Text: Musical Signs of the May-Queen

Text Note: This Medieval "romance" of "Tomas Off Ersseldoune" is a problematic text regarding date and authorship (see end-notes). Nonetheless, its popular association with the legendary "Thomas the Rhymer" or "True Thomas" of certain later ballads is well-known. It's particularly famous for its Orphic tale of a minstrel's journey to a mythic Otherworld, and it's no surprise to find that it gives music a significantly-symbolic role. However, with its mysterious May-Queen acting as the hero's patron spirit (a gift-giving Muse in classic localised form) it also hints at a potentially epochal and remarkably-definitive kind of origin-myth for the entire Lowland musical tradition.

"Musical Signs of the May-Queen"
— excerpts from The Romance & Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. J.A.H. Murray (London: EETS, 1875)
(Translation Copyright © 2010 by Steve Sweeney-Turner)

Introduction: Our heroic minstrel, Thomas, meets a mysterious and beautiful noblewoman one "merry morning of May" while sitting alone to compose a song in the woods "by Huntley Banks" in the Eildon Hills (south of Melrose). At first Thomas mistakes the lady for the Virgin Mary, but she instead evasively states that "I am of an other country" than the "Middle-Earth" of mortal folk. She entices him to follow her to her own world, whose entrance is down through the water of a local stream on whose banks are many fruit-trees — not least apples, of which Thomas eats. Thomas goes with her and is taken to the lady's castle, which is rich in entertainments — the lady is the queen of this subterranean realm. Time counts for everything in this story — Thomas's host is clearly none other than the May-Queen herself (a later ballad version published by Walter Scott makes her the "Queen of Elfland"). As a further indication of the Otherworldly nature of his adventures, it transpires that while Thomas believes himself to have been in the May-Queen's realm for only 3 days, it has in fact been a whole "three year and more" in the mortal world's terms. After the 3 days/years in question, the May-Queen warns Thomas that he must leave her merry realm, for an evil demon is about to pay her court one of its periodic visits, during which it cruelly harvests a number of her subjects. So, after giving Thomas a series of prophecies, she returns him to his mortal terrain, while promising to remain his guardian spirit. Thomas is also returned to our "Middle Earth" with a gifted musical tongue that "shall never lying lie" — he has become a truth-sayer, a prophetic visionary, the "True Thomas" of later legend, with the May-Queen as his protective Muse, perhaps with the Eildon Hills as her local Helicon.

But beyond the text's many possible and actual Classical allusions (there's something very Orphic, and Delphic, about it all), throughout, its symbolism also draws heavily on the archaic native Brythonic ("Welsh") tradition that Thomas's Lowland Inglis (Anglian-speaking) culture had assimilated. Indeed, in later tradition, Thomas is even cast as a reincarnation of none other than Merlin himself (no doubt partly by association with the Arthurian legends of the Eildon Hills, as much as by the political prophecies that the May-Queen gives him).

However, music also plays a key and highly-symbolic role throughout the text. In particular, the May-Queen's horn is played 3 times, figuratively framing the entire narrative — firstly when she appears to Thomas, then as they enter her castle, and finally when they part. Overall, her horn heralds her movements between our mortal world and her spiritual realm. But perhaps most tellingly of all, as they finally part, the May-Queen offers Thomas a choice between two musical gifts to take back with him to his world — harping (instrumental music) or carping (chanting, singing — the vocal crafts). Significantly, Thomas chooses the gift of song, for tongue is chief of minstrelsy. Here, the text lays down a mythic (and metaphorically-divine) origin for a crucial key-stone of Scottish music aesthetics that has endured down through the ages — the primacy of vocal melody as the fundamental root of the Lowland popular traditions. If you'll forgive me for re-jigging a familiar auld saw, it becomes clear from this text that we're all Tam Rhymer's bairns...

Commentary: On a recent May morning, Thomas is alone under a tree "composing my plaintive song" (makand my mone) while birds sing in the woods around him, inspiring his own tuneful meditations. In the midst of this sylvan symphony, a mysterious "lady gay" comes riding over the hill, both she and her horse decked out in the finest gear, including Oriental jewels and 3 jingling bells on either side. The lady is clearly of the most noble origins, although also alone (except for hunting-dogs), bearing arms (arrows — perhaps "elf-shot"), and alternately blowing on her hunting-horn and singing. These details set her apart from the average image of femininity. Metaphorically, she is the hunter — of men not least.

NB: Murray's odd line-numbering is due to the fact that his edition places 4 differently-incomplete MS. versions together, tortuously arranged to theorise a lost original from which they all partly descend.

[1] Here, Murray indicates that two lines of the Thornton text are partly unreadable (cf. my square brackets), and leaves them blank accordingly. Three of the other MSS. he includes have these lines in full, but in varying and even conflicting forms. To my mind, Murray's "Cambridge" text is the best match for filling-in the blanks here (cf. Murray 1875:3). One reason for this is its ridand ("riding"), using the classic Scots verb-suffix that the Thornton text has already used at makand ("making") in the 2nd line of the extract above (Murray's line 26).

