Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The natureculture entanglements of Iceland’s fjords and shores are discussed here, focusing on the non-human actants present in legends. It explores how folk narratives centring on flora, fauna and nature-cultural material, themselves question ontological assumptions and established boundaries.

Paper long abstract

The natureculture entanglements of Iceland’s fjords and shores are discussed here with a focus on the non-human actants present in myths, legends and personal experience narratives. It explores how flora, fauna and nature-cultural material, are experienced, apprehended and narrated, revealing worldviews and belief systems far from simplistic. It engages with folk narratives that run far back to the beginning of human settlement in Iceland. Within the narratives, flora and fauna, macro and micro, can be explored as mobile agentic assemblages that influence courses of events over a large geographical areas. Whether through a network of marine animals and land mammals or naturcultural driftage such as driftwood and animal remains, these assemblages do not ‘respect’ national borders and are clearly part of transnational and transarctic human and non-human networks. They embark on shared bodies of water or on the shore, which in the human imaginary, is apprehended as a border zone. Furthermore, (super)natural beings will be examined as enmeshed in a living environment, from which it may take its supernatural and naturecultural attributes. Within this environment, supernatural and natural threats are met with creative reactions which include storytelling, precautionary and religious practice and other human attempts to control what can be perceived as manifestations of the forces for chaos. As demonstrated in this presentation, collected folk narrative, manuscripts, archival material and ethnography can be of great use in exploring naturecultural entanglements, not least in the study of narratives and narrators that themselves question ontological assumptions and established boundaries.