Welcome!
You are visiting the Estonian folklorists' server Haldjas (fairy, guardian spirit), which was set up in 1995 by the folk belief research group of the Institute of the Estonian Language. Presently, the group and the server have been incorporated under the Estonian Literary Museum. The majority of electronic publications and data corpora in the server are in the Estonian language, which belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family. Estonia is a small country with ca one million people, who speak the Estonian language as their mother tongue.
The server offers a wide range of information on oral heritage, folklore and folk belief, on the institutions actively engaged in folkloristic research in Estonia as well as researchers and research projects. The covered aspects of folklore also include the heritage of other peoples of the Uralic language group. The server features two journals that have been published online and in print since 1996: Mäetagused and Folklore: An electronic Journal of Folklore.
Only parts of the material are currently available in English and/or German; in time the proportion of material in foreign language will grow.
Our news!
Research seminar “Such a Terrible Creature!” in the Estonian Literary Museum
International Seminar: “Such a Terrible Creature!”
9 November, 12:00 PM
4th Floor seminar room, Vanemuise 42, Tartu
What makes an animal an animal? Are species boundaries really as clear-cut as we tend to assume? In Old Estonian, the word loom referred both to an animal and to a human being, denoting more broadly a living creature. It is from this semantic field that the international seminar “Such a Terrible Creature!” takes its inspiration, inviting participants to reconsider the relationships between humans and other animals.
The seminar will present the latest research in zoofolkloristics and introduce the newest volume in the Zoofolkloristics Series. Presentations will address animal agency within multispecies communities, intercultural and interspecies relations, the question of imaginary animals, and the ways in which humans and other animals jointly shape shared lifeworlds.
Species identity is often regarded as a self-evident and defining characteristic. Several presentations challenge this assumption, demonstrating how language, art, traditions, and everyday practices create shared cultural spaces for both humans and non-humans. Topics range from urban street dogs and seabirds to the participation of animals in creative and cultural processes.
Among the speakers are Yana Gergova (Birdwatching and Avian Heritage: Traditions and Ecology) and Lina Gergova (Wild Pests and Liminal Species: Folklore Beliefs and Ecological Protection Practices).
The seminar will explore themes of interspecies coexistence, culture, and community, highlighting contexts in which humans are not the sole creators of meaning. Discussions will also engage with influential currents in ecological thought, including the work of Timothy Morton on entanglement and interdependence.
You are warmly invited to listen, discuss, and reflect with us.
The seminar is organised within the framework of the joint project “Balkans and Baltics in United Europe – History, Religion, and Culture: Beliefs, Ecology and Change (Artistic and Theoretical Dialogues)” and is supported by the Estonian Literary Museum project EKM 8-2/20/3 “Narrative and Religious Aspects of Folklore.”
The next Folklore and Friends seminar
All are warmly invited to the next Folklore and Friends seminar "Cultivating Death Literacy through the Humanities".
The speaker Piret Paal is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Tartu.
Piret Paal's research focuses on palliative care, spiritual care, and cultural approaches to illness and end-of-life experiences. In this seminar, we will explore how the humanities can contribute to our understanding of death, dying, and end-of-life care.
Date: Wednesday, 21 October 2026
Time: 14:15
Venue: Ülikooli 16–103, Tartu
The seminar is in English.
Meeting of the Academic Folklore Society
Meeting of the Academic Folklore Society on 27th of October 16:15 in Estonian Literary Museum (Vanemuise 42, Tartu), 4th floor seminar ruum.
Kikee Doma Bhutia and Santosh Limboo “Guiding the Dead, Sustaining the Living: Funerary Ritual and the Shamans of Sikkim”
This presentation examines funerary practice among the Limboo of Upper Thambong, Soreng District, Sikkim, through the work of their shamans, the Peli Phangsam. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and interviews with practicing shamans, it analyzes how the Phedangba, Samba, Yeba, and Yema, as differentiated ritual specialists, manage the passage of the dead from the community of the living to the ancestral realm. Drawing on van Gennep and Turner, it treats death rites as a liminal process in which the deceased, the bereaved, and the wider kin group are reordered. The paper argues that funerary ritual is the arena in which shamanic authority is most fully demonstrated and most visibly contested amid socio-economic and religious change, and that the Peli Phangsam thereby remain custodians of Limboo collective identity and continuity.
