2025/07/03 by Adam Grydehøj, Ping Su · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Culinary Culture and Tourism #Cultural and Sociopolitical Studies #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/0015587x.2025.2504276
openalex publication_date 2025/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
Encounters with supernatural animals are common to folklore around the world. Narratives of first-person encounters with strange animals tend to be rationalistically ascribed natural explanations, presumably because (unlike ghosts, fairies, and monsters) people undeniably have mundane encounters with animals. Scholars often analyse narrated encounters with strange animals based on their own notions concerning the potential reality of the experiences or objects of belief. This article applies an experience-centred approach to ethnographic interviews concerning the supernatural undertaken in Denmark in 2005–2006. The article argues that legends, memorates, and first-person experience narratives involving supernatural animals should be analysed in a similar manner to narratives involving other supernatural beings. The narrators featured engage in an internal dialectic; comment upon traditions of belief and disbelief; and present complex relationships between narrative, belief, and experience. There is no clear phenomenological distinction between narrators’ reports of animals that could be natural and those that are undeniably supernatural.