Another edition appeared in 1893 as The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies this version included an introduction and notes by Andrew Lang (and is available digitally here).Ī new edition, produced by the New York Review of Books, was published in 2007 with an introduction by Marina Warner. This essay existed only in manuscript until it was published with the support of Sir Walter Scott in 1815 asĪn essay of the nature and actions of the subterranean (and for the most part,) invisible people, heretofoir going under the name of elves, faunes, and fairies, or the lyke among the low-country Scots, as they are described by those who have the second sight, and now to occasion further inquiry, collected and compared, by a circumspect inquirer residing among the Scottish-Irish in Scotland. One of the most unique books I've read in quite some time is The Secret Commonwealth, a singular treatise written by Scotch minister Robert Kirk (~1644-1692) around 1691. This new edition modernizes the spelling and punctuation of Kirk's little book and features a wide-ranging and illuminating introduction by the critic and historian Marina Warner, who brings out the originality of Kirk's contribution and reflects on the ongoing life of fairies in the modern mind. First published in 1815 by Sir Walter Scott, then reedited in 1893 by Andrew Lang, with a dedication to Robert Louis Stevenson, The Secret Commonwealth has long been difficult to obtain-available, if at all, only in scholarly editions. The Secret Commonwealth is not only a remarkable document in the history of ideas but a study of enchantment that enchants in its own right. It is a rare and fascinating work, an extraordinary amalgam of science, religion, and folklore, suffused with the spirit of active curiosity and bemused wonder that fills Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the works of Sir Thomas Browne.
Kirk defended these views in The Secret Commonwealth, an essay that was left in manuscript when he died in 1692. Late in the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in the Scottish Highlands, set out to collect his parishioners' many striking stories about elves, fairies, fauns, doppelgängers, wraiths, and other beings of, in Kirk's words, "a middle nature betwixt man and angel." For Kirk these stories constituted strong evidence for the reality of a supernatural world, existing parallel to ours, which, he passionately believed, demanded exploration as much as the New World across the seas.
A classic, enchanting document of Scottish folklore about fairies, elves, and other supernatural creatures.
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