In one of these books, Fairies and Elves, I found the tale of Tam Lin. It had several pages to itself, beautifully illustrated. The story had all of the elements I liked best, and it became one of my favorite stories. I didn't know much of anything else about the story, and I seem to recall that as a child I thought it was Chinese, based on the name. I don't recall the book mentioning that the story was a ballad, and the prose version in the book left out some of the common but controversial aspects of the story, such as the sex, the pregnancy, and the discussion of abortion. Still, out of the many stories I read it stood out. As I moved on to other books through the years, the story faded into the general background of knowledge.
Pamela Dean's book Tam Lin, in the faerie tale series, came out when I was a freshman in college. The moment I saw the title I remembered the story from years before. While Pamela Dean's writing is lovely and quite beautiful, it didn't connect for me as being about Tam Lin. However, I'm grateful to Dean for providing me with a version of the true ballad at the end of the story, and even more for her information about the other versions of the story out there. I did a little digging at the library and found a few more versions of the ballad. I loved it. I memorized it and recited it and made it part of my .plan file (back in the days before I had a website). I was glad to be reminded of the tale.
After college I found a job that allowed me to create my own web pages. I put up pages on almost everything (a trend I shied away from for some time, though I am now returning to it). I also had many conversations with my coworker, Torrey Simons (Torrey, if you're reading this, I still waiting to exchange those two Cynthia Heimel books with you) about whatever was on our minds. During one conversation I was telling her of my favorite old fairy stories. I mentioned both Tam Lin and Beauty and the beast. During the conversation I was struck by how similar the stories were. Excited, I dashed off a quick email to a college professor to ask him about it. He recommended a few more avenues of research, such as the Stith Thompson folklore index. I started doing web searches for more information, and recording what I found as web pages.
At the time the only other pages on Tam Lin out there (as if there was a burning need) were the ones owned by Chris Gladish. I wrote to Chris to ask him what he thought of everything, whatever everything was at the time. We had a number of good conversations that sparked a bunch of additional lines of research. Chris's pages have been gone for a few years nows, but I'm still grateful for the help he gave me.
Most of the rest of the history of this website is detailed in the site diary. The website has grown and expanded over the years, and hopefully will continue to do so. I'm not particularly obsessed with this story so much as I am with the habit of collecting. I come from a line of geeks, people who love information and are excited by strange details. As I said when I started this post out, my family has always encouraged intellectual exploration, fostering a love of knowledge for knowledge's sake. After a fairly short time, the pages on Tam Lin became a matter of knowing as much about a particular subject as possible regardless of the subject itself. It's a small enough topic that I felt I could do some good in it, simply because no one else had bothered yet (at least not on the web).
I don't believe for a moment that ballads or faerie stories or this faerie story in particular is likely to be of much interest to anyone. I like the story, but I like a lot of stories. This is just the one I've used to decorate my little corner of the web, and I hope you enjoy your stay here. Thank you.
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