‘A dwelling place for dragons’: Wild places in mythology and folklore

Abstract

This Chapter will examine the concept of the Wilderness as a cross-cultural milieu traditionally associated with supernatural encounters. ‘Wilderness’ covers a range of settings across both natural and human environments. Despite ecological variability, a unifying feature of Wilderness is its alterity, concretized in its portrayal as the domain of powerful and ambiguous otherworldly forces. Drawing on mythology, folklore and ethnographic sources, I will explore the character of the Wilderness as a liminal and unstable physical landscape and a spatial reality both potentially transformative and threatening.