Over Nine Forests Book Review
Folk Beliefs and Practices from Lithuania to the Urals
'Over Nine Forests' is a book about folk beliefs and practices from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, western Russia, and Finland.
Over Nine Forests: Folk Beliefs and Practices from Lithuania to the Urals
K.M. Koppana
Heart of Albion Press, 2006
Over Nine Forests Review - Overview
Over Nine Forests: Folk Beliefs and Practices from Lithuania to the Urals, is is 119 pages of discussion about folk beliefs in the Baltics, the western part of Russia, Finland, and Sweden. While the book is divided into chapters, the chapters themselves are loosely organized and contain information with questionable relevance. A careful (and patient) reader can extract the useful information, but this book is better used as a reference only when necessary and does not make a very good read.
The book does not pretend to be a scholarly treatment of the subject matter, even though a more serious or thorough exploration of folk beliefs and practices from the region might be expected. At least for US residents, the book must be ordered from sites that aggregate book sellers because it does not appear available on either Barnes & Noble's or Amazon's US sites.
Over Nine Forests Review – Helpful Information
The most useful information contained within the book can be distilled into two elements: folk themes, like stars, bears, and bees; and references to physical evidence supporting their existence, like pagan carved stones and folk crafts. The visual content of the book – illustrations and photographs – are also helpful as illustrative devices that fills in the blanks left by the text.
Over Nine Forests Review – Problems
The book has many problems, and this creates issues with readability. The author does not always successfully tie together themes or sufficiently explain relationships. She also adds information that, without further exploration, seems irrelevant to her discussion. Even odder are the allusions to mainstream fantasy or science fiction authors that pop up unexpectedly.
Over Nine Forests Review – Conclusions
Despite issues with organization and content, Over Nine Forests does offer some interesting facts and examples of folk beliefs and practices in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Russia west of the Urals. The research process for the book's sections may be overly subjective and could even appear amateurish to some, but records of folk beliefs and practices exist often because of individuals who care to write about them, even if they are not, by nature, academics or writers. Even if the book is not a good read, it may still supplement research about folk traditions of the discussed region, and, barring that, it does indicate locations where these can be observed.
