Thomas the Rhymer, the Scottish poet who returned from Fairyland
Thomas of Erceldoune, called the Rhymer: the historical man of the thirteenth century, the Queen of Elfland by the Eildon Hills and Alexander III's death.
In medieval Scotland the most celebrated of prophets was neither a saint nor an astrologer, but a poet who was said to have spent seven years in the realm of the fairies. Thomas of Erceldoune, known as Thomas the Rhymer or True Thomas, is one of those rare legendary figures whose historical existence is also documented, and his fame as a seer accompanied Scottish history for centuries.
A man of the thirteenth century
Erceldoune corresponds to present-day Earlston, in Berwickshire, in the Borders region. Thomas appears as a witness in thirteenth-century documents, and a deed of 1294 mentions his son and heir, which places his life roughly in the middle and later decades of the thirteenth century. In Earlston a ruin is pointed out by local tradition as his tower.
No poetic works can be attributed to him with certainty. Some medieval authors associated him with the legend of Tristan, and an English poem on Tristrem was later linked to his name, but the attribution is disputed. What lived on through the centuries was above all his reputation as a man who knew the future and always told the truth.
The prophecy of Alexander III's death
The chronicler Walter Bower, in the Scotichronicon composed in the fifteenth century, relates the most famous episode. On the day before the death of King Alexander III, which occurred in March 1286 when the king fell from his horse on a stormy night near Kinghorn, Thomas is said to have told the Earl of March that the next day, before noon, the greatest storm the country had ever known would strike Scotland.
The following morning passed calmly, and the earl was about to mock the seer when news came of the king's death. The storm foretold was therefore not a matter of weather but the dynastic crisis that, a few years later, would lead to the wars of independence against England. The account, written more than a century afterwards, shows how Thomas had already become a national prophetic authority.
The Queen of Elfland
The legend of the origin of his gift is told in an English verse romance preserved in fifteenth-century manuscripts and, later, in the ballad known as Thomas Rymer. As he rested under a tree by the Eildon Hills, Thomas saw a splendid lady approach on a white horse: she was the queen of Elfland. He followed her into her realm, where he spent what seemed to him a few days but were in fact years.
When he returned, in the ballad version, the queen gave him a tongue that could not lie, the reason for the name True Thomas. In the romance the lady also reveals to him a series of prophecies about the wars between Scotland and England. According to tradition, one day Thomas went back to Fairyland at the call of a hart and a hind, vanishing for ever.
Over the centuries Thomas' prophecies were collected, expanded and printed, especially at moments of crisis such as the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when readers sought in them the announcement of a single king for all of Britain. In the early nineteenth century Walter Scott published the ballad in his collection of Border songs, handing True Thomas on to European Romantic culture.