Tam Lin: The Fairy Tithe to Hell and the Woman Who Would Not Let Go
The great ballads of Scotland are not gentle, and the greatest of them all—child ballad thirty-nine, the tale of Tam Lin —is a story with blood under its fingernails. It concerns a maiden who breaks a prohibition, a man held captive by the Queen of Fairies, a tithe paid to hell every seven years, and a rescue accomplished not by sword or prayer but by the oldest and hardest of all magical operations: holding on . It is, beneath its briars and bridles, the most complete initiation text in British balladry—and it is one of the very few in all the world's rescue-literature in which the armed and endangered party is the man, and the descending savior is a pregnant girl with her skirt kilted above her knee. Carterhaugh and the Forfeit The ballad opens with a public warning, sung as if nailed to a church door: let no maiden go to Carterhaugh —a real wood, still standing where the Ettrick meets the Yarrow below Selkirk—for young Tam Lin haunts it, and takes from every visitor a forfeit...