Nature & Landscape in World Folklore

Long before the rise of cities and the spread of writing, human beings lived inside a living world. The forest, the mountain, the river, the storm, the wolf, the oak, the rain — every feature of the land was felt to be alive, to have a voice, to act upon those who passed through it. From that ancient relationship, the great body of nature folklore grew. This overview traces that relationship through the traditions of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, and follows it down to the present day, where it survives in ecological thought, in contemporary paganism, and in the quiet rituals of country people who still speak to the wind.

The Animate Earth

The first farmers and the first hunter-gatherers looked out at the world and saw it as a place where every hill, spring, and tree was inhabited. The Romans called the spirit of a place its genius loci, but the idea is far older and far more widespread. In the Celtic world, every well held a sacred fish; in Finland, the haltija of a meadow had to be greeted before the hay was cut; in Japan, the kami of a mountain was the mountain itself, manifesting as fox, as serpent, as mist. Even the Christianisation of Europe rarely extinguished this older sense: the holy well of a saint was, more often than not, the well of an older god, rededicated rather than replaced. Modern readers who think of landscape as a backdrop for human events are inheritors of a much thinner, more recent worldview. For most of human history, the land was a speaking companion.

The persistence of the animate earth is one of the great constants of folklore. From the Inuit, who read the sea-ice as a living being with moods and intentions, to the Yoruba, who greet the ìrókò tree with a libation before felling it, the world has been conceived as a community of persons, only some of whom happen to wear human shape. This conception is sometimes dismissed as primitive, but it encodes an attentiveness to the land that contemporary ecology has had to relearn. The forest, in such a view, is not a stock of timber; it is a household of beings whose cooperation makes the world.

Sacred Groves, Hills, and Stones

Certain places were set apart as especially charged. Sacred groves dotted the ancient world: the oak grove at Dodona, where the rustling leaves gave the oracles of Zeus; the nemorensis of Diana at Nemi, where a runaway slave could become king by breaking a bough from a particular tree; the lucus of the Germanic tribes described by Tacitus, where the very soil was said to be hostile to the foot of any but the priest. In Ireland and Britain, lone standing stones, ring forts, and hilltops were the sites of older rites that Christianity sometimes re-occupied but never quite explained. The fairy forts of the Irish countryside are the direct descendants of these older enclosures, and a farmer who would never dream of moving one will still leave a corner of the field unploughed, in deference to the Good Neighbours within.

Mountains, too, were thresholds. Olympus in Greece, Sinai in the Hebrew tradition, Kailash in Tibet, Uluru in Australia, and Fuji in Japan were all understood as the meeting points of the human and the divine. A mountain was where the upper and lower worlds touched; it was a place to fast, to pray, to make vows, and to die. The stones of a mountain — its caves, its springs, its strangely shaped outcrops — were read as the body’s own organs: eyes, mouth, heart. To climb such a mountain was, in many traditions, to enter the body of a god.

Trees as World-Pillars

Trees, more than any other living thing, were felt to bridge the worlds. The sacred trees of European folklore include Yggdrasil of the Norse, the great ash at the centre of the Nine Worlds; the oak of the Celts, whose very word may lie at the root of “Druid”; the Irminsul of the Saxons, a great pillar-tree that Charlemagne himself cut down; the ash of the Russian peasant, beneath whose shade the rusalki dance at midsummer; and the elder of the European folk, whose presence near a house could bless or curse the family within. The Christian world inherited and adapted this imagery in the tree of the cross, in the Christmas tree, and in the maypole that still rises in English villages each May morning.

Outside Europe the cosmic tree is even more vivid. The Bodhi tree beneath which the Buddha was enlightened is, for Theravada Buddhists, a kind of living relic; cuttings from it have been planted across South and Southeast Asia. The ashvattha of the Hindus — the banyan, with its descending roots — is a symbol of the eternal Brahman, and the Bhagavad Gita says that whoever knows it knows the Veda. The Maya ceiba rose at the centre of the world, its roots in Xibalba, its trunk in the middle world of humans, its branches holding up the heavens. The same image, in different keys, plays across every continent.

The Reading of Weather

The weather was, and in much of the world still is, the great daily text. Long before meteorology, folk people read the sky as a continuous commentary from the gods. A red dawn, a ring around the moon, a sudden stillness before a storm — each was a sign to be interpreted, an omen to be acted upon. The cult of the thunder gods is among the most widespread of religious phenomena, and the names shift but the attributes hold: a hammer or an axe, a chariot drawn by goats or rams, a double function as giver of rain and bringer of destruction. Thor of the Norse, Zeus of the Greeks, Indra of the Hindus, Shango of the Yoruba, and Lei Gong of the Chinese are all recognisably the same figure, dressed in the weather of their own landscape.

