One sometimes has the experience of knowing two apparently unrelated bits of information—sometimes for years—until suddenly it occurs to one that they are in fact related and indeed illuminate each other in quite startling ways. I have had the good fortune to teach some of the Scots ballads for the last decade or so and have taught “Thomas Rhymer (A)” and ‘Tam Lin (A)” as exemplars of Scots Other World balladry. It is a truism (and the first piece of information) that the worldview of these ballads differs quite markedly from the medieval Catholic worldview that was current when these ballads may have originated and the Scots Presbyterian one that was the dominant ideology in the time and place when they were collected. Few ballad scholars would dispute this claim.

It is also a commonplace (and the second piece of the puzzle) that ballad collectors in the age when ballads were still a living part of Scots folk tradition repeatedly insist that those ballad singers who were part of the traditional Scots folk community “believed” the ballads to be historically true accounts of real experience. I quote a particularly forceful expression of this viewpoint from the great ballad collector William Motherwell:

Motherwell's comment on this problem seems particularly credible since he is not making a polemical point about the naiveté of the folk but simply offering advice to prospective ballad collectors. The whole issue of folk belief in the truth of folktales and ballads is an issue that has been extensively discussed by folklorists, and I cannot summarize in any detail the debate here.Footnote ² What is important for the present argument, however, is that even if one accepts a relatively weak form of the claim that the folk singers and narrators believed their stories to be true—a claim that “some” ballad singers and auditors believed that ballads were true, a claim for which there is substantial support—then a very interesting question emerges. If some singers thought that ballads such as “Tam Lin” and “Thomas Rhymer” were true, then the theological content of these ballads is of great interest—from the perspective of intellectual history at the very least. These are ballads—particularly “Thomas Rhymer (A)”—which make theological claims about God, man, woman, and creation,Footnote ³ and if these ballads were more than simple fantasy for the ballad master who composed them, the ballad singers who sang them, and audience who listened to them, then what do we make of the implicit theological content of these ballads?

For present purposes I propose to concentrate upon the A version of “Thomas Rhymer” as a ballad focused almost exclusively on cosmology. Much of this argument is generally relevant to the other versions of the ballad as well, but this specific version of the ballad illustrates these ideological and cosmological issues particularly clearly. If ballads are narrative poems, the story that “Thomas Rhymer” tells is frustratingly abbreviated. Thomas Rhymer encounters a beautiful lady who is the queen of elf land. They become lovers. She takes him to the borders of her realm, shows him a vision, forbids him speech, and seven years later he returns. As a narrative the ballad is unsatisfactory since just at the point when we as readers or auditors expect to hear about marvels and adventures at the border of elf-land, the narrative breaks off, and we hear nothing about Thomas Rhymer's seven years in the Other World. But if “Thomas Rhymer” is unsatisfactory as an adventure story—there are no adventures, and if his sexual encounter with the elf queen is clearly implied, it is not elaborated upon—from a theological viewpoint the content of the ballad is very interesting indeed.

The ballad opens with a theological gesture—Thomas Rhymer is alone in the countryside when he sees a lady who is so beautiful that Thomas mistakes her for the Virgin Mary:

Even if we did not have the Middle English romance Thomas of Erceldoune,Footnote ⁵ which is certainly related to “Thomas Rhymer” in one way or another,Footnote ⁶ and from which the ballad is arguably derived, the mention of the Virgin Mary would suggest that we are dealing with an old ballad in which medieval lore is in effect fossilized.Footnote ⁷ The Virgin Mary does not loom large in the poetry and religious culture of Presbyterian Scotland. The ballad thus opens with a religious allusion—one which might seem to conflict with the implicit erotic contact between Thomas and his beautiful queen. One might think that a poem that opens with an invocation of the Virgin Mary should not then proceed to narrate an erotic encounter between two unmarried near strangers. But this juxtaposition of piety and unabashed eroticism can readily be paralleled in medieval texts and is one further indication that “Thomas Rhymer” is in its origin an old ballad. Once the queen and Thomas are lovers, the queen has a hold upon Thomas and takes him on a journey between the worlds:

