Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The natureculture entanglements of Iceland’s fjords and shores are discussed here, focusing on the non-human actants present in legends. It explores how folk narratives centring on flora, fauna and nature-cultural material, themselves question ontological assumptions and established boundaries.

Paper long abstract

The natureculture entanglements of Iceland’s fjords and shores are discussed here with a focus on the non-human actants present in myths, legends and personal experience narratives. It explores how flora, fauna and nature-cultural material, are experienced, apprehended and narrated, revealing worldviews and belief systems far from simplistic. It engages with folk narratives that run far back to the beginning of human settlement in Iceland. Within the narratives, flora and fauna, macro and micro, can be explored as mobile agentic assemblages that influence courses of events over a large geographical areas. Whether through a network of marine animals and land mammals or naturcultural driftage such as driftwood and animal remains, these assemblages do not ‘respect’ national borders and are clearly part of transnational and transarctic human and non-human networks. They embark on shared bodies of water or on the shore, which in the human imaginary, is apprehended as a border zone. Furthermore, (super)natural beings will be examined as enmeshed in a living environment, from which it may take its supernatural and naturecultural attributes. Within this environment, supernatural and natural threats are met with creative reactions which include storytelling, precautionary and religious practice and other human attempts to control what can be perceived as manifestations of the forces for chaos. As demonstrated in this presentation, collected folk narrative, manuscripts, archival material and ethnography can be of great use in exploring naturecultural entanglements, not least in the study of narratives and narrators that themselves question ontological assumptions and established boundaries.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This lecture will consider how the vanishing islands of the North Sea area represent supernatural naturecultures, negotiating thresholds of human maritime subsistence and nautical fears, which stand in stark contrast to Irish insular paradises and the Old Norse Glasisvellir.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines traditions of vanishing and re-emerging islands in Faroese, Norwegian, and Orcadian folklore. Narratives of islands such as Svínoy, Utrøst, and Sule Skerry and the submerged city of Finfolkaheem portray landscapes that defy stability. These shifting geographies complicate any notion of ‘nature’ as fixed or coherent. Still, these islands are never merely natural phenomena, rather also representing social spaces governed by rulers like the “Utrøst mannen”, who are depicted as engaging human beings in interactions of hospitality, trickery, or even abduction. Thus, such “peekaboo” islands both mirror and distort human cultural structures all the while remaining entrenched in maritime environments. By scrutinising various traditions of these vanishing islands, I contend that they represent supernatural naturecultures that navigate thresholds between land and sea, human and other-than-human, stability and impermanence. Instead of being inert “creatures of nature”, these islands and their denizens are entangled with human livelihoods, fears and desires, especially those tied to seafaring and maritime subsistence. Furthermore, this paper sheds light on how these North Sea traditions highlight instability, danger, and liminality over timelessness and divine light by situating them alongside the Irish insular paradises often compared to the Norse notion of Glasisvellir (‘Glittering Plains’). Consequently, these “peekaboo” islands question dichotomies of nature and culture, extending a productive lens to folkloristics on how supernatural landscapes embody more-than-human entanglements.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

A decade after the largest forest fire in Sweden in modern times people, plants and animals have begun to return to the transformed area. In line with regrowth and renewal of landscape relations; I follow the ritual and narrative recall of a local forest spirit/historical memory/ghost.

Paper long abstract

The largest forest fire in Sweden in modern times took place in Northern Västmanland in 2014. To many it became a wake-up call to the dangers of global warming and large-scale forestry. Roughly a decade after the event plants, people and other animals slowly return to a landscape, dramatically transformed. Specific and curated sites have come to serve as destinations for shared mourning or reconciliation with climate change. While many visitors follow “the loss and recovery of nature” in the vast burned area locals may hold specific memories and lingering relations to landscapes as significant nature-cultures.

