[H]. 'Young Tam Lane,' Campbell MSS, II, 129.
[I]. 'The Young Tamlane.' Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: a, II, 337, ed. 1833; b, II, 228, ed. 1802.
The first twenty-two stanzas of B differ from the corresponding ones in A, 1-23, omitting 16, by only a few words, and there are other agreements in the second half of these versions. Burns's intimacy with Robert Riddell would naturally lead to a communication from one to the other; but both may have derived the verses that are common from the same third party. Herd's fragment, C, was the earliest printed. Scott's version, I, as he himself states, was compounded of the Museum copy, Riddell's, Herd's, and "several recitals from tradition." I b, the edition of 1802, contained fragments of 'The Bromfield Hill' and of '[The Wee Wee Man],' which were dropped from the later edition; but unfortunately this later edition was corrupted with eleven new stanzas, which are not simply somewhat of a modern cast as to diction, as Scott remarks, but of a grossly modern invention, and as unlike popular verse as anything can be. I is given according to the later edition, with those stanzas omitted; and all that is peculiar to this version, and not taken from the Museum, Glenriddell, or Herd, is distinguished from the rest by the larger type. This, it will be immediately seen, is very little.
The copy in Tales of Wonder, II, 459, is A, altered by Lewis. Mr Joseph Robertson notes, Kinloch MSS, VI, 10, that his mother had communicated to him some fragments of this ballad slightly differing from Scott's version, with a substitution of the name True Tammas for Tam Lane.
The Scots Magazine for October, 1818, LXXXII, 327-29, has a "fragment" of more than sixty stanzas, composed in an abominable artificial lingo, on the subject of this ballad, and alleged to have been taken from the mouth of a good old peasant, who, not having heard the ballad for thirty years, could remember no more. Thomas the Rhymer appears in the last lines with very great distinction, but it is not clear what part he has in the story.[323]
A copy printed in Aberdeen, 1862, and said to have been edited by the Rev. John Burnett Pratt, of Cruden, Aberdeenshire, is made up from Aytoun and Scott, with a number of slight changes.[324]
'The Tayl of the ȝong Tamlene' is spoken of as told among a company of shepherds, in Vedderburn's Complaint of Scotland, 1549, p. 63 of Dr James A. H. Murray's edition for the Early English Text Society. 'Thom of Lyn' is mentioned as a dance of the same party, a little further on, Murray, p. 66, and 'Young Thomlin' is the name of an air in a medley in "Wood's MS.," inserted, as David Laing thought, between 1600 and 1620, and printed in Forbes's Cantus, 1666: Stenhouse's ed. of The Scots Musical Museum, 1853, IV, 440. "A ballett of Thomalyn" is licensed to Master John Wallye and Mistress Toye in 1558: Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, I, 22; cited by Furnivall, Captain Cox, &c., Ballad Society, p. clxiv.
Sir Walter Scott relates a tradition of an attempt to rescue a woman from fairydom which recalls the ill success of many of the efforts to disenchant White Ladies in Germany: "The wife of a farmer in Lothian had been carried off by the fairies, and, during the year of probation, repeatedly appeared on Sunday, in the midst of her children, combing their hair. On one of these occasions she was accosted by her husband; when she related to him the unfortunate event which had separated them, instructed him by what means he might win her, and exhorted him to exert all his courage, since her temporal and eternal happiness depended on the success of his attempt. The farmer, who ardently loved his wife, set out at Halloween, and, in the midst of a plot of furze, waited impatiently for the procession of the fairies. At the ringing of the fairy bridles, and the wild, unearthly sound which accompanied the cavalcade, his heart failed him, and he suffered the ghostly train to pass by without interruption. When the last had rode past, the whole troop vanished, with loud shouts of laughter and exultation, among which he plainly discovered the voice of his wife, lamenting that he had lost her forever." The same author proceeds to recount a real incident, which took place at the town of North Berwick, within memory, of a man who was prevented from undertaking, or at least meditating, a similar rescue only by shrewd and prompt practical measures on the part of his minister.[325]