[2] "With my tonge, to wrobbe and wrye" turns out to be harder to translate that it first appears. Both wrobbe and wrye could have various sensible meanings when taken in isolation, but few of them can be given any coherently-meaningful shape when taken together. But given that: (1) we're dealing with a mystic text which is also later overladen with prophecies; and (2) it makes several pointedly-Classical references elsewhere, it struck me that this line could be a slightly mangled allusion to the famous Oracle of the Ancient Greeks at Delphi. The most famous line ever penned regarding this mother of all Oracles is, of course, that attributed to that father of all crazy mystics, Heraclitus — according to Plutarch, Heraclitus said that the Delphic prophetess "neither speaks [clearly] nor encrypts, but [makes] signs" (Plutarch, De Pythiae Oraculis 404e; my translation). This Delphic combination of concealing while simultaneously revealing meaning within the prophetic sign is a key-stone of prophetic discourse throughout European history. In the Thornton version of the Thomas, it is both possible and plausible that the reference to "robing" (clothing, covering, obscuring) while simultaneously "revealing" is an allusion to Heraclitus's well-known comment on the nature of Delphic prophecy. Or not.

[3] ie. "she blew" the "horn about her neck" mentioned 3 stanzas later in this version from the Thornton MS. Only in the "Lansdowne" MS. version is the horn introduced before the May-Queen actually blows on it (cf. Murray 1875: 3 & 5).

Commentary: A few verses previously, the May-Queen has revealed to Thomas their destination in the distance — a castle in a town whose tower has a bell. Here, following another blast on her horn (both powerful and tuneful), she leads him into the castle's great hall, in which we find instrumental music, singing, dancing and rather rapacious feasting on venison — the latter being a clear indication of the castle's royal context, with the May-Queen as its gracious host. Aside from the list of musical instruments (that also establishes the aristocratic context), we find the ladies of the court singing "in rich array" (part-songs?) while her knights dance in 3's. There is also a possible hint of theatre ("revelry, gaming and play").

Commentary: Here, the May-Queen begins to take her leave of Thomas, having returned him to his own mortal world. And it's here that she offers him the crucial choice between two divine gifts of minstrelsy — harping (instrumental music) or carping (singing, story-telling). Significantly, Thomas chooses the vocal crafts as his gift. Consequently, the May-Queen further endows him with the gift of truth-saying in the new songs and tales that he will subsequently write (including, by implication, this one). But Thomas requests one final, additional gift of his Muse — to be told of some ferlies (miracles, wonders). In keeping with the gifts she has already given, the May-Queen goes on to share a series of prophecies with him.

Commentary: After giving her prophecies of Scotland's political future (which are uncannily accurate), the May-Queen makes her final exit. Now she promises to remain Thomas's guardian spirit, always available to him at the place they first met, but also always watching over and protecting him, wherever he goes. Here, she blows the third and final blast on her hunting-horn before returning to her own realm. She heads for Helmsdale in the far north (in Lowland lore, a place where supernatural folks are said to come from — a portal to the Otherworld). But most significantly of all, her final words repeat and grant divine authority to Thomas's, that tongue is chief of minstrelsy. Thus are the Lowland traditions mythically born.

[1] The Cottonian MS. records a damaged version of these lines, which in Murray's reconstruction (1875: 47) includes the alternative formulation:
tong is water & tong is wyne
[Tong is che]fe of melody
However, the Cottonian MS. also appears to include a damaged equivalent of Thornton's line that "tongue is chief of minstrelsy", which Murray rather oddly neglects to reconstruct. Nonetheless, the Cottonian version seems to underline the intimate relationship of minstrelsy to melody, with song as its highest form.

[2] Likewise, the Thornton version begins with a semi-titular attribution to "Tomas Off Ersseldoune" (Murray 1875: 1). By contrast, while the Cottonian MS. has no opening title, it ends on a damaged explicit, which Murray reconstructs as: "[Explicit prop]hecia thome de Arseldoune" (1875: 47), making the Cottonian title The Prophecy of Thomas of Arseldoune — despite the fact that it's the May-Queen, not Thomas himself, who makes the prophecies in Parts 2 & 3. Equally, given the striking accuracies of the historical prophecies, they're most likely to be later, anachronistic interpolations by anonymous authors/scribes wishing to enhance Thomas's reputation as the "new Merlin", rather than integral components of the original text. Overall, only Part 1, the opening of Part 2, and the close of the Part 3 are credible candidates for having been the original core of the text (cf. my following notes).