Bio:
Dr. Kikee Doma Bhutia is an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Buddhist Studies, Ghent University, Belgium. She earned her Ph.D. in Folkloristics from the University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2022. Her research explores vernacular Buddhism, indigenous beliefs, oral traditions, and sacred landscapes in the Himalayas.
Dr. Santosh Subba (Tamling) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at Namchi Government College, South Sikkim. He earned his Ph.D. from the Central University of Sikkim in 2024, researching psychosocial factors influencing Scheduled Tribe students’ attitudes towards studies. His teaching and research interests include educational psychology, Indian philosophy, pedagogy, research methodology, and traditional and indigenous knowledge systems.
The next Folklore and Friends seminar on 7 October
Our Folklore and Friends seminar series continues on Wednesday, 7 October 2026 14:15 with the talk "The Dead and the Bereaved: Negotiations about Power and Agency by Kaarina Koski from the University of Turku.
Kaarina Koski is a folklorist at the University of Turku, Finland. She has published widely on folklore, death cultures, belief narratives, contemporary culture, and uncanny experiences.
In her presentation, she will explore the relationship between the living and the dead from a narrative perspective. Our deceased loved ones remain part of our stories: their actions and memories may continue to affect our lives and identities, giving them a form of agency within networks of relationships.
In some cases, the dead may also be believed or experienced as intentional spiritual actors who contribute to, or interfere with, the lives of the living.
At the same time, it is the living who tell the stories of the dead and shape how they are remembered. Narratives about the departed can be transformed, and the dead may even be deprived of their individual agency and harnessed to serve established legend plots.
The presentation invites discussion of this complex interplay: How do the living and the dead affect each other’s stories?
Ülikooli 16–103
7 October 2026, 14:15
Everyone is very welcome!
Message sent by Anastasiya Astapova
The Anderson Lecture 2026: Belief narratives in social media
This year’s Anderson Lecture - "Belief narratives in social media" - is given by Kaarina Koski (University of Turku).
The event will take place on October 6, 2026 at 4:00 p.m. Ülikooli 16-115, Tartu.
Belief narratives are flexible and can adapt to new genres, forms, and environments. While societal changes have left some old motifs behind, new ones have emerged, and ghosts, especially, have survived such changes and entered urban milieus and electronic devices.
The lecture will focus on belief tradition in Finnish social media, and especially narratives about ghosts and haunting.
These narratives flourish in diverse forms and platforms. Descriptions of personal experiences are likely to be posted anonymously in discussion forums, where they are followed by dispute and speculation. In turn, widely known legends, are often performed as illustrated videos in YouTube and TikTok. Belief tradition also involves enacting the stories, and reports of legend trips and ghost hunts are presented both in verbal and videotaped form.
Kaarina will explore the narrative strategies used by the performers and discuss the sources, contents and meanings of the narratives. The new digital forms and wider audiences impact the genres and narrator positions, but some narrative strategies are still similar to those observed in traditional face-to-face performances. The meanings of ghostlore reflect contemporary interests and concerns. While in older tradition, moral points used to be a central feature of belief narratives, ontological inquiries and emotional issues are more salient today.
The lecture will be recorded. Recordings of previous lectures in the series are available on the lecture series webpage: https://kultuuriteadused.ut.ee/en/content/anderson-lecture
Message sent by Keily Tammaru, Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore
Folklore and Friends / Folkloor ja mõttekaaslased
Folklore and Friends / Folkloor ja mõttekaaslased
Join us on 23 September 2026 at 14:15 for the first Folklore and Friends seminar of the autumn semester!