Stanza seven, the passage through the blood and water way to the Other World, is resituated in the ballad by Child in that in the manuscript, this stanza occurs as stanza fifteen.Footnote ⁸ I would accept Child's emendation of the order of the stanzas for a variety of reasons. In the first place the authority of a great editor of ballads is not to be lightly disregarded, and indeed the stanza in question makes much better narrative sense as stanza seven than it would as stanza fifteen. Secondly, similar stanzas occur at this juncture in the narrative in other versions of the narrative. The larger argument is that a passage through an extraordinary water barrier as part of the journey to the otherworld makes good sense and is readily paralleled in medieval Otherworld literature.Footnote ⁹

For the hero to pass through such a barrier on the return from the otherworld is unparalleled and problematic in a variety of ways. At any rate although the notion of a passage through water on a journey to the Other World is a common theme in both medieval and other literatures—one thinks of the river Styx in Classical mythology or the metaphorical use of the river Jordan in American tradition of spirituals—these stanzas in Thomas Rhymer compress two Biblical figures together. This passage through water and blood lasts for forty days and nights, the time sequence associated with Noah's flood, and is a passage through a red bloody sea. I would suggest that the red blood through which Thomas and his lady pass evokes the Red Sea though which Moses led the children of Israel. The notion that the Red Sea was a bloody sea is well attested in medieval Christianity and is, indeed, one of the dominant metaphors in the OE poetic Exodus.Footnote ¹⁰ And what is noteworthy about Thomas's passage is that it is a passage back across the Red Sea that reverses the sequence of Biblical history. The Israelites, and by extension, all Christians have already passed through the Red Sea; the Red Sea is in their and our past.

The implications of the next event in the ballad in which Thomas and his lady come to a garden confirm the suggestion that Thomas is in effect recapitulating Biblical history.

This scene both echoes and in a sense reverses the narrative of the Fall. A man and a woman who are lovers are in a strange and enchanted garden. The man wishes to eat of the fruit of the tree, but in this narrative the woman intervenes, prevents him from eating, and provides instead bread and wine because the fruit of the tree is cursed. On this voyage the woman is both the one who nourishes and the one who understands the spiritual implications of the landscape in which they find themselves. Thomas does not “fall,” but he does not fall because he is protected and guided by his lady the queen of elf-land.

After they have eaten and drunk their fill, the queen of elf-land invites Thomas to put his head on her knee, a gesture which presumes sexual intimacy and shows him the extraordinary vision of the roads to the three realms of heaven, hell and fair elf-land.

One immediate comment upon this ballad narrative and its implication is that it both affirms and denies traditional Christian thought about cosmology. The narrow road to heaven and the broad road to hell are homiletic clichés which derive from the Sermon on the Mount and specifically from Matt 7:13. This figure is a great commonplace in both medieval Catholic and Scots Protestant preaching, but traditionally it is a binary figure. There are two choices, and neither of them is good or at least immediately attractive. As this figure was conventionally construed a Christian has the choice between ascesis and self-denial on the one hand and pleasure that ultimately leads to destruction on the other. This image reflects essentially binary structures that—from one perspective at least—are implicit in medieval and early modern Christian thought. There is God and the devil, heaven and hell, good and evil, sin and righteousness, and ultimately God and His creation. These binaries seem absolute in this tradition: they would seem to permit no mediation.Footnote ¹¹ The Roman Catholic dogma of purgatory, of course, presumes a mediate realm, but purgatory is a temporally limited realm.Footnote ¹² When the last saved but sinful souls have been “purged” of their sin, purgatory will cease to be.

A case that the tri-partition explicit in “Thomas Rhymer” is related—although probably not genetically—to medieval Catholic teaching about purgatory could be argued, but the problem of the historical origins of the ideology of the ballad is a difficult one and one that I would prefer to ignore for the moment. The most immediate question is: what are the implications of this extraordinary narrative and cosmological vision? The first point to observe is that much of the content of the ballad is conventionally Christian. The broad road to destruction and the narrow road to heaven are deeply conventional images, and every episode in the narrative echoes or alludes to Christian figures or sites. The ballad begins with an evocation of the Virgin Mary as the queen of heaven; the passage to the Other World suggests the passage through the Red Sea, and the extraordinary vision with which the ballad concludes occurs after Thomas Rhymer and his Lady have recapitulated and evaded the tragedy of transgression in a garden that initiates human history.