This paper discusses the roles of narrative and ritual in local restoration of relations to haunted geologies (cf Bubandt 2017). Expanding Jane Bennetts (2010) definition of ecology as “the places we live” the analysis seeks to include the possible company and comfort of both the more-than-human and the more-than-dead in local attempts to address and recall specific ghosts and other supernatural presences.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper explores ways wicked supernatural beings destabilize existing categories of nature and culture. Using empirical examples from Norwegian folklore, I discuss how supernatural beings challenge simple categories of nature and culture and how they may be read differently

Paper long abstract

This paper explores ways supernatural beings from Norwegian folklore that are narrated as wicked destabilize commonly accepted categories of nature and culture. Stories about wicked supernatural beings might be read as exemplifying social boundaries, narratively construing the undesired as of nature and "proper" human behavior as of culture. Yet, while these beings and their acts are narrated as belonging to nature, both concretely through living in mountains or lakes and figuratively through wicked acts such as fooling or trapping humans, they are also narrated as transgressing nature in a way that categorizes them as outside of common nature, as supernatural. From this perspective, they are narrated as a contrast to humans who are of nature—or at least in contrast to a cultural version of nature, where mountains are for climbing and lakes for swimming, and human nature is characterized by kindness. Instead of trying to untangle this knot of nature and culture, I will use empirical examples to trace the many ways supernatural beings destabilize these simple categories and discuss other ways we might understand these stories, their humans and the beings they bring to life

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This lecture will consider the influences that brought about differences between the folk beliefs and legends of the North Atlantic Islands, many of which clearly have a background in the legends and beliefs of Norway. Was this a matter of natural difference or cultural nurture?

Paper long abstract

It is evident from any survey of the folk beliefs and legends of the North Atlantic Islands that to a large extent they have a foundation in world views and narratives that Nordic settlers brought with them in the late ninth century, narratives and beliefs which naturally shaped the way they saw their environment. These stories naturally have since gone on to develop over the course of time, taking on new shapes and influences. Of particular interest, however, are the differences that one encounters when comparing the legends from each group of islands with those found in Norway. What exactly has caused these changes? Is it the difference in natural surroundings, different cultural influences, different social environments or something else? One such difference can be seen in the fact that while Iceland has no legends at all about the widespread protective household spirits that have come to be called nisser and tomter in Norway and Sweden, such beliefs (in the shape of the so-called hugboon) used to be very much alive in Orkney, and faintly existent in Shetland. Was this a matter of natural difference or cultural nurture? If time permits, considerations will also be made of why the Orcadians seem to have invented the mermaid and the hidden worlds of Hildaheim and Finfolkaheem.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In the Alps, humans, animals, and mountains co-shape history. Folkloric hybrids like werewolves and human–bear figures blur human–non-human borders, reveal complex cultural logics, and challenge the nature/culture divide in more-than-human entanglements.

Paper long abstract

My research investigates multispecies entanglements in the Alpine border region of Italy, France, and Switzerland. Alpine history is not shaped by humans alone: wolves, bears, feral dogs, and mountains themselves can be considered non-human actants that co-construct cultural borders as well as historical imaginaries of space. From an anthropological perspective, these non-humans appear to assume multiple symbolic roles, often coexisting and pairing in meaningful ways.

These dynamics unfold in a liminal space where borders between humans and non-humans are continually negotiated. This space may also generate metamorphic moments, interpreted as “excessive blurring” along the human–non-human continuum.

The folkloristic study of Alpine werewolf and human–bear hybrid traditions is particularly illuminating. These hybrid beings can be interpreted as suggesting that supernatural figures embody complex cultural logics beyond “nature” categorizations. As Joisten demonstrated, the functions of werewolves vary across different spaces, reflecting cultural contexts. In the human–bear symbolic pair, the bear serves as a guardian of the human–non-human borders, while human–bear hybrids emerge as supernatural beings, engendering reflections on kinship.

Overall, Alpine narratives and practices challenge the nature/culture divide and foreground non-human agencies as co-constitutive of history. They illustrate how folkloristic perspectives can contribute to understanding more-than-human entanglements, offering new insights into environmental humanities.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In this paper I analyse how the relationship with and imaginary about the taranta, the land and supernatural beings in Southern Italy emerges from oral history, songs, narratives, myths, films, documentaries and ethnographic works, and is revived and reinterpreted in contemporary performing arts.

