Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

In two college classrooms an ocean apart, students are given a task. After studying a variety of creation myths, they are asked to compose their own story. The results reveal how narrative continues to insist on the cosmological power of the sea to shape communities for better or worse.

Paper long abstract

In two college classrooms an ocean apart, students are given a task. After studying a variety of creation myths, students are asked to communally compose their own stories for their small slice of the world. The results are revealing, giving us insight into how people today, in Scotland and the US Gulf Coast, still link the sea to both creation and destruction, with the shore often standing in as the mediator of human affairs. From floating casinos to the destruction of major hurricanes and continental drift, from merfolk to powerful old women, the insights gleaned from a close look at these student narratives have much to tell us about the bodies of water that govern so much of their lives. In the process, they also revealed a geopolitical and environmental awareness in which the sea is at once in danger and dangerous, ever present and always just beyond the reach of knowability.

The students’ creation stories and the way they engaged with the task demonstrated a core principle of folklorisitic theory–narratives provide a way for people to make sense of the world. Yet these stories, perhaps because of the cosmological level the genre required, demonstrated students’ sense of the larger powers, environmental, political, economic, and historical, that have direct bearing on their lives but are unpredictable and capricious. At the same time, the task gave them narrative power to insist on the importance of the sea in shaping their communities for better or worse.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines myth, folklore, and fantasy in Ma Huan’s Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, showing how travel writing blends cultural imagination, moral lessons, and ethnography, using legends like the Krasue and Buddha’s curse to explore identity and otherness in the Indian Ocean.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the interplay of myth, folklore, and fantasy within premodern travel narratives of the Indian Ocean world, with particular attention to The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores by Chinese traveller Ma Huan. By analyzing origin myths and urban legends documented in these accounts—such as the tale of Sakyamuni Buddha’s curse on the Nicobar Islanders and the Southeast Asian legend of the Krasue—the study reveals how travel writing becomes a site of cultural imagination, moral instruction, and ethnographic projection. Drawing on both indigenous frameworks (such as the Jataka tradition) and Western theories of myth (notably Mircea Eliade’s concept of sacred history), the paper argues for a hybrid interpretive approach that respects the narrative complexity of non-Western oral traditions. The fantastic, far from being a peripheral literary device, emerges as central to shaping perceptions of the self and the other, naturalizing difference, and managing social anxieties through symbolic storytelling. The paper ultimately suggests that travel writing in the Indian Ocean offers a rich archive for folklore studies, reflecting how myths and legends adapt across space, language, and cultural contact zones.

Keywords: Indian Ocean, Ma Huan, travel writing, myth, urban legend, Jataka, folklore, fantastical narrative, Krasue

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the sea’s essential role as a dynamic motif in Latvian folktales. It examines the sea as a setting, an inhabited space for mystical entities, and a nexus for magical and heroic events. Also, it posits that the sea symbolises the potent border between the known and unknown worlds.

Paper long abstract

The Latvian nation’s long-standing relationship with the Baltic Sea, forged over many centuries of coastal habitation, gives the sea an undeniable prominence in Latvian cultural narratives. Consequently, the maritime domain is not just a geographical feature, but also a pervasive, dynamic motif woven into Latvian folktales. This paper critically reflects on the diverse and complex ways the sea and the liminal zone of the seashore are depicted in this indigenous folklore, particularly in folktales.

The analysis focuses on three primary dimensions of the sea’s narrative role. First, the paper explores the sea as a transformative and challenging physical setting that reflects human activities such as fishing and travel. Second, it examines, the sea’s nature as an inhabited space, cataloguing the various animals and, importantly, the powerful mystical entities, such as the Sea Mother or the Sea Father, that reside within its depths. Third, the study examines the sea as a nexus of action, detailing significant events, heroic trials, and magical transformations that occur at the water’s edge or on the waves.

Through this examination, the paper argues that the sea in Latvian folktales serves as a potent symbolic border between known and unknown worlds. The sea embodies immense natural resources and untamable elemental power, reflecting a deep cultural respect for one of the central features of the Latvian mythological landscape.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The proposed paper analyzes "The Woman Carried Away by a Skull," an oral narrative that was documented in 1930 in the Kwak'wala language of coastal British Columbia.

