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- Convenors:
-
James Deutsch
(Smithsonian Institution)
Debolina Nath (Kanchrapara College)
Projita Giri
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Short Abstract
From the fear of Nature, not only comes reverence but also the desire to conquer that fear. This panel will explore how nature is simultaneously worshipped and feared, examining how nature symbolizes both reverence and terror across cultural traditions and Folk Narratives.
Long Abstract
Folk narratives have always reflected the deep and complex relationship between humans and nature. In many cultures, nature is seen not only as a source of life—providing food, shelter, and safety—but also as a powerful, sometimes frightening force. In many folk narratives, nature is both worshipped and feared simultaneously. These narratives, whether myths, legends, folktales or fairy tales, often show landscapes that are both sacred and dangerous, places where spirits, gods, or supernatural powers live and living and non-living beings as fearful. Mountains, forests, rivers and oceans are seen as places of worship, fear and moral lessons, mixing the real world with the spiritual. This panel will explore how folk narratives connect nature worship with human fear. It will look at how these narratives use Nature as a symbol of both respect and fear of its power. By examining different cultural traditions, this panel will shed light on how humans have long understood the complex relationship between themselves and the natural world.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Monday 15 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Carpathian folklore portrays trees as agents of magic: they may house spirits, hold or transmit curses, or protect the living. Through rituals and stories, trees emerge as long-lived beings capable of absorbing, retaining, and redirecting supernatural power.
Paper long abstract
In folk narratives of East Slavic speakers in the Carpathian Mountains, trees on rare occasions house supernatural beings. For example, the povitrulia—a female entity that charms men or exchanges babies—is said to live in trees. Yet trees can be dangerous even without such inhabitants. A tree that has come into contact with water left after a healing ritual may become cursed and later transmit the curse to the household. Other accounts say this water should be poured onto trees in places where people rarely go, so the tree may contain the curse without letting it spread.
A developed mythology also surrounds trees used in magic. If an unknown person tries to cut down such a tree, the act can prove fatal unless cleansing rituals are performed. Trees may also hold cursed objects placed there by sorcerers; as long as the object remains, the curse continues. Cutting down the tree does not stop the magic but makes it permanent. Only removing the object would break the curse.
At the same time, some narratives describe trees as protective. After waking from a dream of the dead, one should look at green trees so the dead cannot harm or haunt the dreamer.
Taken together, these accounts portray the tree not as inert matter but as a long-living presence capable of absorbing, containing, and redirecting magical power across generations.
Paper short abstract
Investigating the indigenously authored novels There There (2018) by Tommy Orange and Indian Horse (2012) by Richard Wagamese, this paper depicts the inherited dislocation of identity through the symbolic use of ghosts as mechanisms to access ancestral memory and portray cultural haunting.
Paper long abstract
Across cultures, ghosts have extensively figured as literary symbols, captivating readers with their often-romanticised suggestion of existence beyond death in the form of apparitions. Once traditional in native lore, the reappearance of ghosts in contemporary Indigenous literature is an effective and symbolic technique, supporting the ideology of imaginative recuperation. In postcolonial literary practice, ghosts became effective devices to explore and portray class, colour, and gender inequalities, bridging the past with the present, encouraging haunting to become a conduit through which to investigate changes in perspectives. Drawing on philosopher Derrida’s concept of ‘Hauntology’, revealing how postcolonial cultures reflect the genesis of oral storytelling to depict inherited dislocation of identity, this paper investigates indigenously authored novels There There (2018) by Tommy Orange, and Indian Horse (2012) by Richard Wagamese.
In these texts, content is torn from real-life experiences. As ghosts become mechanisms to access ancestral memory and depict cultural temporalities, both authors employ haunting as a means to revisit, reveal and recuperate from colonial atrocities. When viewed through the lens of ancestral trauma, Emily Dickinson’s notion that the ‘external ghost’ was less disturbing than any internal haunting becomes particularly applicable. Symbolic of a silent history, the manifestation of ghosts external and internal, serves to separate time, reality and history while representing a continuing loss of identity and cultural futurity.
Paper short abstract
Fantasy has long helped us perceive the world anew. In a time of Climate Emergency is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with useful tools for addressing ‘the defining crisis of our time’ (UN)?
Paper long abstract
From Gilgamesh to Gawain and the Green Knight, the Brothers Grimm to
Grimdark, the natural world has provided the backdrop for Fantasy since
its earliest iterations. The playgrounds of childhood are often a writer’s
first Fantasy landscape and can develop into fully fledged storyworlds.
Do readers of Fantasy seek out the genre for a taste of this unsullied
environment? Is it nostalgia for the lost Edens of childhood, a way to
escape, or to find resilience and inspiration? And in a time of Climate
Emergency, is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it
presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with a
useful tool for addressing what the United Nations has called ‘the defining
crisis of our time’?