Paper long abstract

The taranta – a spider with natural and supernatural features that constitutes the central symbol of the mythical-ritual complex of tarantism, in Apulia, Southern Italy – had the power to motivate and influence local representations of suffering, healing practices, the imaginary, social life and the relationship of the peasants to their land. The power of taranta resides in its ambiguity, and its ability to establish connections between the natural, human and spiritual worlds and the physiological, psychological, social and spiritual dimensions of the human being.

The taranta and its encounters with human beings, as well as the life in the fields and the peasantsʼ relationship with the land, the sea, the sun, the dead and saints appear in various forms and nuances in songs, healing rituals, oral history, narratives, myths, films, documentaries and ethnographic works. They also reveal how many pasts, of different temporal thickness, which can refer to a much vaster spatial context, are encrusted in tarantism.

The taranta continues to multiply and to weave its web of meanings, in a process of recovering local traditions (focused on music and dance) that began in the 1970s and underwent a big shift in the 1990s. The taranta and tarantism continue to stimulate the imaginary and assume new meanings in artistic performances and in the narratives of the public and local agents. They also became positive values of identity, an intangible heritage and touristic and commercial products, in a complex web of interactions between local and global processes.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Latvian and Estonian folklore mentions so called four-eyed dogs – type of dogs who has different colour fur above the eyes, creating an impression they have four eyes. Cluster of folk songs and sayings mention beliefs of such dogs that are able to see supernatural things as souls of deceased people.

Paper long abstract

A thread from the tapestry of intangible cultural heritage - the Latvian and Estonian folklore mentions so called four-eyed dogs – type of dogs who has different colour fur above the eyes, creating a visual impression they have four eyes. Cluster of folk songs and sayings mention beliefs of such dogs that are able to see supernatural things as souls of deceased people who visit homes of alive during fall (see Šmits 1941:1746, 1765, Viluoja 1997:42). The Dog co-burial tradition practised by Eastern Baltic Finno-Ugric people (Livonians, Finns, Osilians and coastal Estonians) during the Late Iron Age (10th-12th c. AD) widens variety of described human-dog coexistence forms and yet perform a dog as a medium between natural and supernatural worlds. Dogs have been guarded people from unwilling guests not only during their lifetime. Being buried with the owner express value and emotional closeness and also symbolically continue to perform practical functions as a guards, herders, hunting companions, consumers of leftovers after the meals, pets that have been cuddled before going to sleep and family members that also will fall asleep some day forever. The Livonian dog sacrifice ritual and co-burying tradition, due to its rarity (in the territory of Latvia 52 dog co-burials have been archaeologically investigated yet) and both material and emotional value, was a public act attesting to the welfare, social status and religious beliefs of the deceased and also of his or her kin.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I explore how a phenomenological approach to site generates new insights into old stories, discussing the legend The Witch of Wookey Hole. I show how walks around the Mendip Hills informed subsequent works; retelling the tale through voices other than those of a patriarchal, extractive perspective.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I explain how I use experiential walking as a methodological tool. Placing my body into zones of industrial fallout, ecological crisis, and social amnesia allows me to interrogate, unpick, and eventually to retell old place stories. Wookey Hole, for example, is a large cave system situated in the Limestone Karst of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, England. These caves have long been run as a commercial tourist enterprise that makes full use of a legend of the curse of a local witch of to attract visitors.

I draw from the Feminist Marxist writings of Silvia Federici and the work in the early twentieth century of archaeologist and speleologist Herbert Balch to show how legend of the witch’s ‘curse’ contains a more complex story of ecological collapse, historic lead mining, and a systemic campaign against the autonomy of women that was related the rise of capital and wage-based economy.

I show how my process of repeatedly walking Wookey and its wider locale allowed me to access ‘voices’ of the lively materials and more-than-human others of the Wookey place assemblage. I describe my attempts to retell this tale from such non-human perspectives in academic writings, a new book of folk stories, and a series of public performances.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper investigates narratives concerning familiars and metamorphoses in seventeenth-century Norwegian witch trials. Attention is given to how these spirits were conceptualised and how they related to the intellectual notions of the time regarding the term ‘preternatural’.

