The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies by Robert Kirk

Description

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is a book by Robert Kirk, first published in 1815. Written as a compact but probing manuscript in 1691 by a Scottish minister and Gaelic scholar, the work records local accounts of fairies, elves and other supernatural presences and treats them with an unusual combination of pastoral seriousness, empirical curiosity and theological concern. Kirk describes encounters, laws and behaviours of the “Good People,” and frames them alongside reports of visions, doppelgängers (or “co-walkers”) and other extrasensory phenomena, producing a document that reads part ethnography, part theological case study and part melancholic wonder-tale. The book has had an outsized influence on later folklore studies and on literary imaginings of the fairylore tradition: editors and commentators in the 19th and 20th centuries brought the manuscript to wider attention, and modern readers value it both as a rare first-hand chronicle of Scottish popular belief and as an early, skeptical attempt to catalogue and make sense of uncanny experience. For collectors, students of Celtic folklore, and readers of supernatural literature, Kirk’s text remains a primary source that bridges seventeenth-century belief and later scholarly inquiry.

This book is available for free download in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle formats. Or you can read it online. No registration is required. Just click the links below the donation buttons.