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Paper short abstract

This paper explores ecological relationships and vernacular epistemologies in the Hannaas Collection. It explores the ways in which folklore preserves environmental knowledge and how digitization can recover this knowledge, often obscured by archival structures.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how ecological relationships and vernacular epistemologies are embedded in the Hannaas collection, a folklore collection made by folklorist and philologist Torleiv Hannaas (1874-1929). Now part of the Ethno-folkloristic Archive at the University of Bergen, Norway, and accessible through the digital platform samla.no, the collection encompasses a wide range of cultural expressions, including folktales, legends, ballads, riddles, placenames, customs, and beliefs, that reflect local understandings of nature and human–nonhuman entanglements.

Focusing on short forms of folklore and Hannaas’ documentation of place names and landscape formations, this paper examines how such narratives contain ecological knowledge, even though the collector’s primary focus may have been on other aspects. For instance, place name records often elicit legends and beliefs that reveal human-nonhuman relationships and environmental knowledge. Although Hannaas may not have collected with ecological intent, the material reveals how people make sense of nature through oral traditions.

The presentation also critically engages with archival and cataloguing practices, asking how classification systems and thematic keywords may obscure environmental knowledge and how digitization can help recover them. By tracing how these narratives have been passed down and recontextualized over time, the paper contributes to broader discussions about the role of folklore collections in environmental discourse and the potential of digital archives to shed light on layered, place-based understandings of nature. In an era marked by ecological and epistemic uncertainty, revisiting such collections offers more than historical insight, it invites a rethinking of archives as dynamic, living systems.