THOMAS OF ERCELDOUNE, called also THE RHYMER, and sometimes given the surname of LEARMONT ? 1220– ? 1297), poet and prophet in the legendary literature of Scotland. The historical person of that name figures in two charters of the i3th century, and from these it appears that he owned lands in Erceldoune (now Earlstoun), in Berwickshire, which were made over by his son and heir on Nov. 2, 1294, to the foundation of the Holy Trinity at Soltra (or Soutra) on the borders of the same county. This would imply that Thomas the Rhymer was already dead, but J. A. H. Murray, who edited The Romance and Prophecies (E.E.T.S., 1875), thinks that he was living three years later in a Cluniac priory in Ayrshire. He figures in the works of Barbour and Harry the Minstrel as the sympathizing con temporary of their heroes, and Walter Bower, who continued the Scotichronicon of Fordun, tells how he prophesied the death of Alexander III. in 1285.
In the f olk-lore of Scotland his name is associated with numer ous fragments of verse of a gnomic and prophetic character. The
romance of Thomas and the elf-queen was attributed to Ercel doune by Robert Mannyng de Brunne, but the earliest text, in the Auchinleck ms. in the Advocates' library, Edinburgh, is in a dialect showing southern forms, and dates from the beginning of the i4th century. It may be based on a genuine work of Thomas, a version by him of the widely diffused Tristan Saga. The most widely accepted opinion is that it is a translation of a French original.
See J. A. H. Murray's edition of The Romance and Prophecies (E.E.T.S., 1875) ; Brandl's Thomas of Erceldoune (Berlin, 1880), and Kolbing's Die nordische und die englische Version der Tristransage (Heilbronn, 1882) ; also McNeill's Sir Tristrem (S.T.S., 1886) ; Lumby's Early Scottish Prophecies (E.E.T.S., 187o), and the reprint of the Whole Prophesie of Scotland (1603) by the Bannatyne Club (1833) ; J. Geddie, Thomas the Rymour and his Rhymes (Edinburgh, 192o).