Social Science Forum: On Northern Storytelling

Social Science Forum: On Northern Storytelling(12.03.2013)

Lecture by author and travel writer Dr. Lawrence Millman, Wednesday March 13^th at 12:00-13:00.
Room M102, Sólborg, University of Akureyri.

The vitality of the spoken word is (or was) essential to preliterate northern cultures, especially in the form of storytelling. For storytelling is a complex stew that purveys in varying degrees entertainment, historical knowledge, and even morality. Thus it's not surprising that the storyteller in certain cultures was also the person who determined if someone had violated a taboo.

Punctuating his presentation with stories he collected and translated himself, Lawrence Millman will take you on a journey that's at once personal, cultural, and geographical. He'll begin with the West of Ireland and discuss storytelling and its traditional significance there, then he'll talk about his work in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, where he spent several years collecting tales and myths from Inuit elders, and then he'll talk about the Kwakwadjec stories he collected in Labrador. Kwakwadjec, or Wolverine, is the trickster figure among the Labrador Innu and a sort of paradigm for storytelling in the North: by his antics, he helps reconcile the listener to a hard life in a cold place. Dr. Millman will also discuss how our minds have been shaped by stories as well as the degree to which stories and storytelling survive in our own literature cultures.

Lawrence Millman has a Ph.D. in Literature from Rutgers University. He has taught at Haskoli Islands, Tufts University, the University of New Hampshire, Goddard College, and Harvard University. His 15 books include such titles as Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Last Places, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Wolverine Creates the World, Lost in the Arctic, and -- most recently -- Hiking to Siberia. His next book, to be published in the fall, will be a collection of his essays about fungi. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Stefansson Arctic Institute. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.