The Lake and Its Monster

Communicating Connections with Landscape, Belonging and Sense of Place with Great Lake Monster Narratives

Abstract

This article explores the longstanding connection between a local version of a widespread cultural phenomenon – sea and lake serpents – and the community that cares for it. Legends and observation narratives, memorates, from the seventeenth century onwards concerning this lake serpent are analysed. The study further discusses how these narratives constitute the best-known Swedish version of lake serpents, the Great Lake Monster in the province of Jämtland, as an intermediary in connecting humans, history, landscape, and societal transformations, and how these narratives convey a sense of place. These intimate links position the Great Lake Monster as a protective spirit of the locality, a genius loci. Centred around one key question – “In what ways do Great Lake Monster narratives express connections between people, history, landscape, and place?” – the article shows how early interpretations of this phenomenon were shaped by life embedded in the everyday interaction with nature and the landscape. With the older legends functioning as a formative foundation for the later shaping of the idea as a cryptid, or “hidden animal”, I argue that they can be viewed as bridging the shared idea of the lake serpent on the Frösö runestone, Jämtland, Sweden, and the cryptozoological tradition of an observed animal in the lake.