Paper short abstract:

Birds has played a role as a messenger for death or important occasions for human life. Stories about the ptarmigan tells us about changing seasons, representing as a model for beauty and as a symbol for Swedish Sámi Struggle for their small game hunting. A story of the importance of birds.

Paper long abstract:

Humans has always had a relations to birds of different species. In Sámi folklore is it well documented what precautions and relations one shall have to nature. A silent forest or a silent mountain is not really nature if it lacks the songs of the birds. If you hear the tengman's owl 'aegolius funereus' late at night, you know that someone you know will probably die, according to the tradition. The ptarmigan's 'lagopus muta' small steps in winter time and its longer steps when days get brighter, does not only tell us about the ptarmigan movement through the seasons. It also tells about of Sámi concept of nature, the days get longer because of the steps of the bird, not the other way around. The ptarmigan is also a symbol for women beauty, describing ancient perspective for women's attraction, very different from todays fashion. In 1992 when the Swedish government passed a law on Small game hunting, was it the ptarmigan that stood on the frontline. Both hunting associations which supported and lobbied for the law and the Sámi associations which fought for the exclusive hunting rights used the ptarmigan as a symbol. After almost 30 years, in 2019 did one Sámi reindeer herding community 'sameby' Girjas win in the Supreme court on the hunting rights west of the cultivation limit 'odlingsgränsen'. To conclude, birds are important in the past and still are in the present.

Paper short abstract:

The leader-sheep is native to Iceland and faced extinction last century. The discourse was more akin to losing cultural heritage rather than an animal going extinct. The stories that surround it are almost full-fledged folktales about how they have saved their herds and shepherds from various perils

Paper long abstract:

The leader-sheep is a breed of the Icelandic sheep and has been native to Iceland for a millennium and is mostly unknown in other countries. The breed resembles goats, is thin and tall, with long legs and not bred for meat consumption. Instead, it’s bred for its ability to lead the herd, predict changes in weather and as a companion to shepherds. When it faced extinction in early 20th century the contemporary discourse centred on how Iceland was losing important, intangible cultural heritage, rather than the extinction of an animal. Leaders within the farming community spoke nostalgically about them and the loss of the brightest and best part of sheep farming. The breed didn’t go extinct though, and lives on today, continuing their role, as they have done for a millennium.

The stories that have been written about it border on the mythical and legendary, almost full-fledged folktales about how the leader-sheep has saved their herds and shepherds from perils. Icelandic farmers have a deep connection to their leader-sheep and respect them, as seen in the stories collected from the end of 19th century until today, in recent interviews to this day. They have often been a symbol of all that is good and great within sheep-farming. This presentation will delve into the discourse concerning the breed and how farmers have recreated a purpose for it in modern times, which is both alike and different from what it once was.

Paper short abstract:

Exploring the relations, visitations and transformations within folk narratives of polar bear arrivals, traditional and recently collected legends in Iceland, as well as media representations, will be discussed in light of narrative traditions, imaginaries of the north and the anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

The polar bear, an icon of the Arctic, has on occasion come ashore in Iceland. While not considered a natural habitat of bears, the country’s human inhabitants’ limited knowledge of them in part springs from cultural origins in Scandinavia and the British Isles, as well as from Norse settlements in Greenland. Accounts of these arrivals can be found in sources of varying reliability, but numerous narratives have been told and recorded of the Icelanders’ interaction, or conflict, with the white bear (In Icelandic: hvítabjörn / plural: hvítabirnir). In tracing the polar bear’s fleeting presence on Iceland’s shores and cultural imagination these narratives not only call into question the boundaries of the human and the animal but also the storytellers’ place in a precarious world. These projections of human aspiration and trepidation perhaps do not leave the polar bear, in itself, with much agency or room for representation. Yet, both traditional and recently collected narratives are open for analysis in relation to narrative techniques applied to describe the physicality, thought and emotions of both bear and human. Tropes and motifs describing natural and supernatural features will be discussed in light of narrative traditions and imaginaries of the north. Performative and methodological issues of gender, periphery and cultural background will be dealt with as well how the significance of the polar bear has developed through the centuries. In their contemporary context this presentation will highlight how climate crisis, morality and arcticification or borealism appear in folk narrative, material culture and media.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on personal fieldwork, archival field recordings and printed sources, this paper highlights the complex relationships and often blurred boundaries between cultural and natural worlds in the diasporic imagination of Scottish Gaels in Canada, ultimately challenging what it means to be human.

Paper long abstract:

Dùthchas is the dynamic system of emplaced knowledge maintained by Scottish Gaelic-speakers at the intersections of time and space, nature and culture, the individual and the community. Enacted at moments of transition and change, dùthchas can serve as a conceptual embodiment of one's place in the world in emergent contexts, where "speakers apply their understanding of its pragmatics, an understanding that presupposes older contexts of use and potentially entails the creation of new contexts" (McQuillan 2004: 182). Drawing on personal fieldwork, archival field recordings and correspondence as well as historical newspapers, this paper explores a dynamic understanding of the natural world creatively enacted in the diasporic imagination of Scottish Gaelic-speakers in Atlantic Canada. From emergent folk taxonomies innovatively drawing on ancestral knowledge to identify previously unknown species of animals encountered in the Canadian forests to mimetic representations of the calls of birds who sing in and understand Gaelic, this paper highlights the complex relationships and often blurred boundaries between cultural and natural worlds, ultimately challenging what it means to be human. Special attention is given to sung dialogues that simultaneously give anthropomorphic voice in a minoritized and marginalized endangered language to black bears, frogs and chickadees and provide a zoomorphic masking of the bard that serves as an empathetic and cathartic release between singer, audience, and animal, emerging from under the shadows of our all-too-often masked humanity.

Paper short abstract:

The ethnolinguistic insight into Slovenian short folklore forms (proverbs, riddles, incantations, etc.) will show which animals are named in them and what characteristics were given to these animals as well as what the culturally specific behavior towards them was.

Paper long abstract:

Short folklore forms, with their naming of phenomena, beings, and objects, are connected with ethnography, folk intangible and material heritage of the people. They transmit experiences (proverbs), knowledge (riddles), prejudices (swear words), but also stereotypes and expected characteristics and events. With an ethnolinguistic approach and the help of semiotics, we can take a closer look at the deeper structures and meanings of short folklore forms and further at social stereotypes. In the paper, animals in Slovenian short folk forms (from the archive of the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology), their stereotypical representation as well as their metaphorical meaning will be presented. In the researched material the named animals are domestic as well as wild animals, never-the-less mostly animals from the near surrounding. It shows that the animals were all over observed and further characterized by people. The insight into short folklore forms will show which characteristics were given to them as well as what the culturally specific behavior towards them was.