Fytte One. Here his acquisition of the gift for ‘true speech’ from the Queen is the validation of his power as a prophet. The earliest of several manuscripts containing this work – the so-called ‘Thornton Manuscript’, a collection of various romance and prophetic writing - has been dated to the decade 1430-1440, over a hundred years after Thomas’s death.

This work, it is believed, is the source of the ballad. But the work is written in a northern dialect of Middle English, not Scots. And while Fytte One contains the same story as the ballad, the details differ. In his edition of various manuscript versions of the ‘Prophesies’ for the Early English Texts Society in 1875, James Murray argues the case for the textual integrity of the whole work in three fyttes in spite of the feelings of Child and others that the story of Fytte One was distinct as a literary product and deserved to be considered separately. Murray also suggests it may not be too much to suppose that “Thomas of Ercildoune may, from his literary tastes, have been the repository of such traditional rhymes” and that he may have known of an independent version of the story in Fytte One and used it as a way of giving “currency to the idea of his own prophetic powers”. Or that a later author put together a compilation of Thomas’s prophecies, adding others of his own, and linked them to the story of his being carried away to Faery in the same way. Indeed, Murray points out that at some stages of its literary reception the prophecies had been regarded with more interest than the folktale. These were common currency in the political discourse of the time and were often used to justify, or whip up support for, particular causes. The author of the Complaynt of Scotland (1529) refers to “diuerse prophane prophesies of merlyne and other ald corruptit vaticinaris the quhilkis hes affirmit in rusty ryme” while James V (of Scotland) was entertained with “prophisies of Rymour, Beid and Marlyng”.

Placing the prophecies alongside those of Merlin, and therefore in the same context as those ascribed to Myrddin and Taliesin, brings the material into focus alongside Welsh texts and predictions of conflicts between the different peoples inhabiting Britain after the Romans left, and throughout the Middle Ages. But we do at least know that Thomas Learmount of Ercildoune existed and that some of the prophecies concerning the area around the Eildon Hills and the valley of the River Tweed provide a setting which make it likely that he was their author. Walter Scott, who was also an inhabitant of this area, may therefore be seen to have had an interest in promoting the ballad and there is some debate as to the previous provenance of the version that he printed in his collection. If it was, indeed, a recent literary production based on Fytte One of the ‘Prophesies’ then the idea that the story had an independent existence in the oral tradition could be questioned. Scott was certainly enthusiastic about Thomas’s legendary status and he even tried to appropriate it by incorporating a ‘Rhymer’s Glen’ into his estate at Abbotsford a few miles away from the spot where the ‘Eildon Tree’ was located. But many have felt that the story has a life of its own beyond the context of the times during which the prophecies were significant. And having a context outside of a particular historical time frame is one indication of a story with the typological, or mythical, significance referred to earlier.

A closer look, therefore, at the ballad, alongside the story in Fytte One of the ‘Prophesies’ is an ongoing project and may feature in a future post.

Propositions and Questions about Maponos and Poetic Inspiration

If – as is attested – Mabon Son of Modron is Maponos Son of Matrona, the divine Son of the divine Mother, and if also – as is attested – he is the spirit of Poetic Inspiration such as is embodied in the inspired [literally*] possession of the Awenyddion as mentioned by Gerald of Wales, and therefore he is the inspired source of their prophecies, and if, cognate with this, The Spirit of Poetry mentioned in Cormac’s Glossary as inspiring the young lad who engages in a rhyming competition with the female poet and may be linked – as is attested – to Aeongus Óg, and if this same inspired possession is the source of  Henry Vaughan's account of the poetic spirit actually entering the young shepherd in the form of a hawk carried by a “a beautifull young man with a garland of green leafs upon his head, & an hawk upon his fist: with a quiver full of arrows att his back”

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Then is there a link between the God of Youth and the Spirit of Poetry which survives in the fragments of story making their own way through the world as episodes in a medieval tale, accounts of poetic & prophetic inspiration and illustrative glosses on words in an exegetical grammar?

But if (as argued by Robert Graves) the source of that inspiration is a goddess rather than a god, whether as Muse or, in the native tradition, the Queen of Faëry as embodied in ballads such as those about Thomas of Ercildoune or  Thomas the Rhymer Who also features in native faërie lore, or in poems such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats which are also making their own independent ways through the world,

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Then should we, as Graves suggests, perceive a transfer of power from feminine to masculine deities as the source of inspiration as evinced by Apollo’s inspiration of the priestess at Delphi?

And if so, does the release of Mabon (who was snatched from his mother when three days old) from a dungeon below Caer Loyw in Culhwch and Olwen signify a release of that prophetic and youthful power into the world by the warrior Arthur and how are we to compare this to the adoption of prophetic power by Taliesin from a brew prepared by Ceridwen whose own cauldron of Inspiration – like that retrieved from the Otherworld by Arthur – became a source of male rather than female power?

Or should gender not be an issue here?

• ‘Inspiration’ – from ‘inspirare’, to breathe in.