Weather was not only interpreted; it was also persuaded. The rain-calling traditions of the world form a continuous chain from Dodona to Tibet, from the Hopi snake dance to the Christian Rogation Day procession. The people of dry lands learned that the sky could be entreated, and the rituals they developed were sometimes solemn, sometimes joyful, and always deeply serious in their hopes. The thunder gods themselves were often the ones to whom such prayers were addressed, since they were understood to hold the rain in their hands.

The agricultural almanac, the weather rhyme, and the ritual calendar were, together, a kind of folk science. “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherds take warning” encodes a real meteorological observation in a verse that children still learn. The older layers of such sayings reach back to a time when every shift in wind and cloud was a comment from the gods, and the careful reader of the sky was, in a sense, reading the will of heaven.

Animals as Messengers and Teachers

If the land was a speaking companion, its animals were its first language. Across the world, particular creatures became emblems of particular truths: the owl for wisdom and for death, the raven for prophecy, the serpent for cunning and healing, the bear for strength, the salmon for wisdom, the fox for cleverness, the wolf for the dangerous wild. The raven of Norse mythology flew out from Odin’s shoulders each morning and returned at evening to whisper the news of the world. The wolf of European folk tradition was the boundary creature par excellence — the edge of the farm, the edge of the forest, the edge of the human.

Animals were also teachers. The Navajo emergence stories tell how the people climbed through successive worlds, helped at each stage by animals who showed them how to find food, fire, and water. In West Africa, Anansi the spider taught the people the stories themselves. In Slavic lands, the wise crane showed the way to the kingdom of the dead. In Australia, the ancestors in their Dreamtime form moved across the land as animals, and the songs of those journeys still trace the routes of the songlines. To know an animal, in such a world, was to know a piece of the cosmic order.

Animal stories also served as a mirror for human society. The bear in the Bedburg legend, the fox in the Reynard cycle, the wolf in the Russian Skazki — these are not just beasts but commentaries on lords and peasants, husbands and wives, the church and the state. The trickster tales of the world — Coyote of the Native American Southwest, Anansi of West Africa, Loki of the Norse — are all cousins under the skin, and they teach the same lesson: that the world is not as tidy as the powerful pretend, and that the small and the clever have a place of their own.

The In-Between Zones

Certain landscapes were felt to be especially permeable. The forest was the most obvious: a place of shadows and unexpected encounters, the home of outlaws, witches, and wild gods. The Leshy of the Slavic forest led travellers astray by mimicking their relatives’ voices; the skogsrå of the Swedish woods drew woodcutters into her embrace; the Wendigo of the northern forests of North America embodied the hunger that waits for those who lose themselves in the deep woods. The forest was not only a place of danger, though. It was also the place where saints and hermits found their wisdom, where the green man of medieval churches stared down from the capital, and where the Christ child of the Russian Christmas plays wandered among the firs.

Mountains, bogs, the sea, the desert, the shore — each had its own folklore, its own population of spirits, its own rites of passage. The bogs of Ireland and Denmark gave up their toll of preserved bodies, often with the marks of violent death, and were understood to be the tír na mbeo, the land of the living, into which the unwary could sink. The sea had its own gods, from the kelpie of the Scottish lochs to the mami wata of West Africa. The desert had its jinn and its hidden waters. Each in-between zone taught its people a different art of attention.

The shore, in particular, has been a place of strange meetings in nearly every tradition. The children of Lir of the Irish story were turned into swans and condemned to live upon the sea until the coming of Christianity; the selkies of the Scottish and Irish coast slipped out of their seal-skins and walked the beach in human form; the mami wata of the West African and Caribbean shore called to fishermen with promises of fortune. The shore is a margin in both senses — the edge of the land and the edge of the known — and the folklore of the margin is always a little wilder than the folklore of the centre. The people who lived there learned to live with the strangeness, and they wove it into the songs and stories that the rest of the world later learned to sing.

The Calendar of the Year

The natural world does not stand still, and the folklore of nature is a folklore of time. The Celtic year was built around four great fire festivals — Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, and Lughnasadh — and around the two solstices. The Germanic year pivoted on Yule and on the bright midsummer fire. The Slavic calendar ran from Koliada at the winter solstice through Maslenitsa and Kupala Night. The Japanese calendar was tuned to the blossoming of the plum and cherry, and the Chinese one to the slow turn of the lunar months. Each of these was a way of marking the year so that the human community could move with it, rather than against it.

