The circulation of such stories within a community facilitates the creation of a picture of specific practitioners, the domain of their competences, and the effectiveness of the ritual acts.
#SVADJBA EMIRA I FERIHA VERIFICATION#
Stories told by cunning folk about successful magical healing are an important factor in their social positioning and the verification of magical practice.
On the one hand, they introduce mythologicaldemonological elements into the everyday, and on the other, they make abstract demonic content concrete by linking it to the plane of experience. In the genre system of folklore, stories of magical healing occupy a liminal space, right at the crossroads of two semantic fields, the demonologically coded and the secular(ised), as the connection with the supernatural is sometimes only latently present. This study analyses the distinctive features of stories of magical healing – thematic (meeting of the natural and supernatural as the core of the narrative), structural (stability of motifs, incorporation of other folklore genres – curses, blessings didactic statements, cumulativity), and ideological (being based on a system of beliefs). It also sheds light on the social base of folklore and examines vernacular views toward legendry and the supernatural. It scrutinizes the history of folkloristics, its geopolitical dimensions and its connection with nation building, as well as looking at constructions of the concepts Baltic, Nordic and Celtic. The third section of the book “Traditions and Histories Reconsidered” addresses major developments within the European social histories and mentalities. The meaning of places and spatial distance as the marker of otherness and sacrality in Old Norse sagas is also discussed here. Articles in the second section “Regional Variation, Environment and Spatial Dimensions” address ecotypes, milieu-morphological adaptation in Nordic and Baltic-Finnic folklores, and the active role of tradition bearers in shaping beliefs about nature as well as attitudes towards the environment. Articles show, how places accumulate meanings as they are layered by stories and how this shared knowledge about environments can actualise in personal experiences. The supernaturalisation of places appears as a socially embedded set of practices that involves storytelling and ritual behaviour.
The first section “Explorations in Place-Lore” discusses cursed and sacred places, churches, graveyards, haunted houses, cemeteries, grave mounds, hill forts, and other tradition dominants in the micro-geography of the Nordic and Baltic countries, both retrospectively and from synchronous perspectives. This book addresses the narrative construction of places, the relationship between tradition communities and their environments, the supernatural dimensions of cultural landscapes and wilderness as they are manifested in European folklore and in early literary sources, such as the Old Norse sagas.
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