Tam Lin - Tumblr Posts
my desire to read every tam lin adaptation versus my complete lack of desire to read acotar
absolutely love tam lin. would die for it. world’s oldest toxic yet wholesome couple story. janet is literally like wanna touch moss wanna touch moss touch moss do NOT want to weave boring tapestries, fucks off to the woods. picks some flowers. tam lin appears. says hey bitch those are my flowers. janet says like hell they are and picks more. tam lin is like THIS BITCH okay guess we gotta fuck now. they fuck. janet gets pregnant. her sorry sap of a dad is like h-h-hey janet you look like you might be pregnant haha just kidding….unlesss? maybe? so will you uh maybe marry one of my knights to legitimize it? aha. janet says fuck YOU no, all of your knights eat shit, and goes back to carterhaugh to get herself an herbal abortion. tam lin shows up. says hey what the fuck. why you trying to kill our baby. janets like what the fuck is your deal anyways? are you a fairy or what? do they have child support in tir na nog cause i doubt it anyways leave me alone. tam lin explains tragic backstory as a human with his manipulative gf the fairy queen. tells janet how she can free him so they can get married. janet’s like bet. janet waits for the fairy queen’s posse to go riding by with her bitch boy tam lin in tow. knocks him off his horse. holds on to this man like a mechanical bull while fairy queen gf turns him into like 5 different non- human things including lions and bears. finally she makes it through the test and he’s turned back into a man but he’s butt ass naked. so she covers him up with her **HIGHLY SYMBOLIC** mantle. end scene. iconic. breathtaking. i am screaming into my pillow
Tam Lin coming out from between the trees with his shirt open down to his stomach and the chiseled jaw of a greek god: do you not know the dangers of wandering this forest alone, fair maiden?
Bonnie Janet, who knows exactly what she’s doing:
I resolve one day to write the strangest Tam Lin retelling this world has ever seen
Which is because a) I have an idea for it and b) the competition is fierce and I intend to be the victor triumphing above the odds
Tam Lin retelling??????!!?!
I love Tam Lin, and I love Janet, but there are no retellings that take advantage of the fact that a) Janet was the kind of weirdo who set out one morning to lose her virginity to the mystical creature squatting on her land with a reputation for having sex with and/or demanding tolls from maidens, b) Tam Lin is what you get when a fairy queen takes a changeling, i.e., a badly-socialized, magic-addled waif of a Romantic poet, with more dramatic instincts than common sense.
All I want in my life is for to Janet march into the ruins of Carterhaugh, yanking up roses by their roots, and for Tam Lin to show up, demanding her kirtle green or the price of her maidenhead—
Only for her to—stay? afterwards???
And there’s this weird three-week span where Janet just…doesn’t leave, but keeps having sex with him, and looks at him with her serious dark eyes and a scowl, and then laughs at him—at him! Tam Lin, beloved of the Fairy Queen!—and Tam Lin falls inexorably and horribly in love. (He likes her ankles, and the unlovely knob of her knees; he kisses the pox-scars at her cheek and though Tam Lin is beautiful and fair beyond measure, he is jealous of her, the scar where the shears cut into her hand.)
She scoffs when he shows her magic. “What use is it?” she asks as he offers her the dazzling armful of jewels. “I can make cheese and parse a contract, speak a little Latin for the church-men and add up my father’s yearly taxes. Can your magic do that?”
She is different than everything he’s ever known, and Tam Lin is in love. Then she leaves.
She leaves.
Tam Lin spends exactly eight months pining, panicking, wondering if she will ever come back—and yes, writing epically bad poetry about Janet, His One True Love, Whom He Shall Tragically Pine For His Whole Life Long. He compares her to a dove. It’s bad. (The Fairy Queen has him sit beside her at Midsummer, and studies him with cool eyes, flat and lovely as silver. He shudders beneath them, he didn’t used to.)
(Afterwards, he is sick in a bush, his stomach trying to empty itself of the rich fairy sweets, the meats he loved in his youth, that taste of ash and nothing more on his tongue. Is it real? Janet had asked. I want nothing that is not real.)
Tam Lin pines so long and so longingly that he’s shocked when Janet herself shows up on the even of Halloween. “Are you sick?” he asks, because he’s never seen anyone’s middle swell up like that, like she swallowed something huge, and it sits in her stomach still.
“No, you ass,” Janet, His One True Love, says. “I’m with child.”
