THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH OF ELVES, FAUNS & FAIRIES
Robert Kirk
The Reverend Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, spent his final years gathering the folklore, second sight, and fairie-belief of the Scottish Highlands into a single manuscript, completed around 1691. He called it The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies — an extraordinary and sympathetic account of the "subterranean people," their nature, habits, and the extrasensory gifts of those said to perceive them.
Kirk never lived to see his work in print. On 14 May 1692, he was found dead on Doon Hill, the very fairie knoll he had walked so often and written so much about — dressed only in his nightgown, with no clear explanation for his death. Local legend holds a stranger account still: that the fairies, angered at having their secrets revealed, took him for their own, and that his spirit remains captive within the hill to this day.
The manuscript itself lay unpublished for over a century, until Sir Walter Scott finally brought it to print in 1815. It was later re-edited and issued in its now-familiar form by the folklorist Andrew Lang in 1893, who added his own extensive commentary and endnotes alongside Kirk's original chapters.
This Fauun edition strips that away. What follows is Kirk's own text and appended account of Lord Tarbott's letters, and his conclusions — presented in Kirk's original seventeenth-century spelling, modernised only where the manuscript was otherwise illegible, and untouched by any voice but his — a seventeenth-century minister's own strange, sincere, and radical account of a world he believed ran alongside our own.
60 pages, paperback
For buyers in the UK, Australia, and USA, books ship from within your own country — domestic shipping rates apply.
Fauun is a women-owned, independent Australian press specialising in classic works of the esoteric, occult, and metaphysical — brought back into print for the modern seeker.
THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH OF ELVES, FAUNS & FAIRIES
Robert Kirk
The Reverend Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, spent his final years gathering the folklore, second sight, and fairie-belief of the Scottish Highlands into a single manuscript, completed around 1691. He called it The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies — an extraordinary and sympathetic account of the "subterranean people," their nature, habits, and the extrasensory gifts of those said to perceive them.
Kirk never lived to see his work in print. On 14 May 1692, he was found dead on Doon Hill, the very fairie knoll he had walked so often and written so much about — dressed only in his nightgown, with no clear explanation for his death. Local legend holds a stranger account still: that the fairies, angered at having their secrets revealed, took him for their own, and that his spirit remains captive within the hill to this day.
The manuscript itself lay unpublished for over a century, until Sir Walter Scott finally brought it to print in 1815. It was later re-edited and issued in its now-familiar form by the folklorist Andrew Lang in 1893, who added his own extensive commentary and endnotes alongside Kirk's original chapters.
This Fauun edition strips that away. What follows is Kirk's own text and appended account of Lord Tarbott's letters, and his conclusions — presented in Kirk's original seventeenth-century spelling, modernised only where the manuscript was otherwise illegible, and untouched by any voice but his — a seventeenth-century minister's own strange, sincere, and radical account of a world he believed ran alongside our own.
60 pages, paperback
For buyers in the UK, Australia, and USA, books ship from within your own country — domestic shipping rates apply.
Fauun is a women-owned, independent Australian press specialising in classic works of the esoteric, occult, and metaphysical — brought back into print for the modern seeker.
