Tam O’Shanter

The story of Tam O’Shanter’s wild night is grounded in a simple but unshakeable premise: the reality of the macabre and things beyond explanation. When Tam peers into the lighted windows of the abandoned church and spies “warlocks and witches in a dance” (Line 116), he accepts that reality without question. Yes, he has been drinking, but this is no drunken hallucination. When Satan himself “screwed the [bag] pipes and made them squeal” (Line 124), the dimension of the paranormal is both vivid and convincing. In this, Burns reflects the tradition of the supernatural that had always been an element of the Scottish culture; ghosts, wraithes, giants, magical dwarfs, and witches (most famously in Macbeth), have long added elements of the inexplicable, the powerful, and the dark to the national literature. Cultural historians have suggested this element of Scottish folk tradition has its roots in the forbidding natural landscape of Scotland itself that has created the moribund Scots character and the fascination with the gothic. Unlike more familiar avatars of Tam in later American literature, most notably Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle, the paranormal, phenomena here are never given any reassuring logical explanation. In Irving’s stories, it is assumed that Rip simply got away from his shrewish wife and the Headless Horseman was a dressed up rival suitor of a girl Ichabod fancied.