Scottish fairy and apparition lore

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Scottish fairy and apparition lore is the body of folk belief, gathered across the Highlands and Lowlands, that held the living to share their country with an unseen population — fairies, the spirits of the dead, and the doubles and omens perceived by those said to possess the second sight. It is at once a set of beliefs and the record of them: a tradition that survives less in scripture than in the depositions of witch trials, the notebooks of ministers and antiquaries, and the testimony of people who claimed to have seen what others could not.

The fairies of this lore were not the small winged creatures of later children’s books. In the older Scottish accounts they were a parallel people of roughly human size, dwelling under green hills and in the hollow places of the land, who took milk, cattle, and sometimes children, and who could be dangerous to slight. Belief in them sat close to belief in the dead: the fairies were sometimes said to be the departed, or to keep company with them, and the boundary between an apparition of a fairy and an apparition of a ghost was rarely sharp. Bound up with both was the taibhsearachd, the second sight — the involuntary faculty, reported especially in the Gaelic Highlands, of seeing events before they happened or persons at the moment of their death.

A neighbouring people

The Scots word that does most of the work is sìth — the fairies are the daoine sìth, the people of peace, named so partly in earnest and partly to avoid naming them outright. The euphemism is itself a tenet: to speak of the neighbours plainly was to risk their attention, and so they are the good people, the gentry, the folk of the hills, the still folk. They live under the green knolls — the sìthean that gave them their name, the conical hillocks that dot the Highlands and were felt to be hollow, lit from within, opening on particular nights to those who passed too near. They keep cattle of their own, the small dun crodh sìth; they spin and grind and make music; they hold courts and feasts and a queen, the Queen of Elfhame, who recurs across the trial confessions with a fixity that no single witness could have invented.

What they want from the human world is the substance of it. They take the toradh, the goodness or profit of milk and grain, leaving the husk behind; a cow that gives but yields no butter has been milked by the unseen. They take the able-bodied and leave a stock — a stick of wood glamoured to look like the stolen wife, or a peevish, withering thing left in a cradle in place of a healthy child. The changeling belief is the hardest face of the whole tradition, and it had hard consequences: the suspected substitute might be tested by fire or exposure, on the reasoning that the fairy thing, threatened, would flee and return the true child. Against all of this the country kept a dense apparatus of protection — iron at the threshold and over the cradle, the rowan tree and the red thread, salt, the unspoken name, the careful courtesy that gave the people of peace no grievance. The point was never mastery of the fairies but staying on the right side of them.

The traffic ran two ways. A person might be carried into the hill and feast there, and emerge to find that a night underground had been years above; might be given the cure of a disease, or the knowledge of who had stolen a cloak, or the sight itself. The seers and charmers who claimed such gifts described them as borrowed from the sìth, on terms, and revocable. This is the seam where fairy belief touches the divinatory and healing arts — the recovery of stolen goods, the lifting of an illness, the foretelling of a death — and it is also the seam along which the whole edifice could be turned, in a courtroom, into something else entirely.

Fairies and the dead

The partition between the fairy people and the human dead was never firmly drawn, and in much of the lore it is no partition at all. The departed were said to be among the sìth; the recently dead might be seen walking with them; a person taken into the hill was, from the outside, simply dead. When Bessie Dunlop of Dalry, tried in 1576, described her familiar Thom Reid, she named him as a man killed at the Battle of Pinkie in 1547 — a ghost, by one reckoning, and a fairy intermediary by another, the distinction collapsing in her own telling. Alison Pearson of Byrehill, tried in Fife and executed in 1588, told of a dead kinsman who led her among the good folk of Elfland. The court did not need to decide whether these were ghosts or fairies; for its purposes they were the same illicit company.

The same blur runs through the omens. The apparition that warns of a death — the shroud rising on a living body, the phantom funeral pacing the road a real one will later take, the light moving along the route the coffin will follow — is read sometimes as the work of the fairies and sometimes as the dead announcing their own approach, and most often as neither, simply as a thing seen by a person who could not help seeing it. An apparition might be a taibhse, a fairy bòcan, a tannasg or revenant, a manadh or portent; the words shade into one another, and a single sighting could be filed under any of them. What held the categories together was not a doctrine but a shared certainty: that the visible world is thinly populated next to the one behind it, and that the living are watched, accompanied, and sometimes warned.

