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.