Notes on Contributors
Pertti Anttonen
is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Studies, specifically Folklore Studies, at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu Campus. He is the author of Tradition Through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship (2005), published in Greek translation in 2018 and in Chinese translation in 2022; co-author of Kalevala-lipas (1985, revised edition 1999); editor of Making Europe in Nordic Contexts (1996); and co-editor of Nordic Frontiers: Recent Issues in Modern Traditional Culture in the Nordic Countries (1993), Folklore, Heritage Politics, and Ethnic Diversity: A Festschrift for Barbro Klein (2000), and Oral Tradition and Book Culture (2018). He has written numerous articles and chapters on folklore and Finnish nationalism, the politics of history, heritage, and tradition, as well as on ethnopoetics and wedding rituals, medieval ballads dealing with Judas, modern pilgrimages in Finland, rites of passage theory, the history of folklore research, and the textual representation of orality.
Herleik Baklid
is Associate Professor of Cultural History at the University of South-Eastern Norway. His doctoral thesis was «Hundrede Daler, Hest og Sadel [â¦]»: En eksplorativ studie av feste-, benke- og morgengaveskikken i et kontinuitetsperspektiv, which contains a study of folk customs in Norway from the late twelfth up until the late nineteenth century. In addition to this, he has written several articles about folk beliefs connected to artefacts found under church floors and in cemeteries, and about early collectors of folklore in Norway. He is also the editor of the multi-volume series, M. B. Landstad: Skrifter, which is presently in the process of publication.
Holger Ehrhardt
is Professor of German Literature and Grimm Studies at the University of Kassel, Germany. Author of Mythologische Subtexte in Theodor Fontaneâs Effi Briest (2008) and Die Marburger Märchenfrau (2016), he is editor of Briefwechsel der Brüder Grimm mit Herman Grimm (1998); Dorothea Viehmann (2012); Jacob Grimms âDeutsche Grammatikâ (2019); and co-editor of Märchen, Mythen und Moderne. 200 Jahre Kinder- und Hausmärchen (2015), and Ãber Nachtfliegen, Zaunkönige und Meisterdiebe (2019). He has also written numerous articles and chapters on Brother Grimm studies, fairy-tale research, edition philology, German Romanticism, East German literature, and literature and early photography, and is the creator of the âGrimm-Portalâ database at the University Library of Kassel.
Line Esborg
is Associate Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Head of the Norwegian Folklore Archives, and editor-in-chief of Tidsskrift for kulturforskning (the Norwegian journal of folklore, ethnology and cultural history). She has a range of publications in folklore, cultural history and digital heritage, including A History of Participation in Museums and Archives: Traversing Citizen Science and Citizen Humanities (2020), with Palmyre Pierroux and Per Hetland; Optegnelser. Isak Sabas folkeminnesamling/ Äállosat. Isak Saba álbmotmuitoÄoakkáldat (2019); and «En vild endevending av al virkelighet»: Norsk Folkeminnesamling i hundre Ã¥r with Dirk Johannsen (2014). Recently (in 2021), she was rewarded funding from the Norwegian Research Council for a project on folklore and natural history, investigating the âmethodological commonsâ in these two fields of knowledge that are normally seen as separated and divergent, using the pioneer P. Chr Asbjørnsenâs work as a point of departure.
Terry Gunnell
is Professor of Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. Author of The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia (1995), he is editor of Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area (2007), and Legends and Landscape (2008) and co-editor of The Nordic Apocalypse: Approaches to Völuspá and Nordic Days of Judgement (2013) and Málarinn og menningarsköpun: Sigurður Guðmundsson og Kvöldfélagið 1858â1874 which was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Award in 2017. He has also written numerous articles and chapters on Old Nordic religions, folk legends and belief, festivals, folk drama and performance, and is behind the creation of the Icelandic folk legend database Sagnagrunnur, and two other digital databases on the creation of national identity and the early collection of folklore in Iceland in the late nineteenth century.
Joep Leerssen
is Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and part-time research professor at Maastricht University. A comparatist by formation, Leerssen studies post-1800 cultural history mainly as a transnational circulation of ideas and mentalities, his emphasis being on literary and discursive sources. Leerssenâs fields of inquiry are the history and theory of the humanities (Comparative Literature in Britain, 1800â2000 [2019]; Irish studies (Parnell and his Times [ed., 2020]); and the comparative history of national movements (National Thought in Europe, 3rd ed. 2018; and Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe [ed., 2018; also online at http://ernie.uva.nl]).