The second sight is the most studied strand of this, and it has its own fuller account in Scottish second sight (an dà shealladh) — the “two sights,” the involuntary faculty whose visions, against the seer’s will, showed deaths, funerals, and arrivals before they came. It belongs here because it is not separable here: the taibhsear who saw the shroud and the wife who dealt with Thom Reid were understood to be doing versions of the same thing, looking into the same crowded dark. The single legendary career built out of the faculty — the Coinneach Odhar of Ross-shire tradition — is treated under the Brahan Seer, where the seventeenth-century man and the nineteenth-century legend come apart.

Robert Kirk and the secret commonwealth

The fullest single witness is Robert Kirk, Episcopalian-trained minister of Aberfoyle in the southern Highlands, Gaelic scholar and translator of the Psalms, who around 1691 compiled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies — an attempt to describe the fairy world and the seers who perceived it as if it were a real order of nature awaiting sober inquiry. Kirk did not write as a man recording a quaint survival. He wrote as a natural philosopher and a divine, setting out the subterraneans as a created people of a middle nature between humanity and the angels, with bodies of congealed air, towns and courts under the hills, and a way of taking the spirit and substance of human food. He gave the co-walker its name and its definition — the double of a living person, every way like the man, a twin and companion that the seer could see and the man could not — and he treated the second sight not as a wonder to be either credited or scorned but as a faculty to be described, measured, and fitted into a Christian cosmos. His aim, as later readers have understood it, was less to prove that fairies exist than to show that, if they do, they trouble nothing in scripture or in reason: a second commonwealth, lawful and ordered, sharing the country with the first.

The work’s history is nearly as strange as its matter. Kirk died in 1692, the year after composing it; local tradition held that he had been taken into Doon Hill for telling the secrets of the people of peace, and that the body in his grave was a stock left in his place. The manuscript stayed unprinted for more than a century. It reached print only in 1815, in a small Edinburgh run, when Walter Scott took an interest and helped bring it to notice; a fuller edition followed under Andrew Lang in 1893, and it was Lang who fixed the resonant title the work now carries. The same Scott who rescued Kirk’s manuscript was at the same time the period’s most influential undertaker of fairy belief: his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft of 1830, written under financial pressure late in his life, treated fairies, apparitions, and the second sight analytically — as a body of vanishing superstition to be explained, traced to its sources, and set in order, rather than reported as live report. The two gestures sit oddly together and define the moment: a tradition is collected just as it is being declared dead, the witness preserved by the very hand that pronounces the sentence.

After Scott the collecting intensified. Martin Martin, a Gaelic-speaking native of Skye, had already given the most-cited first-hand catalog of second-sight cases in A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703); the eighteenth century added Theophilus Insulanus and the famous, undeciding inquiry of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell on their 1773 Hebridean tour. The nineteenth century turned the material into archive: John Gregorson Campbell, minister of Tiree, gathered the Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland (1900) and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands & Islands (1902) from a lifetime among Gaelic speakers, and Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica preserved the charms and protective rhymes — though Carmichael, later scholarship has shown, polished and reworked what he set down, so that the collection is a literary as much as a literal presentation of what he heard. By the time the folklorists arrived, they came to record a belief they assumed to be ending, and the assumption shaped what they kept.

The fairy and the Devil

For the historian the most consequential fact about this lore is what happened to it in court. Across the long Scottish witch prosecutions, a confession of dealings with the fairies could be read, by the bench, as a confession of dealings with the Devil — the same encounter renamed. The accused told of the Queen of Elfhame, of being led into a hill, of a familiar who taught a cure or named a thief; the indictment translated the queen into the Devil, the hill into the witches’ sabbath, the familiar into an imp, the borrowed cure into the maleficent craft of witchcraft. The fairy frame and the demonological frame were not two beliefs held by two parties so much as one set of phenomena described in two incompatible registers — the deponent’s and the court’s — with a life or death turning on which register prevailed.

