Three roads

The idea of the three roads was the idea that first drew me to this story. For the those who just came in...Thomas is pulled up behind the Queen on her horse and they ride off over the hills. I walked up these same hills from Melrose and you come up into a saddle between the two highest hills, from which you look out towards the borderlands and into Northumberland.

While the walk I took was a fairly easy hour's climb, their journey lasts forty days and forty nights (like Jesus in the wilderness) during which they see neither sun nor moon and pass through blood "up to the knee". We are clearly in a symbolic landscape here. Then instead of the view towards England he sees three roads. Actually the longer version of the poem, the "Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune", a 14th or 15th century poem, has five roads - to heaven, paradise (ie the Garden of Eden), purgatory, hell and to her castle. In the shorter ballad as collected by Child and Scott and possibly of later date, there are only three - the narrow road to heaven, the broad road to hell, and the "bonny, bonny road" to elfland. Perhaps this is a sign of the reformation coming between the two versions, eliminating purgatory and downgrading paradise, leaving only the three posible locations. On the other hand, perhaps the greater succinctness of the ballad form just made the version more focused.

Either way, the striking thing, particularly in the ballad version, is that there is an option here that falls outside the Christian framework. You can go to heaven, or you can go to hell - the dualistic options offered by Christianity. But here is a third way, the way to elf-land, which is neither one nor the other.

We have already seen a sideling reference to Christian piety in Thomas' mistaking the Queen for Mary, Queen of Heaven. This is no accident. Many have felt that Mary, a goddess in all but name in Medieval Catholicism, was promoted as a result of the human impulse to worship the feminine as well as the masculine aspects of divinity. The reference to the horse wading "through blood up to the knee" could even be a further Christian reference, to sanctification by the blood of Christ. On the other side, elves have been seen as remnants of pre-Christian religions, "demoted" in the wake of Christianity's spread. So a goddess demoted to a queen of a twilight realm is mistaken for a human woman promoted to virtual divinity. You can interpret the Queen's refusal of the title "Queen of Heaven" as humility in the face of one greater than herself, or as jealousy of a rival for her affections. But you could also see the two as one and the same, despite her denial.

The three roads provide a clearer message - they are not one and the same. But the road to elfland provides a way which will take you neither to heaven nor hell. It provides a different source of wisdom, a different spritual path, a different set of traditions. Thomas can only travel one of those roads and he has no choice because he has been captured by the Queen, although as we saw he was not entirely a passive victim. Nor is the road to elfland an idyll - it is fraught with peril as we shall see. But it is the beginning of injecting into the Scottish story a new element, a wild-card, a source of wisdom and insight outside the Christian framework.