These calendars survive, often in unexpected forms. The Christian liturgical year has absorbed many of the older festivals; May Day and harvest home, Halloween and midsummer bonfires are all palimpsests in which older meanings show through the new paint. The agrarian rhythm of sowing and reaping was, for most of human history, the rhythm of life itself, and the festivals that marked its turning points were also moments when the veil between worlds was felt to be thin. The dead walked at Samhain; the sun was helped across the sky at Yule; the waters were blessed at midsummer; the fields were opened at Lughnasadh. The whole year was, in this sense, a long conversation with the land.

Rivers, Wells, and the Waters of the World

Rivers have always been among the most numinous features of the landscape. The Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, the Rhine, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Amazon — each is more than a body of water; each is a deity, a path, a place of judgment. The rusalki of the Slavic rivers rose from the water on the night of Ivan Kupala, and to see one was a sign of either love or death. The kelpie of the Scottish lochs offered a ride that the unwary never came back from. The Rhine maidens of Wagner’s opera guard a hoard of gold at the bottom of the river, and the Lorelei of the same tradition sits on her rock above the water, singing sailors to their wreck. The Danube, in Hungarian folk song, carries away the bodies of the suicides and the cursed.

Springs and wells, the small waters, were no less sacred. The Celtic world was thick with holy wells, many of them still visited in modern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. The tobair of Brigid at Kildare, the well of St. Columba at Gartan, the wells of St. Winifred at Holywell — all are older than their Christian dedications, and all are still places of pilgrimage, healing, and pattern. The custom of tying a rag to a tree beside the well, or of leaving a coin, or of taking a pin from the clothing, is ancient and widespread. To draw water from such a well without leave was to invite sickness or worse. The same care was taken in Japan, where the mizumori of a village was a sacred spring whose guardian kami had to be honoured; in Russia, where the rodnik was the home of a water spirit; and in the Appalachian hills, where a “water witch” with a forked stick could find the vein of pure water that the diviner could not.

The Forest, the Field, and the Modern Mind

The Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — Wordsworth in the English Lakes, Coleridge on the Quantocks, the German Romantics in the Schwarzwald, the American Transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson in the woods of New England — rediscovered the older sense of nature as a speaking presence, and they gave it a new vocabulary. The forest was once again sacred; the mountain once again a temple; the storm once again a visitation. The new language was not identical to the older one, but it drew from it. The conservation movements of the late nineteenth century, from the founding of the Yosemite grant to the establishment of the first national parks, owed a great deal to this Romantic inheritance, and through it to the older folk inheritance that the Romantics themselves drew on.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the cycle has continued. The modern environmental movement has had to relearn, sometimes painfully, the old lesson that the land is a community, not a commodity. The contemporary pagan and animist revivals — Druidry, Wicca, the various indigenous spiritualities that have re-emerged from the long shadow of colonial mission — are direct heirs of the world described in this overview. They are not antiquarian hobbies. They are attempts to recover, in a form suitable for the present, a way of being in the world that the twentieth century came close to forgetting.

Nature Folklore and Ecological Thought

The deep ecology of Arne Næss, the land ethic of Aldo Leopold, the writings of Rachel Carson, and the modern movements for the rights of rivers and forests all carry, sometimes without knowing it, the imprint of older folk thought. The idea that a forest has interests of its own; the idea that a river is more than a volume of water; the idea that an animal is a person in a different shape — these are not modern inventions. They are the inheritance of centuries of folk observation, codified in stories, songs, and ritual. The new ecological law that grants legal standing to a river is, in a quiet way, a vindication of the old idea of the genius loci.

Even in the heart of secular modernity, the older patterns show through. The names of sports teams, the brands of cars, the mascots of schools, the characters of fantasy fiction — the wolf, the eagle, the dragon, the stag — all draw on a reservoir of meaning that was filled, long ago, by the folk imagination. The wolf that the farmer feared and the forester honoured, the raven that the highland poet watched from the cairn, the great ash of the Norse cosmos — these are still alive in the language and the imagery of the present. They live on because the relationship they encode is older than any single culture, and because the world that produced them is, in the end, the same world we still inhabit.

Nature & Landscape in World Folklore

In this section

Animals in Folklore

Sacred Trees in Folk Tradition

Weather Folklore