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.

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Titania and Bottom, Henry Fuseli ca. 1790. Fuseli’s Gothic fairy paintings capture the glamour and horror of the fae. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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.