Academic literature on the topic 'Folklore, lapland'

Discourses of exotic Lapland with its indigenous inhabitants, the Sámi, are widely circulated in the tourist industry and also surface in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy fiction. In contrast to the ‘self-orientalism’ of discourses of tourism, where places and people are represented as exotic to a tourist gaze, the portrayals of the North and its inhabitants gain different symbolic meanings in fictional texts produced by outsiders who rely on earlier texts – myths, fairy tales and anthropological accounts – rather than on their own lived experience of the North or indigeneity. This article applies the concept of Borealism to examine cross-cultural intertextuality and discourses of the Sámi/Lappishness in English-language children’s fantasy by four contemporary authors. The Sámi and their folklore become recontextualised in fictional texts through a Borealist gaze that associates the indigenous characters with feminist and ecocritical discourses and frames indigenous ethnicity in stereotypical ways.

The article discusses the imagery system in the work of the modern Finnish poet Ismo Alanko. Literary and folklore traditions in his poetry are well researched. The poet has created a rather critical image of Finland as a Lutheran country full of national markers, but well-aware of its literature: “Martti Luther ja muovipussi” (Martin Luther and a plastic bag). Images of Finnish architecture, gray buildings in glass and metal, and a heavy gray northern sky connect Alanko’s poetry to Russian culture, to the name of Isaak Levitan who negatively described Finland as a kingdom of gray. Alanko clearly knows about Levitan’s words “Gray water and gray people, gray life”, but he gets into a debate with the artist, proving that gray has many shades of joy. One of the leaders of Finnish expressionism, Uuno Kailas, associated the nature and people of Finland with gray. But Kailas’ gray is clearly negative and lifeless. Alanko, on the other hand, distinguishes in gray all kinds of positive signs of life. His poems are characterized by the description of the lyrical hero’s irrational states against the background of the fantastic landscapes of Lapland, creating mythological images not immediately amenable to interpretation. For example, in the image of Mooneye from the North (kuusilmä pohjoisesta), there is a motif of turning a girl into a fish, typical for Finnish and Karelian epic songs, also familiar to us from Kalevala and Eino Leino’s poetry. Alanko comprehends serious worldview problems with poetic elegance, with the power of poetic word removing the contradiction between religious and common, rational, and irrational. Alanko revives Kalevala meter not in a “museum” form, but with modern accents and in his native Finnish language.

ABSTRACT Although Cotton Mather, as the official chronicler of the 1692 Salem witch trials, is infamously associated with those events, and excerpts from his apologia on Salem, Wonders of the Invisible World, are widely anthologized today, no annotated critical edition of the entire work has appeared in print since the nineteenth century. This present edition of Wonders seeks to remedy this lacuna in modern scholarship. In Wonders, Mather applies both his views on witchcraft and on millennialism to events at Salem. This edition to Mather's Wonders presents this seventeenth-century text beside an integrated theory of the initial causes of the Salem witch panic. The juxtaposition of the probable natural causes of Salem's bewitchment with Mather's implausible explanations exposes the disingenuousness of his writing about Salem. My theory of what happened at Salem includes the probability that a group of conspirators led by the Rev. Samuel Parris deliberately orchestrated the "witchcraft" and that a plant, the thorn apple, used in Algonquian initiation rites, caused the initial symptoms of bewitchment (39-189). Furthermore, key spectral evidence used at the Salem witch trials and recorded by Mather in Wonders appears to have been generated by intense nightmares, commonly thought at the time to be witch visitations, resulting from what is today termed sleep paralysis (215-310). This dissertation provides a detailed look at some of the testimony given in the Salem court records and in Wonders of the Invisible World as it relates to the interpretation in folklore of the phenomenology of nightmares associated with sleep paralysis. The third chapter of this dissertation focuses extensively on Mather's text as a disingenuous response to the Salem witch trials (320-456). The final section of chapter three posits a "Scythian" or Eurasian connection between Swedish and Salem witchcraft. Similarities in shamanic practices among respective indigenous populations of Lapland, Eurasia, Asia, and New England, caused the devil's involvement in both the visible and invisible worlds to appear more than theoretical to writers like Jose Acosta, Johannes Scheffer, Nicholas Fuller, Joseph Mede, Anthony Horneck, and Cotton Mather, inducing Mather to include a lengthy abstract of the Swedish account in Wonders (404-449).

The departure of Marmier and Gyldenstolpe from Stockholm to join La Recherche at Trondheim marked the beginning of the 1838 expedition of the Commission du Nord, and Marmier was appointed to write the official report. This part of his journey is described in some detail in the Relation du voyage of the official publication, which is full of historical data about the sites described, details of local customs, folklore, climate, population, political organisation, public institutions, statistics, different modes of transport, local curiosities, monuments, and various other information. This chapter notes the apparent ease with which Marmier seems to make the transition from life in presumably fairly luxurious and sophisticated circles at court, or intellectual circles in Uppsala, to contact with some of the least privileged in that society. He seems to have made friends on his travels at all social levels; he recorded those contacts in his official reports.