Notes on this 2010 Edition: My source for the original text is James A.H. Murray's transcription in his still-classic edition of The Romance & Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune (London: EETS, 1875). There, Murray presented no less than 5 different Medieval manuscript versions of the text, although in a rather complex (and sometimes confusing) arrangement to reveal their points of convergence and difference. Implicitly underlying his edition is an attempt to uncover the possibility of a single original source, although he didn't go so far as to develop an ur-text per se. Within all of this, I opted to follow Murray's edition of only one manuscript version, which he labels as "The Thornton MS. (Lincoln A. 1. 17.)", now generally known as Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91, with a modern binding labelled "The Thornton Romances". It contains no less than 65 texts (of which its Thomas is the 13th, running from ff.149v-153v.), now well-established as having been copied both by and for one Robert Thornton (d. c.1460) of East Newton, North Yorkshire, with the scribal work commencing around 1430 — cf. R.M. Thomson's Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989: 65-69). In my excerpted edition, I've simply followed Murray's text and line-numbering. However, I've completely re-formatted his edition to reveal the ballad-like four-line stanza structure implied by the text itself — which, apart from anything else, makes it a far more accessible read than Murray's presentation. I've retained the important Medieval "thorn" character (" þ "), but reduced the text's "barred double-l" to a normal modern "ll". Equally, due to restrictions of the digital font I've used (Times), I've had to give the original lower-case "n"-with-macron as an "n"-with-acute. Expansions of conventional scribal contractions are as given by Murray, in italics. Any other significant editorial issues are contextually annotated in my edition, above.

The translation is, of course, my own. However, there are a fair few obscurities in the text for the modern reader to grapple with. Aside from attempting to track down obscure archaisms in the usual dictionaries, some light can be cast on their meaning by cross-comparing the divergent manuscript versions of the text. Nonetheless, there are a couple of (hopefully feasible) guesses in my rendition.

Purists on both sides of the Border will object to my indexing of the Thornton text's language as Older Scots when, technically, it's (kind of) Northern Middle English. In the realities of the times and places involved, though, these are practically-identical dialects of the cross-Border language of Inglis (or, as Thornton would probably have it in his Yorkshire dialect, Inglysche — cf. reciter's prologue ll. 15 & 24; Murray 1875:1). But my underlying reasons for simply (ie. lazily) indexing it as Older Scots should become vaguely obvious from the following —

The 5 currently-known surviving manuscript sources span the C15th-C16th and are all English, not Scottish. But hard-line Nationalists needn't freak out about that — in Medieval literature, there's nothing unusual in surviving sources coming from places other than the original text's country of origin (indeed, some English texts only survive in Scottish sources). Besides, not one of the English Thomas copies claims a non-Scottish authorship for the lost original on which they are based. Where attributions of authorship are made, it is invariably to the eponymous Thomas himself, and often within specifically-Scottish contexts — for example, the oldest version (Thornton) is headed by the words "Tomas Off Ersseldoune", and closes on "Thomas Of Erseledownne" (the placename conventionally being read as modern Earlston, just north of the Eildon Hills where the narrative itself begins and ends). Murray was far from the first to note that a Latin charter from Earlston dated 2nd November 1294 records the son and heir of Thomas Rymour of Ercildoun granting some of his inheritance to the famous Medieval religious order of nearby Soutra (qua "Soltre"; full text in Murray 1875:x fn.1). Many interpretations of the date and meaning of this document have been given over the years, some being rather complex, and more than a few engaging in Romantically-wishful thinking — including Murray's, but, ironically, not Walter Scott's (Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 1803: II.264). I'll follow Murray on the date but Scott on the simplest possible logical interpretation — in order for his son and heir and to be acting on his inheritance in 1294, Thomas Rymour of Ercildoun is already dead by then at the latest. So, at least provisionally, let's set Thomas's terminus as c.1294.

Obviously, this would also set a terminus of 1294 on Thomas's writing activity. However, Parts 2 & 3 of the Thomas itself notoriously contain references to events that occured after 1294 — not least events pertaining to Robert the Bruce and William Wallace and the "War of Independence", which (at least nominally) ended at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. This time-warping problematic was first underlined by Jamieson in Popular Ballads and Songs (Edinburgh: Constable, 1806:II.3-43), where his edition of the Thomas accepts only the non-"prophetic" Part 1 of the text as original (ie. authored by Thomas himself). As Jamieson notes, there are good stylistic and structural grounds for this hypothesis, and I broadly concur with it. Overall, it comes down to the nature of the alleged prophecies contained in Parts 2 & 3. Apart from anything else, these passages seriously (perhaps even detrimentally) suspend the primary narrative flow, delaying the May-Queen's departure while she "prophesies" a series of political events that occurred after the historical Thomas Rymour's logically-deducible lifetime (ie. post-1294), and which are more than suspiciously-accurate in their historical details. However, this merely conforms to a well-established pattern in Medieval "prophecy" literature (including a fair few "Merlin" prophecies) — they're often very obviously written well after the event, completely anachronistically. Prophecy is remarkably easy with the benefit of hindsight. It's generally nothing more than an entertaining literary device by which to gloss-up the glamorous reputation of the alleged "prophet" in question (and no, not all Medieval readers took such literary artifice as "true" — this is entertainment, after all). So, hacking out the anachronistic "prophecies" in Parts 2 & 3 leaves us with a specifically-narrative core that has both a stylistic and structural integrity that almost completely stands up on its own terms. And this seems to me to be the most likely echo of a "lost original" text, approximately comprising the whole of Part 1 (perhaps minus the reciter's prologue) plus (probably) the opening of Part 2 and the close of Part 3. Intriguingly, and perhaps significantly, this "narrative core" structure is also roughly outlined by the passages containing musical references that I've excerpted in my edition, above. Music is generally the key to mystic babble. ;-)

