Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural Nordic Perspectives on Landscape Theory

by Egeler, Matthias

• ISBN13: 9780197747360
• ISBN10: 0197747361
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197747384
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-03-08
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

All societies fill the geographical space in which they are living with the holy, the sacred, and the supernatural. A lively academic debate has developed in the last few decades about how human beings make the landscapes that they live in and how these landscapes work. This discussion has repeatedly referenced religion and the supernatural, but it has never engaged either in significant depth. Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural: Nordic Perspectives on Landscape Theory presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops these theories further by bringing them into dialogue with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data.

Focusing on many different themes, including time and memory, repeating patterns, identity formation, power and subversion, sound, home and unhomeliness, and nature and environment, author Matthias Egeler engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary fields of landscape theory and the study of religions. He brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been documented since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this vibrant heritage with the insights of landscape theory--both in and beyond the study of religions--allows important new contributions to both fields, especially through the inclusion of perspectives held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have been the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the perspectives found in literature and the arts.

Author Biography

Matthias Egeler is a Supernumerary Professor at the Institute for Scandinavian Studies of LMU Munich, Germany. He has held scholarships and fellowships in Oxford, Cambridge, Berlin, and Cork, and has been principal investigator of a series of projects in Munich. His research interests include the history of religions and the Nordic and Celtic literatures of the Middle Ages. He currently directs a research project on landscape-related storytelling and folk belief in the Icelandic Westfjords.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Prelude

I. Introduction and Exposition
Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural: Introduction to Theories and Concepts
Strandir: Exposition of an Icelandic Landscape

II. Twelve Movements: Aspects of the Engagement with the Supernatural Landscape
Theses on the Supernatural Landscape
Time and Memory
Repeating Patterns
Identity
Morality
Labor
Playfulness and Adventure
Power and Subversion
Sound
Emotions
Coping with Contingency
Home and Unhomeliness
Nature and Environment

III. Coda
Theses on the Supernatural Landscape
Transformations between the Country and the City

IV. Encore
Theses on the Supernatural Landscape
Being-in-a-Place? Retrospect and Prospects

Bibliography
Abbreviations of Archives
Archival Sources
Rannsóknasetur Háskóla Íslands á Ströndum-Þjóðfræðistofa
Náttúrustofa Vestfjarða á Hólmavík
Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum
Secondary Literature and Printed Sources