Folklore Fellows’ Communications

Nijolė Laurinkienė

The Kalevala Society
Folklore Fellows’ Communications 327
Helsinki 2023
336 pages
ISBN 978-952-9534-08-1
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore for 36 €

The God Perkūnas of the Ancient Lithuanians is the most thorough and extensive work on the Lithuanian thunder god to date. This book’s nineteen chapters follow the god’s Indo-European origins through the evidence in histories, place names, and diverse forms of folklore, as well as how these relate to archaeological evidence and aspects of material culture.

Nijolė Laurinkienė’s empirically grounded study covers enormous quantities of primary sources in order to offer multidisciplinary perspectives that she situates in both diachronic and synchronic contexts. Laurinkienė considers continuities and reconstructions of the non-Christian religion and elucidates the rich and dynamic variation in the traditions that continued up through the transition into modernity.

The God Perkūnas is a fascinating and valuable work for anyone interested in pre-modern mythologies. The insights offered will be of relevance to researchers in a variety of fields, and the book also presents a wealth of primary sources, many made available in English for the first time, increasing the book’s value as a resource.

Clive Tolley

The Kalevala Society
First published 2009, reprinted with minor corrections and with additions 2023
Helsinki 2023

Folklore Fellows’ Communications 296, Vol. I
613 pages
ISBN 978-952-9534-06-7
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore, 58 € (The set of vols I & II, 70 €)

Folklore Fellows’ Communications 297, Vol II – Reference Materials
318 pages
ISBN 978-952-9534-07-4
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore, 28 € (The set of vols I & II, 70 €)

Medieval Norse written sources, ranging from poems originally handed down in oral tradition from pagan times to prose sagas composed in literate Christian Iceland, as well as histories and laws, present acts of magic and initiation, performed both by humans in fictionalised histories and by gods in myths. The summoning of spirits, journeys to the otherworld, the taking of animal shape, and drumming are some of the features of these rites that have prompted many to see in pre-Christian Scandinavian practices some form of shamanism. But what exactly are the features of shamanism that are being compared? And how reliable are the Norse sources in revealing the true nature of pre-Christian practices?

In this study, Clive Tolley presents the main features of Siberian shamanism, as they are relevant for comparison with Norse sources, and examines the Norse texts in detail to determine how far it is reasonable to assign a label of “shamanism” to the human and divine magical practices of pre-Christian Scandinavia, whose existence, it is argued, in many cases resides mainly in the imaginative tradition of the poets.

Francisco Vaz da Silva

The Kalevala Society Foundation
Folklore Fellows’ Communications 326
Helsinki 2023
218 pages
ISBN 978-952-9534-05-0
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore, 28€

Francisco Vaz da Silva’s study posits that the meanings of enchantment can be rationally described, but wondertales need to be elucidated in their own terms, as opposed to bringing preset external theories to bear on the stories.

Going beyond rigid distinctions of oral vs. literary vs. cinematic retellings, this book shows that the comparison of all sorts of variants is helpful to understand the tales. It would not be wrong to say that it proposes a mental ethnography of the wondertale—a cartography of its symbolic landscape—up to the present day. Along the way, it revisits a number of received ideas (such as the centrality of male protagonists, the inherent victimhood of feminine characters, and the immanent misogyny of the tales) in light of oral retellings and older literary strata of the wondertale tradition.

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin

The Kalevala Society Foundation
Folklore Fellows’ Communications 325
Helsinki 2022
420 pages
ISBN 978-952-9534-04-3
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore, 42€

The emergence of folklore studies is usually attributed to specifically European circumstances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin’s book argues that influences from and the consequences of the expansion of powerful states beyond the bounds of Europe informed folkloristics as much as did conditions within.

The book’s argument is illustrated with chapters on the development of the ethnological sciences in France, Italy and Ireland within their different political, social and cultural contexts.

Ulf Palmenfelt

The Kalevala Society Foundation
Folklore Fellows’ Communications 324
Helsinki 2022
ISBN 978-952-9534-03-6
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore, 32€

Narrated Communities explores accounts of memories and their relationships to narrating and life stories. The work reveals how elements of worldview manifest as frames of reference for positioning, which makes them foundational to the narrative construction of communities as the mooring posts of collective value systems.

ed. Frog & Joonas Ahola

The Kalevala Society Foundation
Folklore Fellows’ Communications 323
Helsinki 2021
ISBN 978-952-9534-02-9
Available at the Tiedekirja bookstore

The present volume responds to the rising boom of interest in folklore and folklore research in the study of Old Norse mythology. The twenty-two authors of this volume reveal the dynamism of this lively dialogue, which is characterized by a diversity of perspectives linking to different fields and national scholarships.