John Lindow
is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests focus on medieval Scandinavian textual traditions (Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture), especially related to myth and religion, and on more recent folklore of the Nordic region, especially legends, topics on which he has contributed numerous articles and book chapters. Among his books are Comitatus Individual and Honor (1975), Swedish Legends and Folktales (1977), Murder and Vengeance Among the Gods (1997), Norse Mythology: A Guide (2002), and, most recently, Old Norse Mythology (2020). With Jens Peter Schjødt and Anders Andrén, he is co-editor of the four-volume Pre-Christian Religions of the North: History and Structures (2020).
Liina Lukas
is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu. Her research interests include Estonian-German literary contacts (mutual perception, historical multilingualism, common folk heritage, the folk song as a source of inspiration, womenâs poetry, etc.), German-Baltic literature, European including Baltic literatures in the eighteenth century, methodological and theoretical issues of comparative literature from the perspective of small literatures, literary translation and reception, etc. She is behind the creation of the Digital Text Repository of Older Estonian Literature (https://utlib.ut.ee/eeva). Recent publications: Co-editor of the anthologies Herder on Empathy and Sympathy and Empathy and Sympathy in Herderâs Thought (2020) [Brillâs Studies in Intellectual History], edited by E. Piirimäe, L. Lukas and J. Schmidt, and Political Dimensions of German-Baltic Literary Culture (2018), edited by L. Lukas, M. Schwidtal and J. Undusk. She has recently edited The History of Baltic Literary Culture (2021). She is the head of the Estonian Comparative Literature Association and the Estonian Goethe Society.
ÃilÃs NÃ Dhuibhne Almqvist
was born in Dublin. She was educated at University College Dublin and has a PhD in Irish Folklore. She worked for many years as a librarian and archivist in the National Library of Ireland, as a Writer Fellow in Trinity College and University College Dublin, and an occasional lecturer in Folklore in University College Dublin. She was Burns Scholar at Boston College for Fall 2020. She is the author of more than 30 books, including seven collections of short stories, and several novels and plays as well as many scholarly articles and literary reviews. Her most recent books are Selected Stories (2017) and Twelve Thousand Days. A Memoir (2018) and Little Red and Other Stories (2020), and she is editor of Look! Itâs a Woman Writer: Irish Literary Feminisms 1970â2020 (2021). She has been the recipient of many literary awards, among them the Stewart Parker Award for Drama, the Irish Pen Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature, and a Hennessy Hall of Fame Award. Her work has been widely translated. She is also a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of writers and artists, and is President of the Folklore of Ireland Society.
Ane Ohrvik
is Professor in Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her specialisation is the history of knowledge in early modern Europe and her written work includes publications on topics relating to magic and witchcraft, the history of medicine, rituals, book history, heritage, and folk religion. She is co-editor of Sagnomsust (2002) and Ritualer (2007) and has also co-edited special issues of journals on Magic and Text (Arv) and Reframing Pilgrimage in Northern Europe (Numen). Her most recent monograph is Medicine, Magic and Art in Early Modern Norway from 2018. She is currently working on a new book on the Norwegian witch trials entitled Witchcraft in Norway.
Jonathan Roper
works as a folklorist at the University of Tartu. He is interested in traditional verbal genres and is the author of English Verbal Charms (2005). He has also edited Charms and Charming in Northern Europe (2004), Charms, Charmers and Charming (2009), Alliteration in Culture (2011) and Dictionaries as a Source of Folklore Data (2020). His chief fieldwork has been conducted in Newfoundland.
Rósa Ãorsteinsdóttir
is Associate Research Professor of Folkloristics at the Ãrni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. She works both as an archivist and a researcher besides teaching courses on folkloristics at the University of Iceland. Author of Sagan upp á hvern mann (2011), she co-edited the Instituteâs journal Gripla for two years (2017â2018) and is the editor of several books published by the Institute and other bodies. She has published a number of articles on storytellers and wonder tales, the collection of folktales in the nineteenth century, ethnomusicology, and folk poetry, in addition to editing material from the folklore archive of the Ãrni Magnússon Institute for various publications.