Tam Lin blinks. “Oh,” he says faintly.
……and she held him fast and feared him not, and afterwards, he’s curled up against her side in the weak morning light of All Souls’ Day. He’s still shivering from the feeling of his skin tearing off and then twisting up around him, twisting him into another shape. It’s fine, it’s fine, he just has to keep his paws—claws—hands fisted in Janet’s kirtle. Until he remembers that his throat is human can only make faint guttural noises, that he cannot purr. He cannot wind himself around her, coils of—no, no.
“Come on,” Janet says, not unkindly. Her fingers are very gentle, where they comb through his fur—hair. “Come. Come with me.”
She helps him to his feet, and Tam Lin is dizzy with how light he is, absent the Queen’s geas. He could detach from the earth and float away.
Except Janet is there, holding onto his hands. “Well?” she asks, and it is the first time Tam Lin has seen her uncertain—her arms full of lion, a snake, and still she’d held tight, but now he is a man, and that is a different sort of animal.
“I follow you,” Tam Lin says, and he does.
It's Halloween, so please make sure you're practicing safe sacrificing! Pick a rose from forests where a mysterious faerie lives! Pay your taxes to hell! Pull your true loves off white horses! Turn into various animals and flames while being held!
Fire and Hemlock
There it is! I'm quite happy with how this piece turned out, especially the horse. First time draw/painting horses :)
I've always been madly in love with the story of Tam Lin and your description of it as Beauty & the Beast's older cooler cousin is 100% my favorite thing, and I was wondering if you'd be willing to talk about your feelings on the matter a little bit.
don’t get me wrong, I love beauty and the beast, I could happily read/watch/etc. nothing else but beauty and the beast adaptations for the rest of my media-consuming days
but.
if beauty found herself in a tough situation and went “well, I guess I would bang a monster born of magic and bad decisions, that’s something I did not know about myself!!!” janet went ahead and put on sensible boots and marched into the enchanted castle pulling every rose she sees up by the roots and going “WHERE’S A GIRL SUPPOSED TO FUCK A BEAST AROUND HERE”
…also, when Tam Lin tries to tell her she’s trespassed on his magic castle, her response is That’s Not How Property Rights Work You Mystical Maidenhead-Taking Squatter, which I think we can all agree is amazing.
(for extra lols, you can imagine Tam Lin as Coming Out Of The Well To Bang and/or Steal From Womankind)
Anyway, my actual favorite part of the entire story is that presumably Janet just wanted to get rid of her pesky virginity in the most epic way possible and had no intention of sticking around past the initial banging-of-an-elf, because she goes home directly afterwards. This is the part I always like to imagine Tam Lin Languishing For Love Of Janet (The Best I Ever Had), and like. Sighing a lot, and looking forlornly into his well, and being a generally useless Romantic poet about everything.
He probably writes sad poetry about it. The rhymes are terrible.
Anyway, the only reason anyone brings it up again is because a few months later, Janet’s hugely pregnant and her dad finally, tentatively asks, “so uh….this baby. who….?”
“NONE OF YOUR STUPID KNIGHTS THAT’S WHO,” Janet says, because Janet has no chill at all, no chill at all has she, and so she hies to Carterhaugh—
Anyway, she shows up on Halloween, because Janet has an appropriate sense of gothic timing, and Tam Lin is ecstatic to see her. He mentions super casually that actually he might die that night, presumably because he thinks this will convince her to bang one last one out.
(“About to be sacrificed to Hell by the faeries” is a pretty good fuck-or-die scenario, incidentally.)
Except Janet’s response is “UM EXCUSE ME WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS ELDRITCH MAGIC BABY IF YOU ARE DEAD, ASSHOLE,” and because Janet has no chill, no chill at all, she demands to know how she’s going to break the stupid curse and get him back from the faeries.
At which point Tam Lin finally comes through with the iconic line, “hold me fast and fear me not” which everyone should quote over-liberally. Plus, you get the mental image of a very pregnant Janet holding onto Tam Lin as he turns into a wild wolf and a lion bold and a snake—
Afterwards, the Fairy Queen appears and admits defeat and lets them go back to Janet’s father, who presumably was cowed into accepting this weird ex-changeling knight as his son-in-law.
Which just goes to show what any woman can accomplish if she has a sensible pair of boots, a proper sense of gothic timing, and goes around fucking whoever or whatever shows up when she weeds the garden.