Paper long abstract

In early modern Europe, the relationships between the natural, preternatural, and supernatural were the subject of frequent intellectual debates and changing notions. Since the term ‘preternatural’ came to refer to demonic activity and to that resulting from magical practices, the term became central to understanding the realities and boundaries of witchcraft. Preternatural phenomena were the results of occult powers which were used in secret. Yet, as Lorraine Daston observes, while the preternatural was seen as manipulating natural causes, it was limited to working marvels but never miracles.

The witch trials during this period were arenas where these human-nature entanglements were displayed in narratives, discussed, and eventually judged upon among the persons involved. In the trials, human-nature related questions concerned bodily transformations (metamorphoses), the witch-animal relationship (familiars), the manipulation of natural forces (to cause bad weather, crop failures, or plagues), and the situating of witchcraft practices in wild nature (the sabbath) to name but a few. While research has widely considered witches’ characteristic abilities to influence their surroundings, little attention has been given to the concept of ‘nature’ and the character of the natural world. This paper will investigate a selection of Norwegian witch trials from the seventeenth century with particular attention to narrations concerning familiars and metamorphoses. How are these spirits conceptualised in the courtrooms?

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Folklore as Natureculture: Reading Asbjørnsen with Haraway The paper interrogate how supernatural beings in folk narratives problematize notions of nature, through empirical analyses of 19th century narratives collected and curated by P.Chr. Asbjørnsen

Paper long abstract

This paper takes P. Chr. Asbjørnsen’s “A Forest Valley in Western Norway” as its point of departure to explore how supernatural beings—particularly the nøkk and the hulder—destabilize dualistic boundaries between nature and culture. Drawing on an ecocritical reading informed by Donna Haraway’s concept of naturecultures, the analysis shows how the narrative landscape emerges as an active, agentic space inhabited by nonhuman actors who both entice and threaten. Rather than serving as a passive backdrop, nature in the tale is relational, unpredictable, and co-constitutive of meaning. The story reflects a vernacular worldview that resists anthropocentric and modernist conceptions of nature, offering instead a more entangled and reciprocal model of human-nonhuman coexistence.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper presents strategies for reading folk narrative collections as more-than-human ethnographies. Focusing on Scotland and northern England, it interrogates the relational cultural lives of supernatural beings and their challenge to reductive nature-culture binaries.

Paper long abstract

Folklorists have long had an interest in beings beyond the human, but that are, crucially, entangled with human communities and local environments. Within folk narratives and their performative worlds, ‘supernatural’ beings are not only connected to human communities and their environments, but are also shown to have complex social lives. This paper explores folklore collections from the British Isles to elucidate how the socionatural lives of supernatural beings are documented, described, and connected to the everyday lives of humans. Focusing on Robert Kirk’s 'The Secret Commonwealth' (1691) from Scotland and Michael Aislabie Denham’s ‘tracts’ (1846-59) from northern England, it will examine the narrative strategies that collectors employ in presenting local folk narratives and customs that amount to what we might conceptualise as ethnographies of the supernatural nonhuman. Through this ethnographic lens, we can understand folk narrative collections as bioculturally diverse texts that help us rethink hitherto reductive notions of supernatural beings as mere reflections of nature, instead emphasising their relationality. At the same time, they illuminate how nonhumans are to be understood on a vernacular level, resisting scientistic categorisations that further separate human and nonhuman into culture and nature. In this way, this paper contests the notion that all western communities – especially so-called ‘modernising’ and ‘modern’ – view and engage with the world in nature-culture binaries. By reconfiguring ideas of supernatural beings in this way, we are better able to dissolve such binaries, emphasising relational entanglements and thinking more deeply about the naturecultures of supernatural beings.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Building on the expressive matrix between Scottish Gaelic supernatural legend, song and instrumental music, this paper seeks to extend such entangled assemblages to multimodal phenomenologies at the intersections of traditional ecological knowledge, material culture, and the environment.

