Kirk recognises “an abstruse People,” who were before our more substantial race, whose furrows are still to be…
- Date of account
- Written 1691; later edited edition
- Source
- The secret commonwealth of elves, fauns & fairies
- Reference
- The secret commonwealth of elves, fauns & fairies · selected passage 11
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English/Scots historical text
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
Kirk recognises “an abstruse People,” who were before our more substantial race, whose furrows are still to be seen on the hill-tops
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyKirk recognises “an abstruse People,” who were before our more substantial race, whose furrows are still to be seen on the hill-tops. They never were, to his mind, plain palpable folk; they are only visible, in their quarterly flittings, to men of the second sight. That gift of vision includes not only power to see distant or future events, but the viewless forms of air. To shun the flittings, men visit church on the first Sunday of the quarter: then they will be hallowed against elf-shots, “these Arrows that fly in the dark.” As is well known, superstition explained the Neolithic arrow-heads as Fairy weapons; it does not follow that a tradition of a Neolithic people suggested the belief in Fairies.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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