Ülikooli 16–103, Tartu
In person only
Digne Ūdre-Lielbārde (University of Latvia) - Folklore Studies in Exile: Baltic Scholarship During the Cold War Era
What happened to Baltic folklore studies when the Second World War and Soviet occupation divided scholarly communities across borders?
In this talk, Digne Ūdre-Lielbārde explores knowledge production among Baltic folklorists in exile during the Cold War. Drawing on papers presented at conferences of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) between 1968 and 1991, she examines how the legacy of interwar Baltic folkloristics travelled into exile, how scholars maintained and reimagined their field without direct access to many original source materials, and how their work engaged with international — particularly American — developments in folklore studies.
Digne Ūdre-Lielbārde holds a PhD in folkloristics from the University of Tartu (2024). She is a researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia, and Head of the Archives of Latvian Folklore.
Everyone is welcome!
Message sent by Anastasiya Astapova
The special issue of Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore (Vol. 99)
This special issue of Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore (Vol. 99), guest edited by Adam Grydehøj and Ping Su, offers a rich exploration of contemporary Chinese folklore and vernacular religion.
Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, the volume examines how traditions, rituals, beliefs, and cultural heritage are continuously reinterpreted in response to social transformation, urbanization, digital media, and shifting political realities.
The issue opens with Grydehøj and Su’s theoretical introduction, Seeking the Present in the Past, which provides a valuable guide to current approaches in Chinese folklore studies and debates surrounding intangible cultural heritage. The articles that follow reveal the dynamic interplay between continuity and change in Chinese cultural life, addressing topics ranging from lineage narratives and heritage preservation to ritual performance, local festivals, religious practice, visual representation, and online expressions of magic and belief.
Among the highlights is What Gods Want: A Vernacular Religion Approach to Ritual Service Providers and the Desires of Deities in South China. Based on interviews with ritual specialists serving temples dedicated to the local deity Hou Wang, the authors challenge institutional models of religion by foregrounding practitioners’ own understandings of divine agency. Their findings demonstrate the remarkable diversity of religious thought that exists even within a shared local tradition and argue for the importance of vernacular perspectives in understanding the sacred.
The volume also explores how ritual practice shapes social relations and collective identities. An ethnographic study of Guangzhou’s Dragon Boat Festival interprets the celebration as a series of waterborne boundary rituals that maintain community connections within an increasingly urbanized landscape. Other contributions investigate the spectacularization of traditional opera through digital media, the preservation of ancestral narratives, and the transformation of customs under modern conditions.
Questions of gender, kinship, and social order emerge in a compelling study of ghost marriage in North China, where ritual practices surrounding unmarried deceased women illuminate broader tensions between continuity, emotional needs, and modern values. Together, these articles demonstrate how folklore provides an exceptional lens for understanding the negotiation of identity, morality, memory, and belonging in contemporary China.
Complementing the thematic focus on China, the issue includes a selection of internationally authored articles on folklore, ritual, mythology, performance, and cultural adaptation from diverse regions and traditions. These contributions expand the volume’s comparative perspective and underscore the continuing vitality of folklore studies in addressing both enduring human concerns and rapidly changing cultural realities.
Since 1996, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore has served as an international, peer-reviewed forum for innovative folkloristic research. We invite readers to engage with this collection of studies that illuminate the resilience, adaptability, and creative power of cultural traditions in the twenty-first century.
ttps://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol99
Mare Kõiva & Tiina Ann Kirss
Mäetagused 94: Recent Approaches to Mental Health, the Individual, and Community Relations
The latest issue of the journal Mäetagused, titled “Mental Health, the Individual, and Community in a Cultural-Historical Perspective,” brings together a diverse selection of studies on strategies used to address mental health both in the past and today. The editor of this special issue devoted to mental health is Katre Kikas.
The issue opens with Anu Rae’s article “The Experience of Mental Hospital Patients in Pre–World War I Livonia,” which offers a detailed insight into the period when mental illness in this region began to be treated professionally and institutionally.