The cases show the translation in progress. Bessie Dunlop’s Thom Reid and Alison Pearson’s company of Elfland were heard as commerce with a demon; the Aberdeen seer Andro Man in 1598 spoke of the Queen of Elphen and was tried for sorcery; Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn, in four remarkable confessions of 1662, moved without seam between riding with the Queen of Elfhame, feasting in the hill, and the coven, the elf-arrows, and the pact that the demonological theory required — the fullest record there is of the two worlds fused in a single voice. Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, whose Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (2001) is the standard account of this ground, argue that fairy belief did not simply give way before the witch theory but was, in the later seventeenth century, reasserted — that educated Scots, Kirk among them, took the reality of the fairies seriously at the very moment the prosecutions were folding that reality into the case against the Devil. Michael Hunter’s The Occult Laboratory (2001) traces the parallel movement among the natural philosophers, for whom a well-attested fairy or a true second-sight vision was not superstition to be cleared away but evidence — data for a spirit world, and so a weapon against the materialism of the age. This is the seam where the lore touches demonology, necromancy, and the wider arts of divination and prophecy: the visions, the dead, and the unseen people were a single field, and the question of what to call them — fairy, ghost, devil, or natural fact — was the whole of the contest.

Scholarship and the record

The lore survives because it was written down by people who, for very different reasons, thought it mattered. Its primary corpus is unusually deep for a folk belief, and most of it is now in the public domain.

• Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (composed c. 1691; first printed Edinburgh, 1815; ed. Andrew Lang, London: David Nutt, 1893) — the insider’s metaphysic of the fairy world and the seer, and the single richest source. The Lang edition is the one most cited; an overview of the work and its strange afterlife is given in the Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Kirk.
• Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (London, 1703; 2nd ed. 1716) — the most-cited eighteenth-century first-hand catalog of second-sight phenomena, written from inside Gaelic culture.
• Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (London: John Murray, 1830) — the Romantic bridge that treated the whole field analytically and helped bring Kirk’s manuscript to print.
• John Gregorson Campbell, Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1900) and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland (1902) — the great late field-collections by a Gaelic-speaking minister; the modern annotated edition is Ronald Black, The Gaelic Otherworld (2005).
• Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001; repr. Birlinn, 2007) — the standard history of the belief and of its entanglement with the witch prosecutions; the edition record is at Google Books.
• Michael Hunter, The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001) — the natural-philosophical inquiry around Robert Boyle, Lord Tarbat, Kirk, John Aubrey, and Samuel Pepys, edited as a single dossier of texts.
• John Lorne Campbell and Trevor H. Hall, Strange Things (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) — the exposure of the Society for Psychical Research’s 1890s Highland second-sight inquiry and the unreliability of its investigator, and the standard caution on the late psychical re-reading of the material.

The trial corpus is its own kind of source, and a treacherous one: the words are the accused’s, but the questions, the frame, and very often the torture are the court’s, so that a fairy confession is always also a record of what a court wanted to hear. Recent scholarship reads cases such as Bessie Dunlop’s — for which the indictment survives in detail — both as folklore and as forced narrative, holding the deponent’s world and the prosecutor’s apparatus in the same view; one such reading is the open-access study hosted at the University of Glasgow research archive. The spiritualist and psychical-research movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries later reclaimed the seers as evidence in their own cause, drawing the second sight toward the vocabulary of spiritualism and clairvoyance — a reclassification that flattened a specific Gaelic faculty into a generic psychic power, and that the later scholarship has worked to undo.

Historians treat this lore as evidence of how early modern Scots understood death, misfortune, and the limits of the visible world, and they note its entanglement with the witch prosecutions, in which a confession of dealings with the fairies could become a charge of dealings with the Devil. Those who held the beliefs understood them differently — as plain report of a real if hidden commonwealth, and of a sight that came unbidden and could not be refused. The two readings do not resolve into each other. What the records preserve is a country imagined as crowded: the seen world thinly partitioned from another, and certain people born unable to keep the partition closed.

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