Placelore: Pilgrim Routes, Restoried Sites and Contested Spaces

Placelore presents an in-depth exploration of the intricate relationship between humans and their environment, focusing on the interplay of storytelling, traditional communities, and the concept of place. It elucidates the dynamic process of placelore as a continuous intertwining of narration and experience in ongoing interaction with sites of past religious or mythical significance.

Places are meaningful locations that mark the human environment, defining its boundaries, limits, scopes, and coordinates. Their formation is often lost in history, and it can be difficult to determine their lifespan as they constantly transform and evolve. On the one hand, places determine who we are and where we belong: they manifest the traditions, values, habits, and memories that define us. On the other hand, we give life to these places, adding new layers of meaning to them, invigorating the past with individual interpretations and experiences, or contesting it by adding new stories.

The contributors to this volume unravel an intricate web of interconnected narratives along pilgrim paths, historical landmarks of resistance and oppression, nature reserves, and long-forgotten locales. Each case study, focusing on a specific location, route, or region deemed "special" by local stakeholders, uncovers how multi-layered social, economic, political, and religious contexts and histories have been inscribed into the landscape.

Placelore details narrative practices by which places are made meaningful; how special places are imagined in different kinds of media; how their religious history is re-presented as cultural heritage, how they are administered by national institutions; how some of these places become inclusive and attract new or diverse audiences while others become sources of division; and how people re-narrate themselves in relation to place.

Ülo Valk is Professor of Estonian and Comparative Folklore at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He is the editor of Numen: International Review for the History of Religions. His publications include The Black Gentleman: Manifestations of the Devil in Estonian Folk Religion and Storied and Supernatural Places: Studies in Spatial and Social Dimensions of Folklore and Sagas (co-edited with Daniel Sävborg).

Dirk Johannsen is professor of the Cultural History of Popular Religion at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on narrative cultures. Among his recent publications are the co-edited Brill volumes Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion (2020) and Fictional Practice. Magic, Narration and the Power of Imagination (2021).

Marion Bowman is professor of Vernacular Religion at Open University, UK. She has published and researched extensively on vernacular religion, contemporary spirituality, non-traditional pilgrimage, material religion and the town of Glastonbury.