The Scottish poet Robert Burns was born in 1759 and died in 1796. He is best known for Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), for his long comic narrative poem Tam o' Shanter (1791), and for his activity as a collector of Scottish songs. Here, considering Burns in the context of a European folk revival, it is Tam that is the subject of investigation. In what follows, there are two contexts that support the principal argument. Those are an attention to Burns's extensive activity in the field of song collection around the time of Tam o' Shanter, and an attention to his use of folkloric material in poetry prior to 1791. The two are connected, and not least by his European reception in the nineteenth century: his poetry and song was widely translated and circulated in nineteenth-century Europe, and whilst this chapter does not touch particularly on translations of Burns, of which there are some 1,000 recorded by 1899, it is perhaps there that his broader European significance lies. In terms of the folkloric, however, in Britain, his position on the transitional edge of British literary Romanticism, as it emerges out of the eighteenth and slides into the nineteenth century, is hugely important.