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Paper short abstract

Since the relationship between tourism, the landscape and folklore is rather complicated and includes certain (frequently conflicting) tensions, this paper explores a sustainable strategy for folklore tourism practices that is considerate of landscape, people living in a place, and heritage value.

Paper long abstract

Folklore tourism grew significantly in popularity over the last years, enticing people to explore landscapes infused with supernatural folklore. At the same time, however, the amount of scholarship in the field of folklore tourism is limited, and a need for more insight into the conflicting and complicated relationship between tourism, the landscape and folklore remains.

This paper, drawing inspiration from Ironside and Massie (2020), therefore explored a sustainable strategy for folklore tourism practices. Considering that modern travellers require narratives like supernatural folktales to enliven landscapes for them, allowing them to experience these landscapes in new ways, liminal spaces (i.e., a space between reality and the ‘extraordinary’) are created during which people may be receptive to new and fresh perspectives on, e.g., environmental matters. Consequently, folktales – which convey an animistic worldview – can thus offer transformative experiences that have the capacity to impact and mould tourist behaviour. Considering, furthermore, that humanity is at a turning point where we need to critically reflect on the relationship we have with the natural world, this paper considers an approach to folklore tourism that proposes an animist ‘folklore-centric gaze’.

Taking the Isle of Skye as a case study, this paper shows that supernatural folktales enable their audiences to ‘see more’, thereby stimulating a greater sensitivity and responsiveness to one’s surroundings, which is sometimes also accompanied by increased environmentally respectful behaviour. Hence, the influential capacity of folktales mainly consists of nudging people towards adopting a folklore-centric gaze, which enables more understanding/connectivity of/with the natural/more-than-human world.