A Wild Shade

I’ve been wanting to talk about Anaïs Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer’s “Tam Lin” for some time. It’s got an absolutely beautiful, melancholy melody, but it’s the words--the poetry Mitchell has used for her retelling--that gets to me.



The story of Tam Lin is well known: the seeming fairy lover who’s actually a human captive of the fairies, whom the heroine rescues by holding him tight through terrifying transformations. It’s often retold or riffed on--one of my favorite updating/retellings of it...