Landscape Theology : Exploring the Outfields of the Telemarkian Dream Song

• The article explores the Norwegian ‘national ballad’ Draumkvæde (the Dream Song) in Maren Ramskeid’s version. This work has traditionally been interpreted as a folklore adaptation of medieval visionary literature such as the Vision of Tundale, related to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The ballad, however, lacks demons and devils and infernal torture – it is even almost completely devoid of human beings. Instead it tells of a corporeal encounter with an imagined natural landscape. This dreamscape of the song is intimately intertwined with the local terrain of the singer. Maren Ramskeid engaged her own landscape in Telemark, the article argues, to decentre the canonized Christian text and the cultivated Christian building. Speaking an oral outdoor theology, she destabilized the heaven–hell dualism and envisioned a mythological landscape where nature turns dangerously and painfully on those who do not abide by its unwritten norms, but where all are eventually saved by a final judgement in a place called Broksvalin. 

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

draumkvæde

draumkvedet

Maren Ramskeid

visionary poetry

landscape literature

Norwegian literature

place making

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)