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Paper short abstract

Living with Fire explores volcanic mythologies in Vanuatu. Based on linguistic and ethnographic research, it highlights how oral traditions linked to the six volcanic islands express diverse cultural relationships to volcanoes, shaping cosmology, social life and oral history.

Paper long abstract

The Vanuatu archipelago is renowned for having the world's highest linguistic density (François et al., 2015), rich traditions of oral history and mythology (Ballard, 2020; Bessis & François, 2025), and intense volcanic activity (Sherburn, 2019). Located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, the archipelago

is home to six active volcanoes that shape the landscape through explosive and effusive eruptions.

Volcanoes form part of everyday life in Vanuatu. They provide the black stones used for cooking; and the shape of the communal oven somehow replicate a volcano. Volcanoes also provide fertile land for horticulture – land whose ownership rights can be regulated by complex social rules.

The archipelago’s linguistic and cultural diversity is also reflected in the various ways in which local narratives represent their volcanoes. Some traditions see in volcanoes the origin of fire, the source of cooking practices and of stone ovens. Others view their volcano as an object of inter- island trade, among other goods. In central Vanuatu, a major myth tells how the eruption of the Kerua volcano gave rise to new islands and new population settlements – resulting in a new landscape, both natural and social (Bessis, 2023).

Beyond their geological nature, volcanoes also have a sacred aura. They sometimes host the Underworld, the dwelling of ancestors. They have their own guardians, whether human or mythical. Their eruptions can be triggered by sorcerers – typically as an act of revenge.

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Paper long abstract

In 2023, a new survey of Icelandic folk beliefs and experiences of the supernatural was carried out with the help of the Icelandic Social Sciences Institute and grants from the University of Iceland Research Fund and the Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademie in Sweden. This survey builds on previous surveys from 1974 and 2006-2007, and received answers from over 2,500 people of varying ages and genders and varying backgrounds. The poster will give an introduction to the survey and its findings, which indicate not only the fact that folk beliefs (and beliefs in God) in Iceland seem to be fading but also that interesting difference exist between not only the old and young, and those living in urban and rural areas but also between genders. See https://fel.hi.is/sites/fel.hi.is/files/2024-02/Folkbelief_2023_en.pdf

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Paper long abstract

This poster discusses ongoing research into the ways in which the rural past and present are shaped in a podcast called ‘de Nedersaksen’ (The Low Saxons). The podcast, hosted both in Dutch and the minority language of Low Saxon, has hosted over 50 Dutch cultural- and policy makers to talk about the Low Saxon region, its identity, history and language.

In recent years, the (mostly rural) Low Saxon speaking region in the Netherlands has seen increased migrations of people moving in from urban areas. Additionally, political developments regarding emissions and sustainable farming practices in the Dutch countryside led to national farmers’ protests. The rural way of living is perceived to be at stake. Many people living in the region describe a gap between the urban areas in the western Netherlands and the rural regions in the rest of the country. Conversations often steer towards a ‘Low Saxon way of looking at the world’, or a ‘Low Saxon’ nature of the people, which is often presented as distinctly different from the nature of the people in the (mostly urban) west of the country.

This poster explores the way the podcast presents a Low Saxon identity, both as what it is, but also as what it is not. By doing so, this research seeks to understand the way perceived boundaries between the ‘authentic’ rural and the ‘modern’ urban, global and local, nature and culture, center and periphery, all are employed in shaping a new identity; that of the Low Saxon.

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Paper short abstract

This poster examines alphabetic letters inscribed within the illustrations of AM 673 a II 4to. Their sequence, together with the fragment's atypical opening with the Hydrus, suggests that the surviving leaves preserve a later portion of the illustrated cycle.

Paper long abstract

This poster presents observations on alphabetic letters inscribed within the illustrations of the Icelandic Physiologus fragment AM 673 a II 4to (c. 1190–1210). Several illustrations on the recto leaves contain letters integrated into the pictorial field, forming what appears to be a sequence (i–p) across the surviving leaves. While marginal annotations have received some scholarly attention, these letters remain little discussed. I examine the distribution, sequence, and placement of these letters. Their position within the pictorial field sets them apart from conventional identificatory labels of animals and suggests that they fulfilled a different function. The fragment opens with the Hydrus, which does not normally appear at the beginning of the Physiologus cycle. Combined with the alphabetic progression (i–p), this suggests that the extant leaves preserve a later portion of a longer illustrated sequence and that an earlier portion of the cycle has been lost, although the original function and extent of the lettering system remain uncertain. I also discuss evidence of tracing and pricking preserved on selected illustrations. These features may point to a later phase of engagement with the manuscript in which some of the images were reused as exemplars.

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Paper long abstract

Large-scale digitisation of folklore collections has created a strong but still fragmented landscape of digital infrastructures for folk-narrative research. This poster surveys the current state of these resources in Northern Europe, where extensive digital platforms now provide access to vast bodies of narrative material, though coordination across them remains limited. We show how these infrastructures support comparative, multilingual, and cross-border studies, and why closer interoperability is a pressing priority.

We highlight major digital platforms, such as samla.no (Norway), dúchas.ie (Ireland), Folke (Sweden), garamantas.lv (Latvia), hiddenheritage.ai (Scottland/Ireland), sagnagrunnur.arnastofnun.is (Iceland), Kivike (Estonia), and the Danish Folklore Nexus. Related initiatives, such as the Dutch Legend Database and wossidia.de in Germany, illustrate how digital infrastructures of folklore archives expand the range of accessible materials and enable new opportunities for comparative and computational research. Building on such infrastructures, projects like ISEBEL (multilingual legend search) and FILTER (analysis of Finnic/Estonian song variation), together with recent NLP/ASR work on Scottish/Irish Gaelic storytelling corpora, demonstrate how digital tools can extend cross-collection analysis and comparative approaches in folk-narrative studies.

The poster provides a curated set of core digital platforms and tools, a comparative overview of their content, functions, and research workflows they support, and selected examples of how they open new perspectives on research of narrative traditions, including nature-culture entwined storytelling. The poster closes by indicating pathways toward merging national initiatives into more interoperable and sustainable infrastructures for folklore research.

5 more co-authors:

Line Esborg, line.esborg@ikos.uio.no

Tiber Falzett, tiber.falzett@ucd.ie

Angun Sønnesyn Olsen, angun.olsen@uib.no

Ida Tolgensbakk, ida.tolgensbakk@norskfolkemuseum.no

Mari Väina, mari@haldjas.folklore.ee