Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural: Nordic Perspectives on Landscape Theory

In Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural, Matthias Egeler presents an ambitious treatment of the intertwined dynamics of land, belief, and the supernatural in Nordic contexts. The book represents a significant contribution not only to the study of Scandinavian folklore and religion, but to broader debates in landscape theory, phenomenology, and cultural geography. Drawing on empirical material from the Icelandic Westfjords—especially the district of Strandir, which serves as his “laboratory,” the landscape traditions of which are documented from at least the early nineteenth century—Egeler grounds his study in rural perspectives, which are often marginalized in academic discourse (4). To ensure that his sources reflect emic rather than merely collectors’ perspectives, he triangulates across multiple independent streams of documentation representing “interests that have a long tradition of being addressed by local people in local venues” (71).The book brings classic and contemporary landscape theory into dialogue with richly situated folkloric and historical data, bridging the gap between the abstract, urban-centric “way of seeing” and an analysis grounded in the lived “place of dwelling” experienced by those who work the land (20). The result is an exploration of how supernatural belief systems actively participate in landscape construction rather than merely being inscribed onto it. Egeler’s methodology is remarkably interdisciplinary, drawing on an array of sources including the Icelandic legend database Sagnagrunnur, local yearbooks like Strandapósturinn, and a wealth of nineteenth-century documentation. By tracing folklore, toponymy, and archaeological data, he avoids treating supernatural narratives as mere literary tropes, presenting them instead as lived realities for the farming and shepherding communities of Strandir. The volume is generously illustrated with thirty-eight figures, eight maps, and three tables; these are well-chosen and consistently serve the analysis, grounding abstract arguments in the specific terrain of Strandir.Following a brief Prelude, the book unfolds in four principal parts, organized using a sustained musical metaphor: an introductory chapter establishing key concepts and contexts (“Introduction and Exposition”); a central “Twelve Movements” chapter exploring how landscape, religion, and the supernatural interrelate; a “Coda” on transformations between rural and urban perceptions; and an “Encore” that synthesizes and generalizes the book’s findings. Egeler does not theorize or explain the choice to use a musical metaphor as a methodological or interpretive framework; nevertheless, the structure is sequential, patterned, and accumulative, rather than strictly linear or argumentative. Egeler frames the study as “oscillat[ing] between theory and empirical material” (5), an approach that enables him to articulate both a fine-grained analysis of specific themes and a broader theoretical argument about how landscapes become “supernatural” through ongoing narrative and practice. Ultimately, he proposes a new heuristic tool for landscape theory, folkloristics, and the study of religions.The introductory chapter outlines contested definitions of “landscape,” “religion,” and “the supernatural,” then situates Strandir as a case study for holistic investigation. By bridging landscape theory and the study of religion and folklore, the author demonstrates how place-conceptualizations are contingent on cultural context, social practice, and historical memory. A fuller reflection on the author’s own positionality and relationship with Strandir might have further enriched the methodological discussion, though this omission is a minor concern.The heart of the volume lies in chapter 2, “Twelve Movements: Aspects of the Engagement with the Supernatural Landscape.” Rather than advancing a single theory, Egeler maps twelve analytical movements that function as prismatic lenses revealing how landscape operates as a repository of memory, site of identity formation, locus of labor, and stage for encounters with forces beyond the visible. Throughout, he emphasizes the relational and processual nature of landscape meaning, resisting essentialist or dualistic accounts of sacred versus profane space.The twelve “movements” Egeler discusses are time and memory, repeating patterns, identity, morality, labor, playfulness and adventure, power and subversion, sound, emotions, coping with contingency, home and unhomeliness, and nature and environment. Here Egeler consistently pairs theoretical inquiries with nuanced explorations of Strandir’s narratives, place-names, rituals, and oral traditions. Rather than reducing local beliefs to fixed categories, he treats them as dynamic expressions of community engagement full of playfulness, ambivalence, emotional complexity, and moral negotiation. Together, the movements function as a set of analytical lenses revealing how landscapes encode memory and identity, generate emotional and moral responses, structure