CHAPTER IV

FAERY FOLK

'Tis Fancy's land to which thou set'st thy feet; Where still, 't is said, the fairy people meet, Beneath each birken shade, on mead or hill.

While airy minstrels warble jocund notes.

COLLINS

E get nearer to discovering the secret of the

W

dwarf Blind Harry when we see how strikingly what he says of himself in the Interlude

I am the nakit Blynd Hary

That lang has bene in the Fary,
Farleis to fynd,-

reveals his similarity to Thomas Rhymer, "True Thomas," the famous prophet of Erceldoun. He too was once widely reputed to have been in faery and found ferlys.

According to a fifteenth-century English poem, which rightly charmed Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Rhymer caught sight of a ravishing fairy as he lay longing one merry May day on Huntly banks, and followed her over a high mountain to the Eildon Tree, where he swore to abide with her evermore, "in heaven or hell." Imposing serious conditions,

she took him by a mysterious underground passage through dark water for three days without food, to her marvellous land, where he witnessed one strange ferly after another. All manner of minstrelsy was there, and Thomas dwelt in that solace so enthralled that several years passed as three days. But then, for reasons into which we need not here enter, his "lovely lady" conducted him back to the land of mortals. When she was about to bid him farewell, and he pleaded with her not to leave him without some token of their intimacy, she vouchsafed to make certain prophecies, which were carefully recorded. But still Thomas pleaded to hear more, saying " Tell me yet of some ferly." Repeatedly she gratified his request, and thus conveyed to him much knowledge of profit to him both as a minstrel and a seer.

In a somewhat later poem, The Prophisies of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng,* the agent of the prophecies is" a little man who was held by one who met him mysteriously by the wayside until he related" uncouth tidings" of the Scottish wars, and exhibited ferlys.† This poem is evidently that with which Sir David Lyndsay says he comforted King James V when he saw him “ sorry ":

The propheceis of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng,

And of mony uther plesand storye,

Of the Reid Etin, and Gyir Carlyng.

The words occur in the same passage in which Lyndsay refers to the "grisly ghost of Guy" and "fiends transfigurate." That Thomas Rhymer might be thought to have to do with a fiend would appear from the account given in the ballad of the transformation of his lovely lady into a naked blear-eyed hag:

Thomas stood up in that stead

And beheld the lady gay:

Her hair it hung over her head,

Her eyes seemed out, they were so gray.

And all her clothing was away

That he before saw in that stead;
Her one shank black, the other gray
And all her body like the lead.

Thomas's experience was like that which Giraldus Cambrensis* ascribes to a Welshman named Meilerius, who had for some time intercourse with what was evidently a fairy mistress. "Suddenly," Giraldus relates, without giving the cause, "instead of a beautiful girl, he found in his arms a hairy, rough, and hideous creature, the sight of which deprived him of his senses, and he became mad. After remaining many years in this condition he was restored to health in the church of St. David's, through the merits of its saints. But having always an extraordinary familiarity with unclean spirits, by seeing them, knowing them, talk

ing with them, and calling each by his proper name, he was enabled, through their assistance, to foretell future events."

Meilerius was plainly a person of the same sort as he who revealed the future to St. Waltheof, abbot of Melrose (1148-59), as is written in the early alliterative Prophecy of Waldhave,* preserved in the famous Whole Prophecy of Scotland, where he is pictured as a fearful hairy person dreeing his weird in the wilderness. He would not tell all that Waldhave desired to know, but left him with the words:

Goe musing upon Merling more if thou wil,
For I meane for no more, man, at this time.

We certainly cannot help musing upon Merlin after reading of such a figure, especially upon Merlin Sylvester as he appears in the Vita Merlini, where he seems to have the attributes of the savage madman Lailoken, who prophesied to St. Kentigern.†

It has been stated that the Thomas story was perhaps the "immediate prototype " of that of Tannhäuser, and many have held that the similarity between Erceldoun and Hörselberg is too great to be accidental. "Between the Tannhäuser legend at one end of the scale, and at the other many a tale picked up in this century, in which the

mortal visitor to Faery is the object of admiration and envy rather than of reprobation, every shade of man's feeling towards the invisible world may be noted." *

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Brave efforts have been made to identify Thomas Rhymer, who found ferlys in faery and thus became a wise prophet, with an historical person of the name, and to give him a prominent place, along with Henry the Minstrel," in the roll of actual Scottish poets; but such efforts have been illadvised. Thomas's prophecies, as has long been known, are of various dates, and to call him the author of the thirteenth-century romance Sir Tristrem is plainly absurd. That poem may have been attributed to him in the first place because the original French poem on which it is based was written by one Thomas, " Thomas of Brittany "; ‡ but the ascription was no doubt encouraged in order to give more currency to the work.

Scholars may yet try to identify Tam Lin, Young Tamlane, the famous ballad hero, with some historical Scot, Thomas Lynn, or Thomas Lane, Jr.; but so far that has not been done, and we need not labor the point that he is a personage of fiction like Thomas Rhymer. He too, it will be remembered, was taken to faery, but escaped by the help of his mortal true-love. One feature of his story is of particular interest to us in connection with Blind