Paper long abstract

The proposed paper focuses on "The Woman Carried Away by a Skull," an oral narrative that was documented in 1930 in the Kwak'wala language of coastal British Columbia. In the course of this tale, the unnamed female protagonist drifts across the ocean—from whose surface she magically obtains a limitless supply of linen—before ultimately becoming queen of a tribe of Europeans. The story offers an etiology for European linen, which was a major item of exchange on the colonial Northwest Coast of North America. Interestingly, the narrative's constituent scenes and motifs are not transparently related to one another, and their implications regarding European linen are ambiguous. Moreover, these elements find few direct parallels in Kwak’wala oral literature, but similar components are attested individually in stories from other regions of the Northwest Coast. I will interpret these features of the narrative in light of the fact that Northwest Coast societies treat language, in certain circumstances, as “objectual” (I borrow this term from anthropologist Michael Silverstein), or akin to material things, with attributes such as value, rarity, authenticity, and provenance. There is explicit evidence that in the 19th and early-20th centuries, linguistic objects included names, ceremonial songs, and specific types of narrative. I will suggest that the recombinant parts of "The Woman Carried Away by a Skull" were, likewise, conceptualized as objects. The text, accordingly, illustrates how European linen moves among and impacts indigenous communities by comparing these processes with how the story’s constituent motifs have been brought together from afar.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Merfolk are complex beings. After introducing Reidar Christiansen's exposition of the motifs of the Nordic merpeople legends, I will present some of the different kinds of merpersons that may be encountered and add a few ponderings on how they are communicated and what their messages signify.

Paper long abstract

If you have an encounter with a merperson, who or what have you in fact met? It is obvious that merfolk are composite creatures. Their physical appearance is famously split somewhere below the navel, with a humanoid top and a fishlike bottom. But more profoundly, stories of meeting merpeople always contain multiple layers of historical experience and imagination. In his monograph, Scribner (2020) exposed several of these layers, but from a folklorist perspective, he backed of precisely when he should not have.

After explaining how the medieval church visualized of the mermaid, both to discredit female sexuality and to warn against associating with pre-Christian water-creatures, Scribner notes that an entire book could have been written about the blending between the mermaids of medieval theology and the water-beings of vernacular folklore – before he leaves this interesting trail untouched. Then, it is good that we have folklorists. Allready in 1935, Reidar Th. Christiansen wrote an article on the motifs of the Nordic merfolk legends, noting how they in the Middle Ages blended with legends about sea trolls (margygre), and later became closely integrated in the Nordic fairy complex.

In the presentation, I will show some of the main lines of Christiansen’s argument, illustrated with stories of encounter. Afterwards, I will even present a few varieties of waterpeople that Christiansen did not take into account and add some ponderings on how they are communicated and what their messages signify.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The sea is an unpredictable site of danger and bounty in Irish folklore and experience. Its lore gives us a glorious insight into relationships between the human and the natural-supernatural. Here, we explore luck and danger, and encounters between humans and a host of other actors in this zone.

Paper long abstract

The experience of living in a shore world and working and travelling on the sea, and the understanding of how and why ‘things happen’, find an expression in Ireland through action and talk: through the things people do and don’t do to preserve ‘luck’, and through the way people talk about what has happened, might happen, and might have happened. This paper will explore elements of the lore of sea and shore in Ireland, much of which is shared among other North Atlantic communities living and working in this unpredictable, dangerous, and sometimes bountiful or mysterious zone. I will work through examples from fieldwork, published sources and the National Folklore Collection, to ask such questions as;

What does ‘bad luck’ mean in this context? How might we, as folklorists, engage more with differential stances within the community?

How is this realm populated, and how are interactions with the otherworldly population patterned in narrative?

From genial underwater pipe-smoker looking for his ‘pigs’, to the thing with glowing eyes, the drowned brother warning of danger, the sea-rats that followed a man to America, and the enchanted oilskins; the sea is a site of unpredictability, danger and wonder, and a supremely fertile generator of lore about encounters between humans and the glorious range of entities that are in it.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

During the world wars, the Norwegian seafaring community suffered great casualties at the hands of German submarines. These war machines represented a new peril for seafarers, already no strangers to risk and danger. The paper investigates early narratives of fateful encounters at sea.

Paper long abstract

During the world wars, the Norwegian maritime community (a shorthand for companies, ships and seafarers of all classes, including their families) suffered severe losses caused by first imperial, then Nazi German submarine warfare. It is estimated that half of Norway’s considerable merchant fleet was lost during the First World War. Many of the ships were 19th century sailing vessels. In part, such ships were also carriers of traditional systems of man-nature relations, where certain behaviors and procedures were believed to influence the powers of the natural world. They are generally referred to as mariners’ superstition; deliberate strategies for mastering the hardships and vagaries of the seas. At the same time, risk and danger were also framed in capitalistic narratives of insurance and certificates. How did divergent approaches to the dangers of the seas manifest themselves when a stealthy set of weapons – the submarine with its torpedoes – was let loose in the high seas?

