In their readable edited volume, Storied and Supernatural Places: Studies in Spatial and Social Dimensions of Folklore and Sagas, co-editors Ülo Valk and Daniel Sävborg contribute to the lively reinvigoration of the common ground between folklore studies and Norse medieval studies, as exemplified in earlier Nordic and Baltic scholarship, and as powerfully reasserted in recent years at the University of Tartu. The essays in the volume derive in part from a 2012 University of Tartu conference, part of a periodic “Nordic-Celtic-Baltic Folklore symposium” series of conferences that has gone on since 1988.
As the co-editors show in their informative and well-written introduction, place represents a particularly apt topic for interdisciplinary explorations between these fields, as places have held enduring interest for tale tellers as well as scholars throughout time, in the days of the medieval Icelandic sagas as well as in more recent centuries. As the varied and interesting contributions to the volume demonstrate, place becomes a rich field in which communities and individuals establish and perform a sense of history, a sense of connectedness with the world, both natural and supernatural. Storied and Supernatural Places is essential reading for scholars wishing to understand the place-based traditions of Northern Europe, past as well as present.
The volume is arranged in three sections. The first, “Explorations in Place-Lore,” presents cogent case studies of place-related lore, drawn from archival and textual collections. Terry Gunnell’s examination of álagablettir legends in Iceland makes the case for Celtic influences in Icelanders’ experience and conceptualization of the supernatural in relation to particular places in the landscape. John Lindow explores Scandinavian legends about churchyards and their portrayal of the churchyard as a liminal space in which proper human behavior is underscored or ensured. Kaarina Koski presents Finnish lore on churches in relation to state Lutheranism, and in relation to other potent places or beings such as the bathhouse or healer (tietäjä). Sandis Laime examines Latvian legends about sinking churches and the capacity of significant or unusual places to attract narratives to themselves due to both historical and natural factors. Kristel Kivari and Ülo Valk provide descriptions of significant or mysterious places as seen from perspectives of popular science, popular belief, and tabloid journalism, Kivari looking at theories of dowsing (water witching), earth fields, energy flows, ley lines, and geopathy, Valk at contemporary legends of haunted places, particularly a haunted former hospital in Tartu.
A second section, “Regional Variation, Environment and Spatial Dimensions,” lacks the evidential and methodological cohesiveness of the volume’s first section but presents interesting explorations in themselves. Frog examines narratives of the theft and regaining of thunder in Nordic-Baltic mythologies. Madis Arukask looks at lore about herders as practitioners of magic in Vepsian and North Russian folk cultures, including traditions of secrecy and alterity that served both to isolate and maintain traditions and tradition bearers. Bengt af Klintberg looks at Swedish and broader European folk beliefs and legends of bracken casting their seeds only on Midsummer eve, exploring the wider legendary and ethnobotanical lore of rural European folklore. Daniel Sävborg and Mart Kuldkepp each present interesting readings of folkloric elements in particular Icelandic sagas, including Njáls saga, Egils saga einhenda, Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls, Eyrbyggja saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa, Kormáks saga, Eireks saga víðförla, Eiríks saga rauða, and a number of þættir. Questions of genre, belief, setting, travel, sacrality, and narrative function are explored in ways that integrate both narrative analysis and folkloristic investigation of place and belief.
A third section, “Traditions and Histories Reconsidered,” looks at the history of the discipline of folklore studies, with insightful case studies concerning various European countries contributed by Jonathan Roper, David Hopkin, and Diarmuid Ó Giolláin. Roper’s examination of “folk disbelief” provides a valuable note in a volume of materials that earlier folklorists and reading audiences used to regard as evidence of the quaint and credulous. The history of legendry and its nationalist uses in England, Ireland, France, and North America provide valuable contextualization for the Nordic and Baltic case studies presented earlier in the volume. Together the essays in this section also suggest the complex array of issues of class, education, national identity, deruralization, and popular literacy that influenced the collection, analysis, and publication of place-related folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Many of the articles present and make use of theories of place and sacrality, drawn variously from folklore studies, religious studies, psychology, history, or other disciplines. Yet, for the most part, the authors of these contributions devote particular attention to careful and lively detailing of narratives regarding places and the sacred in and of themselves. This fact lends the anthology a sense of approachability and intrigue that render its articles well-suited to the college classroom or generalist reader. At the same time, the specialist in legend studies will find many useful insights in the pages of this anthology as well as abundant reminders of the intrinsic interest and cultural resonances of the many and varied stories people tell about places.
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[Review length: 830 words • Review posted on September 12, 2019]