There's a lot to be said about a fantasy that is written WELL. In fact, one can argue that it is the only thing worth aiming for. With tons of writers touching on this and that in the realm of the Fae, of wandering minstrels, of friendship, love, and loss, you'd think there would never be a way to STAND OUT from that crowd.And then, this late in my career of hunting down all the best books on the Fae, I run across Thomas the Rhymer. There are no tricks in this telling.It is, above all, a crisp,

The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream.

Another take on the legend of Thomas Learmounth. Beautiful language, absence of violence - these are the book's pluses. However, that is about it. The story itself lacks something very important - the point. I do not mean the point of the legend of True Thomas, but the point of this very book. Thomas lives here and then he lives there... so what? What was the point of his stay with the Elves? What did the riddle he had resolved while living among the Elves have in common with the rest of his lif...

What a quietly beautiful book. At a first glance, it's a small story - but it has such depth, such insight, it's so full of raw emotions and witty humour, it touches your heart and doesn't let go easily. If at all.

This was a book I read sometime in the 90s (1995 is a rough guess), after getting it from the Science Fiction Book Club. It's a masterful re-telling of the Scottish folk legend of Thomas of Erceldoune, a 12th-century minstrel (who was apparently an actual person), who was said to have been abducted by the queen of Elfland to serve her for seven years, as the price of a kiss, and to have returned with the gift --or curse-- of never being able to say anything but the truth. The author's treatment

Prose re-telling of the tale of Thomas the Rhymer, a minstrel who was taken to Elfland by the Queen of the Elves and who stayed there for 7 years, returning with the gift of a tongue that never lied and became renowned as a prophet.Engrossing enough but the game between the Queen and the Hunter which Thomas either provoked or was a pawn was very confusing. Yes, there was a need to show just how otherworldly and removed from humanity the concerns of the elves were but surely the author ought to h...

A really intetesting, extremely unusual novel. Its sort of an example of what fantasy might have been like if Tolkien had never existed, with a deeply character driven storyline and a setting very rooted in old England and its mythology, sort of like Spencer or something. its largely a down to earth, almost realist novel, interrupted by 100 pages of the strangest, most surreal storytelling I've seen in a while. (A friend of mine compared this section to the wizard knight by Gene Wolfe, and, for

I love novels like this; that flesh out a traditional tale while remaining true and faithful to the source material. (Like Robin McKinley's 'Beauty', Donna Jo Napoli's 'Zel', etc). This book retells the legend of Thomas the Rhymer, a minstrel taken under the hill for seven years of service to the faerie queen, who returns with the 'gift' of being unable to tell a lie. It brings to life Thomas and those who know and love him, letting a reader feel not that what they'd heard previously of the tale...

I'm maybe half-way through Thomas' interminable time with the Queen of the Elves, and I just can't force myself to read any further. I really can only echo others who say that the first section, Gavin's, was entrancing. The character himself was charming (if a bit of a female fantasy of what a good husband should be), his descriptions of the other characters make them come alive, and the action moves at just the right pace. Thomas, on the other hand is, as others have said, arrogant, smug, shall...

In September, Ellen Kushner (who is a friend) gave a keynote speech for the launch of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for for Fantasy and the Fantastic. She spoke about this book, which I had not read since shortly after it was published in 1990, so I picked it up again. I’ve spent so much time with Kushner’s Riverside books that I had forgotten just how adept she is (and was 30 years ago) with the evocative language of high fantasy, the conjuring of mystical places and elves who are truly in...

More than enough has been written about bards and elves (although not as much back when this book was written). The two have always gone together. But this one does stand out. It's an odd book—there's very little in the way of actual plot. It's told in four parts, from four different perspectives. A bard befriends an old couple and falls in love, gets swept away to Elfland for seven years, comes home, and eventually grows old and dies. That's about it. There are no grand quests or major battles,...

It took me a while to get into this version of Thomas the Rhymer. The story is told in four voices: the voice of an old man who takes Thomas in almost as his own son, Gavin; the voice of Thomas himself; the voice of Gavin's wife, Meg; and the voice of the mortal woman who loves Thomas, Elspeth. The part in Gavin's voice didn't grip me so much, but when I came to Thomas's part, I could barely put the book down. It's not full of action, and Elspeth doesn't play a part in Thomas coming back from Fa...

Lovely but far too short, Thomas the Rhymer is a retelling of an old tale by the same name, which tells the story of a poet and harper who is by the Queen of Elfland to serve her for seven years and returns being unable to tell a lie. What songs do you sing to them in Elfland? There, where all the songs are true, and all stories history...I have seen lovers walking in those glades, with gentle hands and shining faces, their feet light upon the grass, where little flowers shone in the shadows

Thomas the Rhymer is a worthy and beautiful novelization of the ballad, elegantly told from the perspective of four people--Gavin and Meg, the elderly couple who takes on Thomas as a surrogate son, bookend Thomas's own experience in Elfland, and the fourth by Thomas's mortal love, Elspeth, after he returns to the human world with his 'gift' of soothsaying. Kushner's language is so subtle, lyrical and magical, some passages near left me in tears. She has such a flair for words (and this book is a...

I didn't expect the matter of this book -- a bard captured by Fairyland -- to be my cup of tea. I read enough about Fairyland in high school to last the rest of my life, and I tend to think of bardic protagonists as the fantasy genre's version of writer protagonists in literary fiction -- the exception to my rule of enjoying whenever someone writes a story about their own job.However, perhaps because Ellen Kushner is a sort of bard herself, as well as a writer, I did like reading about the prota...

A beautiful rendition of the medieval Scottish folktale that has the echoes of the old ballads, tinged in delicate magic and filled with otherworldly wonder that glazes the life of poets and bards. It reminded me of Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, regarding its tone, the idyllic setting, along with the likable characters. This is a fairytale romance dipped in the everborn longing for beauty in the ephemeral human heart, a story of passion and desire that razes in the face of imm...

This is my all time favorite book about Faerie. I've been reading about and studying Faerie since I was a small child. And I am an AVID reader. Ellen Kushner has done more to bring the world of the Fae alive than anything else I've ever read. Critics of this book need to understand that Thomas the Rhymer or Tam Lin is a legend. It is what it is. For Kushner to have made him pleasing to all would have been to stray from the legend. For the book to have had a more climactic ending would have been

A sensually told tale of Thomas the Rhymer - pre, during and after his abduction by the Queen of Elfland, with whom he resides for seven years, returning with her 'gift' of a tongue that can tell no lies.Fleshing out the myth and letting us get to know Thomas as he might have been before, with a tongue that flattered and lied easily, the first part of the book was the strongest for me. And while I enjoyed the plunge into Faerie, I found that Thomas's return and remaining life, as told by the gir...

This is a gorgeous, multilayered literary fantasy disguised as a fun, engaging read: it works on any level. I fell in love with the characters and the setting, which were both painted so deeply and honestly that I was totally immersed. The legend of Thomas the Rhymer is mostly about his exciting trip to wondrous Elfland and the amazing prophecies Laird Thomas gives afterwards. Kushner includes all those elements, but her take focuses less on spectacle and more on Thomas' heart: his personal jour...

Ellen Kushner takes a traditional Scottish ballad and weaves it into something magical and beguiling in this lovely, haunting tale. The ballad sings of a minstrel lad abducted to Elfland for seven year's to serve as the Elf Queen's lover, then returned to the mortal world. A footloose and carefree young minstrel, Thomas gives himself up to the quicksilver Elf Queen and the succulent delights of her bower. Yet, he is tormented by her small, careless cruelties, by the elves' constant game-playing,...