Thomas A. DuBois

Since its initial publication in the early nineteenth century, Elias Lonnrot’s Finnish epic Kalevala has attracted international interest and scholarship. However, the author comments that the distorting lenses of translation, cultural difference and historical distance, have rendered the work a cryptic and often misinterpreted text outside of its country of origin. Even within Finland, scholars have found it difficult at times to judge the relation of the Kalevala to its oral sources. Lonnrot’s meticulous notes and discussions of intent and accomplishment make clear what he changed and how he went about it, but give us less inkling of why. This study's view is that the key to understanding Lonnrot’s changes lies in Romantic aesthetics and in the intellectual and socio-political agendas which they encode. Lonnrot created a Romantic epic out of Baltic-Finnic folk poetry, an epic complete with the narrative, generic, gendered and political characteristics of literary epics in nineteenth century’ Europe.

Finnish Folk Poetry and the Kalevala

With near-mythical forests of birch and pine, the Nordic and Baltic countries boast a rich tradition of religious wood carving that is in many ways emblematic of their cultures. Sacred to the Touch examines the spiritual and intellectual projects of six twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists who have adapted and revitalized this tradition. Through interviews and analyses, folklorist Thomas A. DuBois explores the notions of continuity with the past that these artists seek to express through their art, examining the forest church of late Finnish artist Eva Ryyn�nen, the carvings of Norwegian Americans Phillip Odden and Else Bigton that decorate a planned replica of a stave church in Southern California, the medieval Catholic-rooted work of Lutheran Sister Lydia Mariadotter (Swedish), the grave markers and roadside figures of Algimantas Sakalauskas (Lithuanian), and the merging of Lutheran and pre-Christian traditions by Lars Levi Sunna (S�mi). With color photographs and detailed descriptions, Sacred to the Touch reveals the interplay of tradition with personal and communal identity that characterize modern religious carving in Northern Europe.

Nordic and Baltic Religious Wood Carving

Sacred to the Touch

Coppélie Cocq

Digital media–GIFs, films, TED Talks, tweets, and more–have become integral to daily life and, unsurprisingly, to Indigenous people’s strategies for addressing the historical and ongoing effects of colonization. In Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North, Thomas DuBois and Coppélie Cocq examine how Sámi people of Norway, Finland, and Sweden use media to advance a social, cultural, and political agenda anchored in notions of cultural continuity and self-determination. Beginning in the 1970s, Sámi have used Sámi-language media—including commercially produced musical recordings, feature and documentary films, books of literature and poetry, and magazines—to communicate a sense of identity both within the Sámi community and within broader Nordic and international arenas. In more contemporary contexts—from YouTube music videos that combine rock and joik (a traditional Sámi musical genre) to Twitter hashtags that publicize protests against mining projects in Sámi lands—Sámi activists, artists, and cultural workers have used the media to undo layers of ignorance surrounding Sámi livelihoods and rights to self-determination. Downloadable songs, music festivals, films, videos, social media posts, images, and tweets are just some of the diverse media through which Sámi activists transform how Nordic majority populations view and understand Sámi minority communities and, more globally, how modern states regard and treat Indigenous populations.

Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North

Susan Brantly

The Nordic Storyteller: Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen consists of a set of nineteen research essays plus an introduction, written by colleagues and admirers of Niels and Faith Ingwersen, leaders in the field of Scandinavian Studies in North America for some four decades. A first section of seven essays, entitled “Songs and Tales in Oral Tradition,” presents research in the area of folklore studies, including balladry, saints’ lives, incantations, healing, legendry, and personal experience narrative. Articles take up such issues as classification, thematics, cultural and historical change, and the effects of technology on daily life. A closely related second section, “From Oral Tradition to Literature” includes three essays which examine the adaptation of oral tradition to literary forms, focusing on the works of P. Chr. Asbjørnsen, Esias Tegnér, Elias Lönnrot, F. R. Kreutzwald, and the illustrations of Arthur Rackham—all figures important in the rise of folklore as a key interest of Romantic nationalism. A further set of nine essays grouped under the title “Tales in Literary Form” examine aspects of the writings of some of the greatest storytellers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including H. C. Andersen, Herman Bang, Henrik Ibsen, Jóhann Magnús Bjarnason, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, Isak Dinesen, Martin Andersen Nexø, Billy August, Hans Scherfig, Peter Høeg, Klaus Rifbjerg, Leif Panduro, and Kjartan Fløgstad. Articles address topics including autobiography, source criticism, symbolism, personal and national identities, and the representation of political ideals. Together the essays of this volume demonstrate the unflagging salience of narrative—of storytelling—in the personal lives and social experiences of Scandinavians and their neighbors, past and present.

Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen

The Nordic Storyteller

Dan Ringgaard

Mark B. Sandberg

Steven P. Sondrup

Nordic Literature: A comparative history is a multi-volume comparative analysis of the literature of the Nordic region. Bringing together the literature of Finland, continental Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Sápmi), and the insular region (Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands), each volume of this three-volume project adopts a new frame through which one can recognize and analyze significant clusters of literary practice. This first volume, Spatial nodes, devotes its attention to the changing literary figurations of space by Nordic writers from medieval to contemporary times. Organized around the depiction of various “scapes” and spatial practices at home and abroad, this approach to Nordic literature stretches existing notions of temporally linear, nationally centered literary history and allows questions of internal regional similarities and differences to emerge more strongly. The productive historical contingency of the “North” as a literary space becomes clear in this close analysis of its literary texts and practices.

Thomas A. DuBois

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