The answer to this question seems obvious. The ballad is titled "Tam Lin", so the story must be about him, right?
If the story is about him, why then is most of the story concerned with Janet instead?
Let's start at the very beginning. The story does not generally open with Tam Lin himself, but with a warning to maidens concerning the woods in which he dwells. Tam Lin could have probably used a warning about those woods before the faerie queen took him off to dwell in green hills. The warning given is about him, not for him. Although Tam Lin is mentioned in this warning, the focus quickly moves to Janet and her actions. Whether she goes to the woods to pick flowers or summon her lover, she is the one we follow about in this tale. There are no scenes in the story that do not include Janet. Her motivations are the only ones we are privy to, and her trials and difficulties are the main concern of the reader.
In fact, the only information we have about Tam Lin comes to us through Janet. We see how he interacts with her, and we only get his back story because she asks it of him. For all that many storytellers claim that this story is about a young mortal man stolen away by fairies, we never see this central event take place. Tam Lin may give an account of how he came to be living with the fairies, but for all we know he could be lying; he could have fallen down a rabbit hole or eaten magic mushrooms, and it would all be the same from the viewpoint of the reader. His story is fantastic, but he has little power over it himself; he may merely tell it to Janet and leave her with the choice to act or not.
Tam Lin's trials and tribulations are of secondary importance to Janet's. While the rescue of Tam Lin is the major event of the story, we are only privy to the events that bring Janet to that moment, not how Tam Lin has found himself at the crossroads at midnight. We see her struggles with her family, and her questioning of Tam Lin. We do not know how he has lived with the fairies or how he came to suspect he would be the next sacrifice. There's no way for us to know about his character at all except from how he behaves with janet (and in some versions he behaves rather badly).
Presumably he never would have found someone to save him if Janet had not plucked that flower, and even then he might not have mentioned it to her if she hadn't asked. In a rather startling twist on the old passive-female/active-male stereotype of folklore, Tam Lin is the one unable to act in his own behalf until guided by Janet's actions. In fact, even the Queen of Fairies has a more dramatic role to play than the title character, as she at least gets to enact some terrible magic and say some nifty lines in the parting curse. Poor Tam Lin doesn't have anything more active to do in his own rescue than give away some secret knowledge and then get pulled off of a horse.
So why then is he considered the main character by so many people who have written about this story? He is a fairly passive character, and in the longer versions of the tale he spends an awful lot of time off-stage. I've come up with a few small theories about this odd behavior on the part of the storytellers. One is that much of Tam Lin's activities concern life in the fairy world, and this is rarely written about because it is supposed to be very mysterious and beyond human knowledge. Since the fairy world didn't actually exist but young girls wandering around in the woods DID, it was easier to make up a story about the latter than the former. However, as far as I can tell it's really no harder to make up stories about getting carried off by the fairies than it is to make ones up about how you get carried back, so this theory doesn't really wash with me.
A second theory, closely related to the first, is that Tam Lin is the title and main character because he is the more unusual character. He is the one that causes maidens to be warned against the woods, and the one whose identity is cloaked in mystery. Perhaps he does not need to have much of a character himself, as he is imbued with interest any mystery by his very nature (afterall, the holy grail is the main focus of many stories, and it rarely has any speaking lines at all). The counterpoint to this theory is that the hero is still usually the main character no matter how unusual the object of their quest (Beowulf, for example, battled dragons and other strange creatures), and that men carried off to the faerie realm are still more common in folklore than headstrong young women who can outwrestle a lion.
Another theory, and one that I am inclined to believe because of my own hairy-legged feminist leanings is that where ever possible popular culture has preferred to focus on the role of the men rather than the women in stories. Even this seems to be a little bit of a stretch though, since storytellers still managed to title another tale "Snow White" rather than "Prince Charming" when the story followed around a female lead character. One can argue (and I am always prepared to argue with myself) that Snow White's Prince didn't have a name of his own anyway, just the generic heroic title of Prince, so he can't properly usurp the title in the first place, or alternately that Snow White is still generally presented as passive enough that making her the title character still isn't enough to make a threat to the tradition of male supremact in folklore.
Still, that leaves us with questions about just who this story is about. Who it is about may be no easier a question to answer what it is about. I've presented the tales on this website in hopes that someone outthere might be able to discover the central story, even I myself cannot.
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