Research source

The modern recorders are not consciously copying from old accounts; the coincidences therefore have their…

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 18
Rights: public_domain
Language: English/Scots historical text
Record updated: 2026-08-24

Record summary

The modern recorders are not consciously copying from old accounts; the coincidences therefore have their value, as proving that certain phenomena have occurred and recurred

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 only

The modern recorders are not consciously copying from old accounts; the coincidences therefore have their value, as proving that certain phenomena have occurred and recurred. Now those phenomena may be due to conscious or to hysterical imposture, but they have been frequent and common enough to keep alive, and probably to originate, a part of the Fairy belief—that part which is concerned with Brownies and house-haunting Pixies, or Domovoys. These, again, correspond to the tricky beings described by Mr. Leland in his _Etruscan Remains_ as survivals of old Roman and Etruscan popular religions, while we find similar occurrences in the Empire of the Incas not long after the Spanish conquest of Peru.[8]

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This 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 only

Lattice 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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