The Norwegian St. Olav Ways are currently the largest Northern European project re-institutionalizing pilgrimage as cultural heritage, providing a new framework for vernacular religious practices to a wide audience. In this article we approach the current pilgrimage revival in Northern Europe as part of a trend toward a heritagization of religion that allows new religious self-understandings to emerge. We analyze pilgrim guidebooks to the St. Olav Ways with regard to their narrative scripts, detailing how they can create expectations, inform the pilgrims’ conduct, and direct their attention toward a history that translates into a heritage. Based on a corpus of published pilgrim journals and diaries, we argue that the guidebooks instruct a process of interpretive drift, which influence the pilgrims toward embracing and embodying a new role within the religious field. The guidebooks invite the pilgrims to take on the role of heirs to a medieval European tradition.
In the late nineteenth century, the relationship between fictional literature and religion was up for debate. In the Nordic literary scene, this debate was triggered by Danish literary critic Georg Brandes in 1871, when he famously announced a turn towards critical realism. Fiction was identified as a possible link between secular and religious representations of reality, and modern literature was supposed to act as a catalyst for the criticism of religion. In the following years, literature became the medium to explore the 'problem of religion,' the utopia of an atheist society and the mysteries of the human mind. This article traces major theoretical impulses and their literary substantiations from 1870's literary realism to the emergence of the literary fantastic in the 1890s. In the literary fantastic, the criticism of religion became religiously productive. Anticipating the cognitive study of religion, folkloristics explained supernatural concepts as the natural result of ordinary mental mechanisms. This radical naturalism allowed for an inclusion of the supernatural in literary realism. The case example of Haugtussa (1895), a work by the Norwegian author Arne Garborg, shows the lasting re-configuration of the understanding of religion that gave way to a 'modern religiosity' based on fiction.
Magic has a long tradition as a literary topos in the European history of religion. From antiquity onward, scholarly theories and poetic descriptions have suggested magic as a transhistorical and substantive phenomenon, while its alleged historical performances mostly turn out as attributions meant to marginalize or exclude rival parties. Until the modern institutionalization in occult orders, the self-declared magician had, with few exceptions, remained a fictional character, portrayed in varied ways depending on literary or scholarly genre (see Daxelmüller and Otto). In modern day literature, two contradictory types seem to stick out in particular. On the one hand, there is the classical "Faust-type" of character: people skilled in occult knowledge and with high ambitions, learned in the dark arts of performing rituals to evoke demons or craft instruments. The source of their power is a coalition with demonic, non-human entities or, as a heritage of modern occultism, the use of "cosmic" or "spiritual" energies that are channelled by the trained magician-like in Harry Potter's wand-based magic. On the other hand, there are the archetypal "Merlin-type" characters in present-day fantasy literature, who are magical beings themselves. Their
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