Tam Lin is the haunted hero of one of the greatest of all the Border ballads (Child 39), set at Carterhaugh in Selkirkshire, where the rivers Ettrick and Yarrow meet. The place was reputed to belong to Tam Lin, a mortal man captured long before by the Queen of the Fairies after he fell from his horse, and now bound to guard the wood — exacting from every maiden who came there a forfeit of her mantle, her rings, or herself.
The story
The bold young Janet, daughter of the local lord, went to Carterhaugh in defiance of the warnings, plucked a rose, and so summoned Tam Lin. The two became lovers and Janet found herself with child; when she returned to ask him whether he had ever been a Christian man, he revealed his fairy captivity and a terrible danger — that on Halloween the fairy host would ride, and that the Queen was apt to pay her tithe to Hell with a human soul, and feared it would be his. He told Janet how to win him back: she must wait at Miles Cross at midnight, pull him down from his white steed as the troop passed, and hold him fast through every shape the Queen would force upon him.
Janet did as she was bidden. She seized Tam Lin and clung to him as he was changed in her arms into a newt, an adder, a bear, a lion, a red-hot iron bar and a burning coal — never loosing her grip — until at last he turned to a naked man, whom she wrapped in her green mantle and so reclaimed for the human world. The furious Fairy Queen, robbed of her knight, cried out that had she known, she would have turned his heart to stone. The ballad, recorded by Sir Walter Scott in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, fixes the legend firmly to Carterhaugh, where Tamlane's Well still stands by the roadside.