Varitations on Storycrafting:
Thomas the Rhymer
Part 5: Thomas The Rhymer: A Tale of the Artist
by Alan Irvine

irst off, I want to make it clear that I have, in fact, played fair with this exercise. I did not pick a story that I was already familiar with and had already thought through. Thomas the Rhymer is not a story I tell, nor even one I have ever considered telling. I have never heard anyone else tell it. (I was, in fact, surprised at Harlynne Geisler's remark that in her part of the country it is almost over-told.)

But having written the summary, and settled back to think it over, a couple of points jump out at me. In themselves, they are relatively minor, but I have long since learned to trust my gut reactions to a story, so I know these must be addressed. The first is the tiend due to Hell, and the second is the Faerie Queen's glamour, or illusion of beauty. Both are characteristic of Scottish fairy lore, and rarely found elsewhere. (While fairy power of illusion does show up ofte in other cultures, it is typically not coupled with the idea that it is used to conceal a drab and dreary fairy world in a pretense of beauty.) Both ideas suggest that the faerie folk are somewhat unsavory, if not down-right wicked. It is not hard to see the influence of a dour, Calvinist world view underlying these ideas. However, it is a view that is decidedly at odds with how I view the matter. If these were major aspects of the story, so important to the plot or theme of the story that changing them would radically alter or undermine the tale, my discomfort might well end the exercise right here, forcing me to abandon the tale as one I simply can not tell. Fortunately, it seems to me that both points are minor elements in this tale, and so can simply be dropped from the story without harming it. At worst, it loses some of its traditional Scottish feel. Then again, I'm not a 17th century, traditional Scotsman, so that is going to happen to some degree anyway. Yet even with this decision made, these two points continue to bug me, though I am not sure why. For the moment, I set the matter aside and move on.

So far, I have only dealt with immediate reactions to the story. Now it is time to go to work. The first step is research; how do other versions of the story play out? In the case of Thomas, that research leads me in a couple of directions. I can go back to the traditional versions of the story. Besides the version in Swinson's book, from which our summary version was taken, I also find a version in Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales edited by Gordon Jarvie. More importantly, I can push back beyond these prose renderings to the original ballads. Francis James Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (commonly known as simply the Child Ballads) contains an entire section on True Thomas, with over half a dozen versions, several fragments of other versions, and extensive notes and discussion. The other direction my research leads is to other modern versions, to se how contemporary artists have approached the tale. The music group Steel-Eye Span has the ballad set to music on a couple of their albums. Comic book artist Charles Vess included the tale in his collection Ballads and Stories.

As I make my way through all these versions of the tale, I begin to notice a couple of common threads. Most versions concentrate on Thomas's meeting with the Faerie Queen and their journey to Faerie. The time in the faerie lands and Thomas's life afterwards are usually covered quickly, if at all. (Some versions actually end with the arrival at the palace, or even after the visions on the road.) The one strong deviation from this pattern is a version that dwells heavily on Thomas's prophecies, particularly those concerning Scotland's politics and wars, and how they came true. The overall pattern, however, suggests that the core of the story lies in the encounter and the journey. I also note that the tiend to Hell and the faerie glamour play only minor roles, when they appear at all, which provides support for my decision to drop them from the tale.

Now that I know more about the story and the ways in which it has been shaped and changed, I am ready to begin working up my own version. I think about the story, about which scenes, images, events stand out in my mind. The first is Thomas's first encounter with the Faerie Queen. I can see the Queen, mounted on her horse, riding through the summer's twilight; her beauty beyond that of mortal ken, otherworldly, compelling. (Charles Vess's exquisite drawings definitely help shape my vision of her.) Descriptive language is one of my strengths, and this scene is rich with possibilities for it. So, too, the entire ride to Faerie is filled with evocative images, rich in potential description, filled with symbolism and metaphor to play with. The journey reaches its climax with the vision of the three roads, which appears in every version of the tale, often as the most elaborate scene. Is this, then, the heart of the tale? Even if it is, I find one more scene tugging at me: the older Thomas disappearing into the twilight with the two white deer. There is an emotional tug in this scene, something suggestive of melancholy, loss, sacrifice, or perhaps just farewell, that I would like to develop more. Finally, in the notes I made when starting on this exercise, I jotted down "Truth Telling." In the time between starting this exercise and starting to write this article, however, I have forgotten what I meant by that. I can make a few guesses, but none seem particularly compelling to me now, so perhaps "Truth Telling" was not as key as I first thought.

With these scenes in mind, I have an outline of the story. The key scenes will be the meeting, the journey, the vision of the roads, and the call to return, with, perhaps something about the effect of all this on Thomas. The narrative of the tale will link these. But something is missing. The scenes feel like separate set pieces, pictures to be described and somehow fitted together, but not like the high points in an integrated story. I do not know what links these scenes together, what is going on in the story that makes these scenes important. I do not know what the story is about. It is not just a travelogue of a trip to fairy-land (or, if it is, I am not all that interested in telling it.) I need to take some time to think about what is really going on in the tale. Why do I find these particular scenes so compelling? What about them captures my attention? The story is rich in metaphors, but what are they pointing towards? What is truly going on inside the story? My initial reaction to the tiend and glamour, why did I react so strongly against including them in the story? As I pose and struggle with these questions, a new outline of the story begins to take shape.

At its core, this is the story of encountering the Other. Of traveling outside the everyday and discovering new visions, new understandings and being transformed by them. That is why Thomas's fate is sealed from the start. Once he decides to speak to the Queen, he has acknowledged the Other, and having done so, can never go back to being oblivious to its existence. (That suggests that Thomas should hesitate before hailing the Faerie Queen.)

But what is this Other? Can I shape the idea into something more specific? I recall that Thomas is a harper, an undistinguished one at the beginning of the tale, a great one at the end. This, then, is the tale of his encounter with artistic vision. Thomas encounters the power, the enticement of art, allows it to pull him out of the everyday world into something new and more rich than he ever dreamed. In the end, he is transformed forever by the encounter and must surrender to it. So it is important to show how Thomas is changed by the experience. Perhaps that is what I meant by the cryptic note "Truth Telling." Even if I do not address his truth telling specifically, I nee to convey that he is different, changed by what has happened. As I start to see the story in this way, I finally understand why the tiend and glamour bother me. I can not accept the implication that art is wicked or deceiving. Indeed, the encounter does not, in the end, lure Thomas into illusion and falsehood, but opens his eyes to see and speak the truth. Can falsehood lead to truth? (Can it? That might be another intriguing direction to explore. What if, instead of dropping the idea of glamour, I complicate it, give it another level, so that there is not just one, but many layers of glamour and illusion, so that what is illusion in one world is real in the other? This could open the story up to the question of the relationship of art to reality. Or it could simply complicate the story too much.)

And now I know what the story is about. I understand why certain scenes jump out at me. And suddenly I am excited about the story. Indeed, I can already see links to other stories I tell, such as "The Piper of Hamelintown," and see how this story could be combined with them in a program. What started as only an interesting exercise for Works In Progress is now a tale I am eager to work on.

—posted June 2002

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