The paper is triggered by curiosity about early perceptions of German submarine warfare in Norwegian culture. Musicologist Linda Maria Koldau’s concept of the “Submarine Myth” (“Mythos U-Boot”) is an instructive counterpoint. The submarine evolved into a vibrant cultural symbol during the 20th century, partly due to blockbuster movies depicting the adventures and the plight of submerged crews in conventional and nuclear submarines. Visually striking and providing the setting for intense psychological and social drama, the submarine myth is however fraught with paradoxes.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Mermaiding is a growing cultural phenomenon of extreme freediving while wearing mermaid tails. This paper explores how practitioners journey across the globe to swim as something other-than-human,encountering whale sharks,seals,and other ocean beings in adventures that blur myth and lived reality.

Paper long abstract

Mermaiding is a contemporary cultural phenomenon where people engage in extreme freediving and performance while wearing monofins. Beyond the practice in local pools and lake waters, many self-described merfolk journey across the world to dive in saltwater environments, often seeking encounters with marine life. In these travels, strange things certainly happen at sea: humans appear as their oceanic selves, swimming alongside other beings in spectacular adventures that blur the boundary between myth and lived experience. Based on ongoing ethnographic research, this paper explores how mermaiding turns the ocean into a site of strange encounters between beings. Some of these beings are manifested through human bodies disciplined in breath-holding and transformed through years of aquatic training. By diving without breathing equipment, relying only on a monofin and the held breath, merfolk also invite risk into play, heightening the intensity of these encounters. I argue that mermaiding re-enchants our relationship to the sea, a sea which has always been a realm of wonder and danger in its own right. By diving in mermaid form, practitioners transform myth into an embodied, sensed experience, aiming to dissolve boundaries between human and ocean being. In these adventures, the ocean body is no longer a backdrop but a companion to be met, bringing mermaids into voyages of both discovery and peril. And like sailors of old, these merfolk then sail back to shore, carrying the tales of oceanic adventure to tell among human worlds.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

An athletic swimming challenge, that takes place once a year somewhere in the Aegean Archipelago, is viewed as a dynamic representational practice for the host community through updating existing customs and identities, collective memory mechanisms, belonging and togetherness.

Paper long abstract

This paper deals with a recent sporting event that takes place once a year somewhere in the Aegean Archipelago and its insular complexes. We argue that, in this case, an athletic swimming challenge is being transformed into a dynamic representational practice for the host community through updating existing customs and identity matters, triggering collective memory mechanisms, while it reactivates a sense of belonging and togetherness. Our approach draws on the following (ongoing) fieldwork research elements:

The Sea: a long swimming race around a small island in the NE Aegean Sea, Greece.

The “marathon”: a tough open sea contest where, symbolically, there is no loser; every swimmer and their individual teams (support boat captains and personal assistants), all receive a medal.

The circled island: a small population, until recently identified as an endogamic community of goat herders and fishermen with many children in large families. An unspoken challenge of inclusiveness for several decades. The community hosts the annual athletic gathering and supports the swimmers in a festive mood: participates, welcomes, ritualizes, and then, narrates the story and remembers.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Tales, material heritage, and technology together form a cultural pattern. In this work, I explore the relationship between water and materiality by weaving together traditional stories, words, and concepts with my own embodied experiences of sailing and rowing traditional boats.

Paper long abstract

Navigating the sea using muscle power, currents, and wind offers a distinct, embodied understanding—one that arises at the intersection of technology, culture, and nature. This mode of knowing stands in stark contrast to the mechanical-technological mindset of the present, both in theory and practice.

In this paper, I explore how the sea can be understood as a language that communicates through materiality—the boat, the oars, and the human body. I refer to this language as vannsk, a term that captures the experiential, immersive, and enactive dimensions of maritime knowledge within a cultural context.

I examine various concepts for navigating uncertainty and managing outcomes within this non-mechanized cultural framework. My sources include traditional expressions and concepts, Svale Solheim’s notion of nemingsfordom (semantic preconceptions) from 1940, and documented local narratives of boat use and boatbuilding (Planke 2001). These materials are brought together and interpreted through the lens of my own embodied experiences—sailing and rowing traditional and reconstructed boats.

Solheim, Svale 1940. Nemningsfordomar ved Fiske. Det norske videnskaps-akademi i Oslo. I kommisjon hos Jacob Dybwad. Oslo

Planke, Terje 2001. Tradisjonsanalyse. En studie av kunnskap og båter. Doktorgradsavhandling. UiO.