This is followed by two articles that address (mental) health in a family context. Tiiu Jaago’s article “‘Hello, Dear Little Sister!’ Health as a Theme in Letters” moves from the world of institutions to family communication networks, focusing on health (and health problems) as an important component of correspondence between geographically distant relatives.
In her article “Rumours, Poetry, and Memories: Genre Reflections of Jaan Saalverk’s Suicide,” Katre Kikas maps thematic and semantic shifts across genres surrounding the suicide of one man.
Positioned at the intersection of historical examples and contemporary cases, Reet Hiiemäe’s article “Extrasensory Perception and Post-Intersectionality” analyses the connections between specific belief-related modes of perception documented in many cultures and the interaction of marginalising characteristics, both synchronically and diachronically.
The remaining four articles focus on the present day. Anastasiya Fiadotava’s article “Representations of Mental Health in Estonian-Language Internet Humour” examines dominant representational strategies in Estonian social media.
Kadi Kass’s article “Creativity as a Voice in Researching and Interpreting the Experiences of People with Mental Health Difficulties” focuses on the empowering potential of creativity in the context of social science research.
Heldi Marleen Lang’s article “Do Autistic People Jump Higher Together? An Autoethnography of Narrative Medicine” asks how reading about the experiences of another person with the same autism spectrum diagnosis influences self-perception.
Kairi Jets’ contribution “Growing into a Carrot: A Literary Scholar’s Experiential Account of a Mental Health Stand-Up Comedy Project” approaches from an autoethnographic perspective the stand-up comedy performance “Mental Health Is Like a Carrot,” created within the Peaasi.ee and Kinoteater collaboration project “Peaasi Makes You Laugh.”
Zifa Hasanova examines “Bashkir Rituals Related to Domestic Geese: Traditions and Innovations.”
The issue also includes an obituary by Eda Kalmre dedicated to the long-time folklore collector Leida Oeselg (18 April 1934 – 5 October 2025).
Published since 1996, the journal also contains a chronicle of scholarly events and book reviews.
Ritual Year WG Seasonal Webinar #18, spring 2026
Ritual Year Working Group Seasonal Webinar #18, spring 2026 - Ritual and festive environmental relationality in Ibero-American mountain regions will take place on Monday, April 27, 2026, at 15:00 BST+2 (10:00 New York, 16:00 Rome, 17:00 Tallinn/Bucharest, 22:00 Manila).
We invite you to listen to our invited speakers Ana Correa, Paula Gabriela Nunez, Letizia Bindi, Tobias Boos and Daniela Salvucci who are going to present us with their research on South American festivals.
Thanks to Georgiana Vlahbei, our working group has recently gone through a visual upgrade, and we are now ready to show off our fresh, new look for this special occasion.
More information (poster, TEAMS link etc.) available here
Folklore and Friends Seminar (April 22): Alevtina Solovyova
Folklore and Friends / Folkloor ja mõttekaaslased
Ülikooli 16–103 (in-person only)
April 22, 14:15
Alevtina Solovyova (University of Tartu). Eschatology and Entrepreneurship in Contemporary Inner and Central Asia
This lecture explores how eschatological narratives and ritual practices are mobilised across Inner and Central Asia in response to intensifying crisis and uncertainty. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and digital fieldwork, it examines how diverse religious and social practices provide frameworks for interpreting pandemics, wars, and geopolitical tensions.
Particular attention is given to the rise of “eschatological entrepreneurs”, who translate crisis narratives into actionable practices through rituals, consultations, communal networks, and digital platforms. The lecture argues that these actors operate within hybrid moral and economic systems, where spiritual authority and livelihood strategies intersect.
Rather than signalling passive belief, eschatological imaginaries and ritual practices emerge as key mechanisms of coping, enabling communities to navigate uncertainty, negotiate power, and enact agency in a rapidly changing Eurasian landscape.
Alevtina Solovyova is a researcher at the University of Tartu whose work focuses on religion, crisis narratives, and digital ethnography in Inner and Central Asia.