labor and survival, and enable both quotidian coping and transgressive play. In the movement entitled “Sound” (the eighth of the twelve), for instance, Egeler shows how particular sounds, whether natural or attributed to supernatural beings, become attached to specific locations, so that the landscape is not merely seen but heard as a repository of uncanny presence.The movement on “Labor” (the fifth of the twelve) develops this analytical approach at greater length and with particular richness. Here Egeler illustrates how the sacralization of the land is a cumulative process tied to place, experience, and everyday work (137). An important narrative from this movement comes from Guðmundur Jónsson (1904–1977), a local storyteller from Selbekk (139–42). The story recounts how Guðmundur’s mother and a companion, venturing into the uplands to gather Iceland moss to stretch the farm’s failing food supplies, encounter a terrifying, inhuman voice in the mountains. Egeler shows how the supernatural here is inseparable from agricultural labor. The encounter happens not during leisure time but during food-gathering driven by scarcity, and Guðmundur’s narration links nearly every location in the story to farming practices: sheep husbandry, hay transport, upland grazing. The fact that the supernatural and the uncanny are encountered amid ordinary work rather than in moments of leisure or aesthetic contemplation is itself a quiet challenge to the assumptions that have long shaped landscape theory.Such narratives represent not merely a textual sense of place but embodied, lived experience, and this movement exemplifies one of Egeler’s notable contributions throughout the volume: His critique of approaches that treat landscape as a visual object to be “looked at”—a perspective he associates with the urban, bourgeois visuality critiqued by scholars such as Denis Cosgrove—and his insistence on recovering the knowledge of those who “live in” the landscape: the farmers, shepherds, fishermen, and storytellers of Strandir. This critique is particularly central to the “Power and Subversion” movement, where Egeler engages Cosgrove’s argument that landscape functions as an ideological construct tied to the exercise of power (163), testing it against Strandir material in which vernacular supernatural storytelling encodes mockery and resistance rather than simply reinforcing dominant power structures, as illustrated by the mock place-name “Kattegat” (literally “cat’s gate”) applied to a tiny tidal channel in Hólmasund navigable only by small rowing boats at high tide. Borrowed from the name of the sea between Denmark and Sweden, this acknowledged Icelandic joke mocked Danish rule and asserted a distinctly Icelandic perspective on the two countries’ relationship (165–66).A compelling aspect of Egeler’s empirical work is his attention to narrative patterns that connect specific places with experiences of contingency and emotional resonance. Stories about hauntings, spirits, and uncanny presences are treated not as static legends but as ongoing articulations of how communities make sense of uncertainty, loss, and existential boundaries. This approach aligns with folkloristic emphases on legend as cultural logic, yet it expands the frame to consider how such logic is integrated structurally into the lived landscape itself.While the book provides a rich analysis of the supernatural, Egeler also touches upon other cultural dimensions of these traditions. Although it is not a central focus of the book, he calls attention to the fact that Strandir’s landscape traditions were shaped primarily by the experience of male outdoor laborers, whose perspective dominates the surviving folklore (35). Even so, these same narratives consistently subvert and question power dynamics, including those related to gender. In legends regarding álagablettir (places of enchantment), characters who violate the narrative’s central taboos are almost invariably male, while the figures offering counsel or warning are often female. Furthermore, local trolls are frequently portrayed as powerful female figures who abduct and consume men (56). These gendered patterns merit deeper exploration, as they reveal how women’s agency operates within supernatural narratives even as male outdoor labor dominates the visible landscape. The analysis might have benefited from more sustained attention to how gender shapes relationships with supernatural places and how women’s ritual and narrative practices contribute to the constitution of supernatural geography.The book’s rich use of place-names and regional histories further illustrates how embedded belief systems articulate spatial meaning. Egeler does not reduce these to relics of a bygone pagan past; instead, he situates them in a layered continuum of cultural memory that interacts with modern transformations of identity, economy, and environment. This perspective underscores the persistence and adaptability of supernatural geographies within shifting social contexts. The hill Kross (Cross) near Kaldrananes offers a striking example: Documented since the nineteenth century, the place-name layers