John Shaw
is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, where he served as Senior Lecturer in Scottish Ethnology at the School of Scottish Studies until his retirement. He is editor of the journal Scottish Studies, and since the 1960s has carried out extensive fieldwork recording the Gaelic oral and musical traditions of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Scotland. Collaboration with Gaelic tradition-bearers Joe Neil MacNeil and Lauchie MacLellan has produced Sgeul gu Latha/Tales Until Dawn (MacNeil 1987), and Brìgh an Ãrain/A Story in Every Song (MacLellan 2000), as well as a more recent collection of traditional tales recorded in the field (Na Beanntaichean Gorma/The Blue Mountains 2007). His further publications in the fields of Gaelic ethnology, traditional narrative (social and historical contexts), comparative mythology, song and instrumental music have appeared in academic journals and collections in Europe and North America. He has also played an active role in the formation and development of Tobar an Dualchais/Kist O Riches and the Calum Maclean Project, digitised resources providing online access to Scotlandâs major folklore sound archives.
Kim Simonsen
is a Fellow in Modern European Literature Study at the University of Amsterdam. He has been an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen and teaches at the University of the Faroe Islands. His doctoral thesis, Literature, Imagining and Memory in the Formation of a Nation-Travel Writing, Canonisation and the Formation of a National Self-Image in the Faroe Islands, set out to answer various questions such as the key relationship between self-image, literature and the formation of the Faroese nation in the early nineteenth century. He is the leader of both the network on Romantic Travel Writing to the Far North 1800â1900 and the network on North Atlantic Digital Repatriation and Cultural Heritage Network. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, Stanford University and Columbia University and the University of Amsterdam, where he carried out his post-doctoral research. Simonsen is also a Board Member of the Nineteenth-Century Centre at the University of à rhus and on the editing board of Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms.
Fredrik Skott
is the head of department of The Institute for Language and Folklore in Göteborg, Sweden. He has a PhD in history at Göteborg University, and is a docent in Nordic Folkloristics at à bo Akademi University, and since 2021 has been the secretary of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture. Author of several books, such as Asatro i tiden (2000), Folkets minnen (2008), Påskkäringar (2013) and Vardagsskrokk (2021), he has also written numerous articles and chapters on folklore archives, the history of folkloristics, and folk belief and rituals. During the last few years, he has been involved in the creation of several digitial platforms and projects, such as Sägenkartan (The Map of Legends), Dialektkartan (The Map of Dialects) and Folke (part of the Swedish e-infrastruncture, Nationella språkbanken, a major portal for Swedish language research).
Timothy R. Tangherlini
is Professor in the Department of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. Author of Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories (2014), Talking Trauma (1999), and Interpreting Legend (1994), he has published widely in academic journals, including The Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Folklore, Scandinavian Studies, Danske Studier, PlosOne, Computer and Communications of the Association for Computing Machines. He has done extensive fieldwork on storytelling among paramedics, and shamanism in South Korea, as well as archival work on rural 19th century Denmark. His current work focuses on generative models of common story genres such as legend, rumour, personal experience narratives, and conspiracy theories.
Ulrika Wolf-Knuts
was Professor of Nordic Folkloristics at à bo Akademi University, in Finland, and the author of Människan och djävulen: En studie kring form, motiv och funktion i folklig tradition (1991), and Ett bättre liv: Finlandssvenskar i Sydafrika: Om emigration, minnen, hemlängtan och nostalgi (2000). She was also the editor of Arv: Nordic Yearbook of folklore (1993â2002) and has written a number of articles on folk belief, vernacular religion, matters of identity, research history, and methods within folklore studies. Among other things she also served as the Secretary General of the Folklore Fellowsâ Summer School in 1999; as Member and Chair of the Coimbra Group of Universities, Culture, Arts, and Humanities Task Force; as Chair of the SIEF Working Group on the Ethnology of Religion; and as Member and Chair of the board of the Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History. She retired from the Chair of Folkloristics in 2013.
Susanne Ãsterlund-Pötzsch
PhD, holds the title of Docent in Nordic folkloristics at à bo Akademi University and works as archivist at the Collection of Tradition and Language, in the SLS (Svenska Litteratursällskapet [Swedish Literature Society]) Archives, in Helsinki. Her research interests and publications have focused on Finland-Swedish Folkloristics, performance, practices of everyday life and various aspects of mobility, such as migration and everyday walking.