But at this point, another interesting aspect of Medieval "prophecy" literature's uncanny hindsight can be brought into play. Ironically, the more "accurate" the "prophecy" is, the more authentic it is as historical record — precisely because it's written post-facto to "prove" the supreme "prophetic" power of its alleged "prophet". Now, assuming Thomas's death c.1294, another only-just-posthumous text that legendarily cites his "prophetic" power also gives us some dates to work with for Thomas himself. Murray gives the whole text, with translation, as "The Old Harleian Prophecy" (1875: xviii-xix & lxxxvi, but again side-steps the simplest logical conclusions). In this "prophecy", from the early 1300s (ie. not long after 1294), Thomas is said to have again predicted various up-coming events in the "Wars of Independence". But what's most intriguing from the properly-historical perspective comes before and after the "prohecies" themselves —

— "The Old Harleian Prophecy" (Murray 1875: xviii-xix), my translation

Again, let me stress that, in order to establish Thomas as the prophetically-"True Thomas" of legend, the author of this (probably) apocryphal text has to base Thomas's alleged "prophecies" on real historical events, otherwise no-one would accept them as "true", which would defeat the entire purpose of the text. And this is where it gets interesting, and useful. Because taking the nominal end of "the Scottish war" as the Battle of Bannockburn on 24th June 1314, and working back through the "twenty winters and one" that this "prophecy" claims are all after Thomas's own lifetime, we arrive at the winter of 1292-93. And the phrasing of "neither in thy time nor in mine" in combination with "coming and gone within twenty winters and one" seems to imply Thomas speaking of all of these winters in the future tense — in turn suggesting that he was still alive prior to the first of them. In other words, this "prophecy" seems to claim that Thomas dies no later than the autumn of 1292. And this, of course, fits rather neatly with the other more solidly-historical inference that his son and heir has already inherited his estate by 1294. So, overall, I reckon that a plausible working terminus for the historically-evasive Thomas Rymour of Ercildoun can be argued as 1292. That's probably as solid a date as we can dredge out of the vast pile of time-warping post-hoc mystifications that literally tumble from the multitude of pens scribbling away in his legendary wake. One way or another, 1292 probably ain't that far off, and also has the major advantage of establishing a working terminus for his own actual literary career. Which, of course, brings us back to the real point at stake here — the vexed question of the lost original of the Thomas text itself.

One obvious point about the 5 surviving versions of the Thomas is that they all differ in significant textual detail, here and there — in particular, some have entire passages that some of the others don't. The latest copy of all ("Sloane", 1547) even omits the narrative Part 1 entirely, containing only the suspect "prophetic" Parts 2 & 3. Such points are in themselves clear indications that the 5 surviving copies do not all belong to a single manuscript tradition. And for multiple manuscript traditions to develop, some time has to pass from the writing of the original single source to the divergence of later versions. So if the original Thomas was indeed written no later than 1292, then we can also note that our earliest surviving copy dates from c.1430 — a fairly viable gap of 138+ years in which differences pretty-much inevitably would emerge between diverging manuscript traditions. Overall, the available evidence points to an original version that was at least mostly narrative in content, into which various "prophecies" were anachronistically interpolated at later dates. And this lost original is probably mostly retained in Part 1, probably with the opening and closing sections of the "prophetic" Parts 2 & 3 respectively, as I've already suggested. And, following the scant historical gleanings outlined above, this original would have been composed no later than 1292.

Of course, it's difficult to come up with anything more precise than that. But the narrative core of the Thomas does strike me as a fairly mature composition. And so, adding a bit of lee-way to the dates (and for no other good reason, I admit), that vaguely excuses my entirely hypothetical date for the composition of the narrative core (qua the "lost original") as c.1280, with an et al appended for the authorship of the obviously-later "prophetic" interpolations, and thus a "final" working date for the whole extant piece as "c.1280+". It should go without saying that all counter-arguments will be gratefully received. ;-)