Robert Kirk and the Fairy Romantics
Today, we're diving into Reverend Robert Kirk's seminal work, "The Secret Commonwealth" (1691), and how over a hundred years later, Sir Walter Scott brought it to the public's attention.
This essay is part of a series called On the Origin of Fairies.
We began this series with the strange case of St. Fillans, a village in the Scottish Highlands whose residents halted the construction of a property development that risked disturbing a fairy rock. St. Fillans lies in the county of Perthshire, where we’ll be returning today—except in this entry, we’re traveling back to 1691.
That year, an Episcopalian minister named Reverend Robert Kirk wrote an extended essay that compiled the local beliefs about fairies: The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies. Kirk died a year after finishing the essay, and it remained in manuscript form for decades.
It was the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott who would bring Kirk’s manuscript to broader public attention in 1815. A passionate student of folklore, the Ivanhoe and Waverly author encouraged the essay’s publication, and later added to Kirk’s legendary persona by immortalizing local Aberfoyle folklore about the minister in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), a collection of primary and secondary sources on supernatural folklore. Scott relays the tale of Kirk’s sudden death, while the minister was walking through Aberfoyle (his final parish):
… walking one evening in his night-gown upon a Dun-shi, or fairy mount [such as still exists in St. Fillan’s] in the vicinity of the manse or parsonage, behold! hee* sunk down in what seemed to be a fit of apoplexy, which the unenlightened took for death, while the more understanding knew it to be a swoon produced by the supernatural influence of the people whose precincts he had violated.1
* “Hee” meaning “he.”
Kirk wasn’t actually dead, as the villagers of Aberfoyle would soon discover. He had been stolen by the fairies. Kirk’s spirit appeared to a seer (more on that below) and gave him a message for his cousin:
“Say to Duchray, who is my cousin … that I am not dead, but a captive in Fairy Land; and only one chance remains for my liberation. … I will appear in the room [where the christening of his child was to take place], when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or dirk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this opportunity is neglected, I am lost for ever.”2
Kirk never made it out of Faerie. As the story goes, his cousin was so stunned by his appearance that the rescue mission was botched. The timing of The Secret Commonwealth’s publication and Scott’s subsequent Letters on Demonology could not have been more fortuitous. Between Kirk’s writing the manuscript in 1691 and its publication in 1815, Europe experienced the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, and backlash in the form of the Romantic Movement. The Romantics believed that in spite the progress of the 18th century, reason and rationality were insufficient to explain the human condition and range of experience; they felt a person’s individual emotions and inner world were worthy of exploration. I’ve written about Romanticism and its weird cousin, the Gothic, several times in Crossroads. (Especially the Goths—I love spooky people.)
But for today’s purposes, it’s important to note that in Walter Scott’s day, there existed a renewed public appetite for the supernatural, even if educated classes largely no longer believed in the stories Kirk had recorded in 1691.
What’s interesting about Kirk’s text is not only the wealth of folkloric knowledge that would otherwise have been lost, but the fact that it was written just as—let’s call it, the Fairy Class Schism—was emerging. (Long-time patrons will remember my Salem Witch Trials series from this past autumn; the witch trials in New England occurred just one year after Kirk wrote The Secret Commonwealth.) Kirk penned his essay in a time when members of wealthier classes were starting to question the worldview that had dominated humanity for its entire existence: the notion of the enspirited world, alive with demons and ghosts and gods large and small.
There’s another aspect that makes Kirk’s text remarkable. Here, we have a Protestant minister who writes with an anthropologist’s curiosity on local folklore, rather than issuing a scathing rebuke of “demonic” interactions. As folklorist Richard Sugg notes:
… this, indeed, brings us to the most extraordinary core of fairy beliefs. They were heresy. A quiet heresy, and in fact a very pious one—but heresy, nonetheless. Somehow, these illiterate, politically powerless people had evolved and sustained their own largely independent cosmology: one arguably as robust, as dense, as complex and as beautiful as any Greek myth or monotheistic theology.3
In The Secret Commonwealth, Kirk takes great pains to state that the second sight (the ability to see fairies) is much more common among men than women—an interesting, if eye-roll-inducing, reversal of stereotypes regarding gender and magic. He also makes it clear that this sight “is not criminal, since a man can come by it unawares and without his consent.”4 He argues strongly that the ability to see these entities is not Satan’s work, but a talent with which one is born. Unlike the Puritans who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials, who believed all folk magic was evil, Kirk makes a distinction between occult abilities like second sight and those he deems immoral, such as necromancy. He reminds his reader:
Every unusual art or science is not sinful or unlawful, unless its original or principal design do make it so; nor was God always pleased to discover even every necessary truth at once, yet when such truths and sciences were permitted, recommended, or suggested, they were truly lawful.5
In other words, intent matters.
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Fairies weren’t angels or demons, but somewhere in between. The common origin story with which Kirk’s contemporaries would have been familiar was the notion that fairies were fallen angels, not quite good enough for heaven but not bad enough for hell. Kirk echoes this popular cosmology:
They are said to have aristocratical rulers and laws, but no discernible religion, love, or devotion towards God, the Blessed Maker of All. They disappear whenever they hear His name invoked or the name of Jesus (at which all do bow willingly or by constraint that dwell above or beneath within the earth [Philippians 2.10]), nor can they act aught at that time after hearing of that sacred name. The tabhaisder or seer that corresponds with this kind of familiars can bring them with a spell to appear to himself or others when he pleases as readily as Endor Witch did those of her own kind.6
Fairies, to Kirk’s parishioners, were kidnappers, seducers of young people, and purveyors of extraordinary glamour. A belief echoed in many Celtic regions, as we learned from Walter Evans-Wentz, is the idea that spirits of the dead are sometimes found in Faerie. Robert Kirk often refers to the fairies as “subterraneans,” though he notes their dualistic nature of having “light, changeable bodies (like those called astral) somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud and best seen at twilight,”7 while also residing within fairy mounds or hills.
Historian Francis Young points out that this chthonic nature can be found in the godlings or “small gods” of British folklore throughout all eras.8 By the time fairies and elves emerge in the British or Irish cultural conscience, these creatures were undeniably tied to the land. Their homes may have occupied a liminal space of malleable time, but they didn’t exist in another realm like Narnia or Middle Earth. To those with a magical worldview, living in an enspirited landscape, the fairies were part of one’s ecosystem.
In the upcoming entry of this series, we’ll sink further back in time to the Reformation, Shakespeare, and the survival of the fairy in the early modern period. We will see how despite clerical efforts to label fairies as devils, the Good People kept trooping onward, undeterred by human squabbles.
Marina Warner, Introduction to The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, Robert Kirk (New York Review Books, 2007), xxvii - xxviii.
Warner, Introduction to The Secret Commonwealth, xxviii.
Richard Sugg, Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion Books, 2018), 19.
Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (New York Review Books, 2007), 30.
Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, 58.
Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, 13.
Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, 5-6.
Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 88.