a probable Christian harbor cross, supernatural prohibitions against disturbing the site, and a local storytelling tradition connecting it to Golgotha and founders’ burial mounds—a combination Egeler shows to be both unique to this site and composed entirely of patterns repeating throughout Strandir (94–102).The town of Hólmavík, examined in the “Coda,” offers a different vantage point. There, these same landscape traditions encounter an outside gaze and undergo transformation. Egeler dramatizes contrasts between embodied dwellers and detached visitors, demonstrating how perspective shifts alter how place is interpreted. “Encore” expands this idea, articulating a heuristic pair of ideal types—“being-in-a-place” versus “looking-at-a-place”—as tools for future scholarship. This conceptual distinction encapsulates the book’s core contribution: that landscape’s supernatural dimensions are not intrinsic qualities but emergent properties of particular modes of engagement, shaped by social practice, narrative form, and embodied experience. The heuristic opens pathways for comparative work beyond the Nordic context and invites interdisciplinary dialogue with scholars in anthropology, folklore, religious studies, and cultural geography.In these concluding chapters, Egeler contrasts the rural experience of “being-in-a-place,” characterized by direct labor and “first-degree” mediation of the supernatural—that is, a direct, embodied relationship with a specific locale—with the urban “looking-at-a-place” (276). Hólmavík comes to serve as a transitional space where the supernatural landscape becomes a “second-degree” mediation—disembodied depictions of a magical landscape—through art and tourism (277). An example of this second-degree mediation is presented in the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft, “where pop art meets folklore” and ritual objects such as the Goðdalur “sacrificial bowl” are stripped of their original landscape-specific contexts and presented as objects dislocated from the land (260–62). Egeler suggests that as modern travel speeds up, these meaningful roadside landmarks are turning into “non-places” in the sense described by Marc Augé: spaces devoid of history or identity for the passing observer and fading from the memory of the local inhabitants (258). Through the representation of magic in art and monuments, the spiritual landscape of Strandir becomes “portable” and available for urban consumption, separated from the land and disassociated from its lived contexts (275). Egeler is not dismissing urban or touristic engagement per se; rather, he argues that the acceleration of modern travel flattens complexity, preventing the sustained, labor-inflected relationship with place from which supernatural meaning emerges. The loss he describes is less a moral failure of urban dwellers than a structural consequence of modernity’s compression of time and attention; scholars will want to assess whether this argument sufficiently escapes the romantic valuation of rural rootedness it risks implying.The book is strongest where it juxtaposes theory with grounded empirical material, demonstrating how each sharpens the other. Its commitment to rural voices and longitudinal documentation offers a corrective to scholarship that is overly reliant on urban, literary, or elite sources. The Strandir focus, while narrow, yields considerable analytical depth. Extended engagement with other regional materials, such as Sámi traditions, or with comparative Scandinavian folklore more broadly might have enhanced generalizability, but the book’s single-site rigor compensates. While Egeler’s analysis richly explores the supernatural, the natural environment features primarily as interlocutor rather than agentic participant. Scholars seeking sustained engagement with recent work in environmental humanities or multispecies ethnography will find that such approaches are not central to Egeler’s project. Yet this focus on human narrative and practice is thematically coherent and augments rather than detracts from the book’s central achievements in reclaiming rural, working-class perspectives in landscape theory.Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural is intellectually rich, methodologically rigorous, and theoretically provocative. It will be essential reading for scholars of landscape theory, folklore, and religion. By placing rural Nordic perspectives at the center of landscape scholarship, Egeler shows that landscapes are lived, narrated, and continually remade through the interplay of practice, memory, emotion, and belief. Although the title foregrounds Nordic perspectives, the distinction between “being-in-a-place” and “looking-at-a-place” offers a heuristic valuable beyond Nordic contexts, applicable to any investigation at the intersection of environment and belief or rural and urban. Egeler’s synthesis of conceptual inquiry with finely textured documentary evidence sets a new benchmark for studies of sacred and supernatural landscapes. For scholars invested in understanding how human communities make meaning of place, this book will prove indispensable.