The ballad of “Thomas Rhymer” is in no sense a “pagan” ballad; the ballad would be meaningless to a pagan, assuming that one could have somehow found a pagan in late medieval or early modern Scotland to listen to it. But if we may begin by observing how deeply Christian the ballad is, we must also note that the ballad master, who was responsible for the ballad “Thomas Rhymer” in the form in which it was published by Jamieson, challenges certain aspects of Christian thought profoundly. Christian thought is, as I have remarked, binary in certain respects, and the cosmological vision with which the ballad concludes is of a tripartite cosmos: heaven, hell, and elf-land. Again, the ballad master seems comfortable with an essentially positive view of sexual desire and pleasure and with the idea that women might possess agency and authority.

But we are, after all, told nothing about elf-land or Thomas's adventures in that realm. We must infer everything that we can say about elf-land from Thomas's adventures on the journey to that land. One immediate point, however, is that elf-land has a beautiful queen, but it appears to have no king. Or if there is a king, as there is in some versions of the story, like King Arthur or Ailill the husband of Medb, he seems to have to accept the fact that his beautiful queen takes a lover when it pleases her. In other words this is a realm in which women—or at least one woman does. And the queen of elf-land reveals herself as an authority figure in a variety of ways. It is she who initiates the erotic relationship between herself and Thomas—presumably she has seen him from afar and liked what she saw. Once they are lovers she takes Thomas into her realm—reversing the normal pattern of patriarchal marriage or concubinage in which the man takes the woman into his household. It is on her horse that she and Thomas traverse the sea of blood, and finally and climactically she reenacts and reverses the story of the Fall, protecting her foolish and greedy lover from the cursed fruit that he would otherwise have eaten. She offers Thomas bread and wine in its place, the material elements of the Eucharistic feast, and then shows Thomas the cosmos as he rests his head on her knee after having eaten and drunk his fill. The gesture certainly implies sexual intimacy—I would be elaborating on the spare diction and brevity of the ballad if I were to define the vision as a post-coital, but one of the implications of the ballad is that a sexual relationship between a couple who find each other attractive is perfectly legitimate and free from moral significance. Neither Thomas nor the elf-queen show any hint of reluctance to enter into their relationship, and neither the poet nor anyone else condemns them. The moral world of the ballad thus conforms to the vision that the elf-queen sets before Thomas. There is righteousness, presumably defined as traditional Christian ascesis; there is wickedness, which is presumably its opposite; and there is elf-land, a space in which a woman is powerful and in which conventional moral attitudes to sexual pleasure do not seem to apply.Footnote ¹³

The reading of “Thomas Rhymer (A)” that I am proposing seems to me strongly supported by the text of the ballad. We would have to suppose that the ballad master who shaped the ballad, the singers who sang it, and the ballad audience who listened to it were oblivious to the meaning of the symbols that are evoked and to the denotative meaning of much of the language of the ballad if we were to argue that “Thomas Rhymer” is a conventionally religious ballad or a secular ballad which happens to include some religious imagery and allusions. Again, my reading of the ballad explains its curiously truncated narrative structure; the hero Thomas Rhymer does nothing more than react to the initiatives of the elf-queen, and he is in her power and under her protection throughout the ballad. The ballad proper is about a series of visions, which the reader or auditor must gloss for themselves.

