Cryptids – animals that are sometimes observed but have not been scientifically verified – can be said to belong to the realms of myth or imagination. They are often strongly associated with particular regions and landscapes, and are therefore frequently used for tourism, marketing, and regional branding purposes. Consequently, public authorities and government agencies must sometime navigate their relationship to these animals that may – or may not – exist. In this article, we discuss the Jämtland County Administrative Board’s decision in 1986 to safeguard a local cryptid, the Great Lake Monster. By following the Board’s handling of the case, we show how authorities, organizations, and private individuals apply conventional laws to an unconventional case, in unconventional ways. We introduce the term “playful legal space” to describe the space established by the Board in their attempt to navigate the tension of two simultaneously overlapping social frameworks – nature conservation of verified species and heritage preservation of a culturally important cryptid. The term introduced offers great potential to scholarship of various fields, and in further developments in understanding creativity in cultural and social life.

In 1985 the County Administrative Boardof Jämtland initiated a process to protect Storsjöodjuret (the Great Lake Monster). Asother famous cryptids, the Monster has become a valuable resource in the process of cultural heritage, marketing and tourism. We apply Bateson’s theories of play (1972) and Goffman’s concept of frame (1974) to show how play offers a metacommunicative strategy to circumvent expressions of disbelief in a locally important folkloristic phenomenon. We ask what reactions the board’s invitation to play are met with, and how the case’szoological, cultural and juridical frames are negotiated.

The process is analysed with respect to the different actors’ relation to genres and keys. The playful process in 1985 is contrasted by the judicial intervention in 2002 by the parliamentary ombudsman by whom humour and play are not deemed acceptable communicative strategies. We understand this in terms of closeness, and find that closeness to Storsjöodjuret is a direct factor both to the complexity of suitable communicative strategy, as well as to the creation of the protective decision made as such.

Requests for personal funeral rituals increase with growing secularization and the individualization of death. Based on interviews, this article discusses four women's experiences of independently planning and conducting secular memorials and ash disposals. I discuss the role of improvisation in the processes surrounding these rituals. Imagination, invention, improvisation, independence and inspiration emerge as characteristic aspects of their accounts. Due to the atheist beliefs of the deceased, the families have actively distanced themselves from the Church's funeral ritual, and undertakers were not considered helpful. To amend this, the relatives assumed responsibility for planning the secular funerals rather than leaving responsibility to the dominant authorities of death. Arranging memorials and burials without previous experience made the mourners feel insecure, but they also took pleasure in the creativity of the process, through which they created meaningful and deeply personal memorials and ash disposals. The study shows how rituals were (re)created by combining personal details with already established funeral ritual elements, as the mourners both mimicked and actively distanced themselves from existing ritual forms.

Ash disposal at sea is a rapidly growing phenomenon in Sweden. To scatterthe ashes of a loved one over water may appear particularly appealing if thedeceased had had a strong connection to the sea. It may also give rise to private sites of memory in the maritime landscape as the mourners attribute newmeanings to the sea. 

This paper on cruising sailors' online travelogues examines storytelling as an ongoing process. In this work, I combine perspectives from research on narrative and on the experience of time to introduce an analytical simile comparing storytelling with the embroidery stitch backstitch. I show the ways in which cruisers write their way along travelled routes, describing past and future events from an ever-changing present position for a contemporaneous audience.

This article discusses narrative and social challenges following development in communication technology. The paper aims to show how Swedish cruising sailors adapt the style and content of their online travel writing, with the interest of different audience groups in mind. How do they manage the sometimes conflicting interests of different audience groups? What is considered un-tellable, and why? The analysis is based on interviews with Swedish cruising sailors and on analysis of primarily four online cruising travelogues. The article combines folkloristic and socio-linguistic perspectives on communicative competence and on immediate or ongoing storytelling, to describe a narrative awareness of the cruisers. As I show, concern for the readers make online travel writing whilst travelling a work-like task. The cruisers develop strategies to write entertaining and exciting stories without worrying family members, and must try to instruct fellow cruisers without boring the non-sailors in the audience. Lastly, the article advocates a combination of online and offline qualitative fieldwork to enable an understanding of online and ongoing storytelling practices, and the social and narrative strategies of people active in social media.