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BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
Uniform with this Volume: Price 6s. net.
Superstitions of the Highlands andIslands of Scotland. Collected entirely fromOral Sources by the late John GregorsonCampbell, Minister of Tiree
SOME PRESS OPINIONS
The border line of fairyland once crossed is a bourne from which fewantiquaries return. We have had great difficulty in getting back ourselves,led on as we were by the seductive John Gregorson Campbell, assuredly, ifever man was, since Campbell of Islay’s day, in the innermost secrets of theElfin folk. Indeed, Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands, full tooverflowing though they are, do not seem to us to express with anything likethe same fullness and body the misty legend and wayward romance andquaint realism of the Celtic supernatural as does this plainer and prosaicnotebook of an old parish minister between 1861 and 1891. Folklore whetherof Celt or Saxon, henceforward has to reckon with the posthumous notebooksof John Gregorson Campbell for an indispensable section of its apparatus ofstudy.—ANTIQUARY.
The importance of the work from the scientific point of view can hardly beexaggerated, as its accuracy is absolutely indisputable. And yet being littlemore than a collection of stories told in the simplest English, it is as enjoyableas one of Mr. Lang’s fairy-books.—THE SPECTATOR.
Altogether the volume is in its way singularly interesting, and forms a richmine for the folklorist. Some of the stories may be met with under otherversions, but most of them appear here for the first time and are wonderfullyvaried. The light they throw upon the Highlander’s ways of thinking isremarkable.—SCOTTISH REVIEW.
Statements and beliefs are given exactly as they reached the author, nordo I think it would be possible to detect a single instance in which widerknowledge or prepossession of any kind has induced him to alter or distort afact. This rigid conscientiousness will always secure for Mr. Campbell’s workthe confidence and regard of true folklorists.... Campbell of Tiree takeshis place by the side of Kirk, and of Walter Gregor of Pitsligo, among thoserecorders of folk-lore to whom the student can always turn with increasedconfidence and admiration.—Mr. Alfred Nutt in FOLKLORE.
Students of tradition will find much to interest them in this new collectionof Highland folk-lore, for although a good deal of the information is similar tothat contained in previous works of the kind, yet many details are new, andeven those which are already familiar have this great recommendation—thatthey were obtained at first-hand from the peasantry, and not from otherbooks.—RELIQUARY.
On the whole their can be few richer fields of