If we define this text as a fantasy, as a marvelous ballad of the distant and imaginary past, “Thomas Rhymer” is not particularly problematical in that we as modern readers do not expect such texts to be theologically or even logically consistent. But given the claim, which the authority of scholars such as Motherwell allows, that at least some ballad singers and auditors took the ballad quite seriously, as a true narrative, then the issue of the ideological implications of the ballad is much more challenging. The problem, of course, with this reading of the ballad as a serious text is that it might seem to presume a kind of covert “pagan” oppositional cult in medieval and early modern Scotland for which there is absolutely no historical evidence. And as I have suggested the language and imagery of the ballad is deeply Christian. What I would tentatively propose is that we should see the ballad as a kind of ideological and programmatic statement in which an individual ballad master (who may well have been a woman) made use of ballad form and convention and various strands of preexisting folk tradition to create what is in effect an argument about the status and authority of women and the goodness of sexuality as a legitimate part of the created order. Thomas Rhymer's voyage to the Other World and the teaching of the elf-queen take place in exceptional and indeed in what might be defined as liminal situations. They meet each other in an earthly wilderness, travel between the worlds, and Thomas is instructed by the queen of fairie in a garden that is beyond this world and yet outside her realm of Elf-land. The ballad is a story about teaching; there are no adventures, and the erotic relationship is passed over very quickly. And if we take these teachings seriously, the implications of this adventure are, I would argue, quite clear.

Thomas Rhymer's role in Scots folk tradition as “True Thomas”—the prophet who sees the future and is incapable of lying and whose prophetic texts were widely read and circulated—perhaps predates his role in this ballad. This ballad which “explains” how the prophet poet obtained his marvelous abilities, was shaped by the ballad master as a vehicle to express these theological and social ideals.

One could, of course, argue that such “advanced” ideas simply could not have been articulated in medieval or early modern Scotland. I would respond to this line of argument in two ways. In the first place the text of the ballad was published in the early nineteenth century, was collected from oral performance decades earlier, and is clearly related to a Middle English romance that is preserved in fifteenth century manuscripts. Scholars are inevitably suspicious if one argues that a ballad for which there is no evidence before the seventeenth or eighteenth century is “medieval,” but in the case of “Thomas Rhymer” there is substantive evidence for the claim that some form of the ballad, at least, was quite old. If we have to choose between preconceived historical ideas and clear textual evidence, I would prefer to accept the evidence of the text—particularly so since I can think of no reason why Jamieson, the first editor of the ballad, or Mrs. Brown, the ballad singer from whom he obtained it, might have “corrected” or changed the ballad narrative. There has been some concern—“suspicion” would be too strong a word—about Mrs. Brown's role in the tradition of Scots balladry since she is the source for so many of the ballads and for so many of the best versions of the ballads as canonized by Child.Footnote ¹⁴ But there are other versions of “Thomas Rhymer” preserved in Scots tradition, and it is clear that the ballad is related to the late Middle English romance Thomas of Erceldoune. Admittedly the “A” version of “Thomas Rhymer,” which is the version Jamieson collected from Mrs. Brown, is the text upon which this interpretation of the ballad is based, and the other versions of the ballad are less explicitly theological than this one. But this observation is, in effect, an argument for the authentic and traditional character of this form of the ballad. As the wife of a Presbyterian minister, Mrs. Brown would not have any motivation to reshape a traditional ballad in a way that some readers, at least, might find theologically problematical. If anything she would presumably have been inclined to modify the ballad in the direction of orthodoxy, if she had thought of the ballad as in some sense “her” text for which she might be thought accountable. But as an “antiquarian,” or to use more modern terminology, as an intelligent Scots woman who was interested in the traditional lore and literature of her native land, who was in effect an ethnographer and folklorist, she was concerned to preserve the ballads as she had heard them as a young girl in the northeast part of Scotland. It is, of course, impossible to verify her reliability as a folklorist by comparing her versions of the various ballads she collected with similar ballads collected by others at the same time and place, since she is the only source for many of these texts, but the literary merit of the ballads she preserved, their deeply traditional aesthetic form, and their archaic worldview argue that Mrs. Brown was a good and honest antiquarian who preserved traditional Scots ballads rather than a forger of spurious antiquities.