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how nature (environment and animal) becomes a source of fear in contemporary urban legends. While traditionally linked to rural folktales, similar patterns emerge in the city, where parks function as symbolic forests and urban animals (large birds or feral cats) evoke fear.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the ways in which nature—both the physical environment and animals—operates as a source of fear in contemporary urban legends. While we are accustomed to seeing the natural environment and animals function as loci of fear primarily in folktales set within rural contexts, similar dynamics can also be observed in urban settings. The issue of adaptation is crucial: how the forest is reimagined within the city, how the urban park becomes a symbolic ‘other’ forest, and how and why urban animals (large birds, feral cats, or wild creatures released into peri-urban areas) may evoke fear among city inhabitants.
The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Athens, focusing both on the collection of legends and on the emotional responses of those who narrate and listen to them.
Paper short abstract
The forest is common motif in folk and fairy tale traditions, a space that encompasses the liberating possibilities and the real dangers of straying away from home. This paper considers how the ambiguity of “the forest” is invoked in contemporary narratives of gendered violence in true crime media.
Paper long abstract
The forest is common motif found in folk and fairy tale traditions, a space that simultaneously encompasses the liberating possibilities and the very real dangers of straying away from the familiarity of home. This paper examines this motif in the folk narrative tradition of murder ballads and related genres of storytelling in the United States. Specifically, it considers how the ambiguity of “the forest” is strategically invoked in contemporary narratives of gendered violence in true crime media. It examines how both literal and metaphorical references to “the forest” are used by narrators to call into question the contested terrain of experience shaping the stories women share about danger, blame, and potential victimhood. Attending to the natural landscape of the forest as a contested terrain itself within the discursive landscape of true crime storytelling, this paper builds on Amy Shuman’s important observation that “Stories rarely if ever belong to a single category of experience; more often, storytelling demonstrates an awareness of multiple possible categories, some compatible, some contested, some provocative or marked, and others assumed or naturalized” (2005:16). Ultimately, this paper’s focus on narrative engagement with “the forest” in true crime storytelling offers insight into the multiple discourses women must navigate as they recognize themselves as always already a potential victim of gendered violence in a dangerous world.
Paper short abstract
Slovak writer E. J. Groch has introduced the concept of 'second naivety', in which human beings reduce their human selves in favour of spiritual and divine powers, most often represented by nature. In his work, he observes the process by which body diffuses and unifies with other natural creations.
Paper long abstract
In his work, Slovak writer Erik Jakub Groch (1957) presented the radical concept of 'Second Naivety' (2005), derived from religious practices of simplicity and minimalism as an alternative to the consumerism and materialism of the contemporary world. From the outset, the concept was closely associated with ecology as a moral quest and a display of compassion towards beings considered to be 'lower' than mankind. The concept has gradually undergone further development, and in Groch's later work Viety (2021), which translates as 'sentences brought by the wind', he begins to demonstrate self-observation of bodily diffusion and unification with other beings (trees, birds, insects, etc.). Through depoeticisation, he reaches the threshold between literature and mysticism. Reuniting with nature involves reduction and minimalism (in Groch's own words: 'It is essential to leave something out so that nature can describe itself'). Physically diminishing oneself allows one to transcend boundaries of body and move freely between the human narrator and other natural beings. Inner human emptiness is a prerequisite for acquiring new content from spiritual or natural realms. In the light of Latour's concept of agency, Groch challenges the human-centred, dominant perspective by pushing actants of nature to the most prominent position, which has a number of consequences, including showing a new order in which nature prevails in the world. The original paradox — analysing naivety is incompatible with being naive — is resolved in Groch's recent work by increasing emptiness (lack of syntax, sentences reduced to notes, etc.), allowing nature to describe itself.
Paper short abstract
Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural (1952) bears striking similarities to Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), specifically to the Grettis saga. Like Grettir the Strong, Roy Hobbs is a larger-than-life heroic figure—strong, brave, and ‘natural’, but also flawed, leading to his ultimate downfall.
Paper long abstract
Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural (1952) seems like a ‘natural’ subject for a conference that engages with ‘essentialist notions of the natural’. Although the novel itself is not a folk narrative strictly speaking, it very deliberately utilizes many elements of myth and legend. The path of the novel’s protagonist Roy Hobbs largely conforms to the archetypal patterns of folk heroes, as delineated by Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, Edward Tylor, Joseph Campbell, and others. Moreover—and perhaps more appropriate for the conference setting in Reykjavik—there are solid connections to the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), specifically to the Grettis saga.
Like Grettir the Strong, Roy Hobbs is a larger-than-life heroic figure—strong, brave, and ‘natural’, but with deep flaws that lead to his ultimate downfall. Further similarities between the two narratives are the inevitability of fate, in which both heroes seem trapped in tragic cycles of betrayal and failure, as well as a literary tone that seems deliberately understated, restrained, and stoic amid the highly dramatic confrontations of the story lines.
This paper will explore these connections, particularly to better understand the physical and spiritual ‘notions of the natural’ that emerge fully in both Malamud’s novel and the Grettis saga. The paper will also consider the 1984 film version of The Natural starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, which adheres closely to both the novel and saga until the end, when presumably Hollywood conventions must inevitably overcome the doom and gloom of traditional folk narrative.