Places of unrest. Animisms of past landscapes in Troms, North Norway

In this paper, I investigate four sites connected to animist narratives in Northern Norway. The unrest associated with these sites is seen as being caused by human activity but carried out by disruptive forces. Sometimes the causes are known; sometimes they are unknown, but still connected to active agencies in these landscapes. The narratives relate to two types of forces that can make a place uneasy: chthonic forces and harmful deeds of humans against nature or other people. Implicit within these narrations and interpretations is an animistic worldview: places can and do remember. The places presented here are situated close to current or past Sámi settlements, suggesting that they are the result of animist and possibly shamanic practices and cosmologies. This reveals an ongoing concern with disruption of human/nature relations and attributed continued meaning through the Sámi narrative tradition. Sámi language originally had no word for nature. Luondo, the name used today, originally meant personality of humans, animals, or places, and illustrates my entry point into these phenomena.