A second line of argument that supports my interpretation is that it is hardly a new idea that folk songs and folk narratives, the literary genres adopted by men and women excluded from cultural authority and political power, often address the concerns of the dispossessed and the powerless. One thinks of the spirituals dealing with the theme of Exodus and freedom from slavery in the Afro-American churches in America before emancipation or the work songs from white American folk tradition. From the time of the Lollards onwards, if not before, there were “conventicles” of women and men in England and Scotland who wanted to move beyond the passive acceptance of the official religion of the day, and it is imaginable at least that some of ideas implicit in this vision poem derive from such a setting.

If one accepts my interpretation of “Thomas Rhymer” and its context, one immediate question is whether this ballad is unique in its theological implications. The variants of the ballad, I must admit, are less clearly theological.Footnote ¹⁵ The potentially relevant corpus of Anglo-Scots, Scandinavian, and European balladry and folktale is huge, and I cannot pretend to have surveyed it, but one immediate analogue is “Tam Lin,” in which a strong female heroine rescues her love from faierie and which reflects the kind of blending of conventional Christian thought, delight in sexual love, and wary respect for the power and charm of faierie that we see in “Thomas Rhymer.” Another possible analogue would be “Gil Brenton,” although that ballad is less successful esthetically than either “Tam Lin” or “Thomas Rhymer.” A more remote but striking analogue is Marie de France's Yonec, in which the magic shape-shifting lover receives communion before beginning his adulterous affair with the heroine and in which the love of the hero and heroine is an absolute good that simply transcends religious or social convention.

In discussing the implications of this ballad and its analogues, however, I do not want to give the impression that “Thomas Rhymer” is an unorthodox or heretical ballad that violates fundamental conventions of Christian thought. In medieval and early modern Scotland, many devout Christians also believed in the realm of faierie and in the power of its inhabitants.Footnote ¹⁶ And the implicit argument of the ballad that women are potentially the spiritual and intellectual equals of men if not their superiors, and that sexual joy is potentially at least a blessing rather than a curse are themes that were argued and developed in contemporary theological discourse.

And indeed, these or similar ideas were current in important and influential medieval literary texts and traditions. The quasi-theological language in which the troubadour poets celebrated the ladies whom they loved and desired has often been commented on.Footnote ¹⁷ The Roman de la Rose was one of the most widely disseminated poems in any vernacular language in the medieval literary tradition and while the interpretation of the Roman de la Rose has been extensively debated, the claim that the poem articulates ideas about human sexuality that seem to conflict directly with conventional medieval Christian ideas on the subject is beyond reasonable debate.Footnote ¹⁸ And finally Dante who is so often cited as an unimpeachably orthodox Catholic poet, introduces Beatrice—whom he first loved when he and she were unmarried— but who lived out her life as the wife of another man, as the fundamental source and authority for his great visionary poem.Footnote ¹⁹ If the ideas expressed in “Thomas Rhymer A” seem unconventional when contrasted with conventional medieval Christian ideas about the role of women and about sexuality, the poem can be seen as a late witness to a serious debate which extends from some of the earliest vernacular medieval literary texts to the early modern period and in the case of this ballad to even later.

There is little published on the topic of feminist theology before the sixties of the last century, but there is cosiderable interest these days in such figures as Hildegard of Bingen or Julian of Norwich as women and mystics who contributed to the tradition of Christian thought in a specifically feminist way. We do not know who shaped “Thomas Rhymer,” but it was recorded by Mrs. Brown who learned her vast store of ballad lore as a girl in the northeast of Scotland from an aunt and from women servants who looked after her as a young girl. And it has been suggested that one of the reasons for the importance of women in English and Scots ballad tradition is that women would sing in communal labor, particularly in the tasks associated with making cloth from wool—the task of weaving which was so important in medieval and early modern society in defining the role of a woman. “Thomas Rhymer” was first collected by a woman, may have originated in the situational context of women working together, and may well have been composed by a woman ballad master. These suggestions are admittedly speculative to some degree, but it seems to me that there is a strong case to be made for adding “Thomas Rhymer” and related ballads to the corpus of medieval and early modern texts which articulate a specifically “feminist” theology, since these ballads both conceptually and esthetically are among the richest and most attractive monuments of that tradition.