Hermit of St. Kilda, The

DESCRIPTION: "And is the Percy yet so loved By all his friends and thee? 'Then bless me, Father,' said the youth, For I thy guest am he."
AUTHOR: Thomas Percy
EARLIEST DATE: 1771 (Percy, The Hermit of Warkworth)
KEYWORDS: reunion father
FOUND IN: Britain(Scotland(Aber))
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Greig/Duncan8 1789, "The Hermit of St. Kilda" (1 fragment, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: Thomas Percy, _The Hermit of Warkworth: A Northumberland Ballad: In Three Fits or Cantos_, T. Davies and S. Leacroft, London, 1771 (available on Google Books), "The Hermit of Warkworth" (1 text)
J. S. Moore, _The Picctorial Book of Ancient Ballad Poetry of Great Britain_, New Edition, Bell and Daldy, London 1860 (available on Google Books) pp. 506-529, "The Hermit of Warkworth" (1 text)
Roud #12994
NOTES [518 words]: The current description is all of the Greig/Duncan8 fragment.
This apparently refers to Stallir, "a devout Hermit of St Kilda," who built a house on the remote rocky island of Borrera a few miles from St Kilda off the north-west coast of Scotland (source: James Wilson, A Voyage Round the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles (Edinburgh, 1842 ("Digitized by Google")), Vol II., p. 57).
Greig/Duncan8: "Words of ballad from Chambers' Miscellany." That's not definite enough for me to find. Is this in one of many volumes of Chambers's Miscellany of Instructive and Entertaining Tracts by William and Robert Chambers? Is it The Book of Days: a Miscellany...." by Robert Chambers? Something else? - BS
The Greig/Duncan mention seems to be a red herring, since this piece is actually a tiny fragment of "The Hermit of Warkworth" by Thomas Percy.
Yes, "the" Thomas Percy. The question is how this ended up in the Greig/Duncan collection, and where it acquired a tune, and why the name of Saint Kilda was placed on it. I have no answer. The original poem begins
Dark was the night, and wild the storm,
And loud the torrent's roar;
And loaud the sea was heard to dsah
Against the distant shore.
St. Kilda and Borerra are well to the west of the Hebrides, the most isolated rocks in all of Britain (Soay Island one of the smaller islands in the archipelago, is "The Westernmost Point in the United Kingdom," according to Google Maps).
The rest of my original speculations are useless; I was trying to evaluate the mention of "the Percy." The answer of course is that Thomas Percy was mentioning the family whose name he shared, the Percies of Northumberland, who had nothing to do with Saint Kilda (a name not even mentioned in Percy's poem) but plenty to do with Warkworth in the north of England. This renders my speculations pretty moot, but I will leave them here to prevent anyone else from going down the rabbit hole. Many years ago, I wrote:
[T]he mention of "the" Percy bothers me -- this sounds like a reference to the Percy earls of Northumberland, not some hermit. The Percies, who ruled a very large earldom very remote from London, were constantly involved in rebellion (the first one, Henry, and his son Harry Hotspur were involved in the overthrow of Richard II; the second, third, and fourth all had their hands in the Wars of the Roses, mostly on the Lancastrian side). As a result, they were always getting deposed, or at least in trouble. So a son might at any moment go into hiding.
The wild thought that came to me, the second time I read this entry, is that the father is in fact Henry Percy, First Earl of Northumberland, and the son is Harry Hotspur. Hotspur was killed in 1403 (in rebellion against Henry IV, whom he had earlier helped place on the throne), and Henry the Father lived until 1408 -- but this was a period when no one believed anyone was dead (e.g. there were constant rumors that Richard II was still alive), so maybe a rumor arose that Harry Hotspur survived the Battle of Shrewsbury and returned in disguise to his father.
Pure, wild, crazy speculation, of course. - RBW
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File: GrD81789

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