The life of 17th century Scottish pastor and writer Dr Robert Kirk, whose 1691 book, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, was the first attempt to collect together Highlander folklore in regards to fairy lore, was an...
moreThe life of 17th century Scottish pastor and writer Dr Robert Kirk, whose 1691 book, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, was the first attempt to collect together Highlander folklore in regards to fairy lore, was an extraordinary one, at the crossroads of cultures, history, and folklore. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still. There are innumerable stories of fairy contact in countless cultures throughout the world, but Robert Kirk is not anonymous — fairy-taken, he, like Bridget Cleary in 19th century Ireland, real, documented, flesh-and-blood people, have stepped out of the human world, the world of the ordinary, sideways into a strange, parallel universe where nothing is quite as it seems. In this paper, Sophie Masson investigates the case of a man who moved from history to folklore, from reality to myth, against a background of tumultuous times in Gaelic-speaking Scotland.