Paper long abstract

In the various versions of the port-à-beul (mouth music) to the reel “Am Muileann Dubh” (‘The Black Mill’), listeners are introduced to what is purported to be a preposterous summer pastoral scene at a mill in which wild bird nests, livestock, barley meal, snuff tobacco and the devil himself are present. As an extension of the lyrics, John Shaw identifies a Cape Breton legend type, which details the tune's origins through characteristics found in both supernatural and religious legends. These narratives serve as a Cape Breton variation on the Faustian bargain [M211], at the crossroads between musical gain and damnation, thwarting the priest’s delivery of extreme unction upon the departing family member of a novice fiddler. Several versions provide a coda in which the tune is banned from further performance by clerical intercession and thus serves as a point of subversive ‘folk’ reflection and contestation eschewing clerical power in favour of ethnoaesthetically centred criteria and sensual pleasures in this feelingful ‘garden of earthly delights’. When examining the versions of this tune’s origin legend from Highland Scotland alongside toponymic evidence, there is a conspicuous lack of clerical censure, with a reframing around illicit whisky production and smuggling. Building on the inter-genre reinforcement of the expressive matrix between Scottish Gaelic legend, song and instrumental music, this paper seeks to extend this entangled assemblage to multimodal phenomenologies at the intersections of traditional ecological knowledge, material culture, and the environment that challenges the binary ontologies of nature/culture, salvation/damnation, pleasure/abstinence through such interpersonal more-than-human encounters.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Aren’t forests, lakes, and roads not merely backdrops, but active forces in encounters with the supernatural? The Smiltene legend corpus suggests seeing landscapes as relational environments where humans, supernatural beings, and places co-constitute experience.

Paper long abstract

In Smiltene, a small town in northern Latvia, a dense demonological legend heritage was recorded a century ago. These narratives describe encounters with beings tied to specific sites – forests, roads, lakes, hills, etc. – whose actions are recurrent and repetitive. Local taxonomies gave them names derived from how they express themselves: the Wailer, the Scratcher, the Twitcher, the Growler, etc. Often imagined as restless spirits of the violently dead, they were not encountered everywhere but precisely somewhere; their recurrence is anchored in place.

The experiences these legends recount suggest that the environment itself is never a passive backdrop. Forests and other sites of encounter appear agentive – they lend the beings persistence, enable encounters, and create unease in presence. Walking through these landscapes, with knowledge of their demonological background, alters perception. But not only that. Expectation interacts with auditory impressions, tactile sensations, shifting visual qualities, and the temporal atmosphere of particular hours, such as dawn or night. Together with the narrated encounters, these elements combine into a perceptual intensity – at times so strong that the environment itself seems to generate the experience, even without a supernatural figure manifesting.

In this sense, the Smiltene corpus does more than preserve a forgotten demonological tradition. It points to how landscapes participate in supernatural encounters: as relational environments where humans, beings, and places co-constitute experiences through affect, repetition, and situated conditions.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on Norwegian transhumance tradition, this paper understands fairies as other-dimensional cultural beings, and not as symbolic representations of nature. Thus, the mountain landscape they inhabit must also be seen as a multi-dimensional cultural one, rather than a natural one.

Paper long abstract

Fairies and related supernatural beings have since the 19th century been described as ‘natural beings’ (Norwegian: naturvette, Swedish: naturväsen), and in that sense as an opposition to human culture. Such beings have often been seen as border guards between the social world and the natural world, both in time and space.

For example, Norwegian transhumance tradition tells how fairies (huldrefolk) lived on the mountain farms during the winter season. Their entry into the farms has been understood as a symbolic transformation of these farms from being a social sphere in the summer to becoming nature, or even wilderness, during the winter. Fairies are regarded as creatures of nature, even though the legend tradition tells that they have a social life and a societal structure that mirrors human society. Hence, it is tempting to think of the categorization of them as nature as a result of ontological purification by folklorists in a Latourian sense. This paper will discuss the rich Norwegian memorate and legend tradition about fairies, with an emphasis on their social life. Inspired by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and perspectivism, the social life of the fairies will be the starting point for arguing that these beings are not necessarily symbolic representations of nature, but rather cultural beings of an otherworldly dimension. And it will discuss whether it is productive to understand the landscape these creatures possess, the forests and mountains, as a certain kind of other-dimensional cultural sphere, rather than nature in a simplified sense.