Witchcraft & Second Sight in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland: Tales and Traditions Collected Entirely from Oral Sources

Witchcraft & Second Sight in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland is a rich compendium of supernatural belief as preserved in Gaelic oral tradition: tales of seers, witches, omens, charms, curses, spectral visitations, and the uncanny knowledge known as "second sight." Its style is at once antiquarian and ethnographic, combining careful classification with vivid anecdote. Situated within the late-Victorian folklore movement, the book preserves a world in which Christian practice, older cosmologies, and communal memory coexist with remarkable complexity. John Gregorson Campbell (1836-1891), a Gaelic-speaking minister and folklorist closely associated with Tiree and the Hebridean world, was unusually well placed to record these traditions. His clerical vocation gave him intimate access to parish life, while his linguistic competence and sympathy for Highland culture enabled him to gather material that might otherwise have vanished under modernization, Anglicization, and religious suspicion. This volume is recommended to readers of folklore, Scottish history, anthropology, and supernatural literature. It is not merely a catalogue of strange beliefs, but a serious record of how communities explained misfortune, gifted perception, moral danger, and the unseen.