The objective of this article is to consider legends or oral narratives in Norway which deal with the Chudes. Who were the Chudes - an important nation acting in a particular historical context or a mythological image? In order to answer this question it is necessary to examine different references to the Chudes preserved in Norwegian legends and historical sources. Here I consider the following tasks: 1) to clarify the meaning of the word ‘Chude’ in Norwegian culture; 2) to analyze legends about the Chudes in order to pick out the main plot-constructing elements. Legends are narratives which claim to be true and are usually connected to well-known places and people. Migrating legends are narratives which have been narrated in many places and for a long period of time. This also concerns legends narrating about the Chudes. This article discusses the effect on the percentage of truth in the narratives. For fifteen years I have taken the lead in doing research work at UiT (The Arctic University of Norway), the Institute of Teacher Education and Pedagogy, where my students and I collected several hundred legends, mainly from Northern Norway. The reason why pedagogy students were involved in this work is that legends can be applied as a method of knowledge development. It will be helpful when the students become trained teachers and face their own pupils at primary and lower secondary schools. Interest in legends can strengthen skills and content awareness, being at the same time a gateway to establishing knowledge structures.

The history of social work examines the development of social-political theories and practice; they represent an internally differentiated entity which is partitioned based on both content direction and the attitude to the researched problems. The epistemological specifies of the historical research determine the historic heuristics focused on scholarly literature as well as historical sources that use both literary and heuristic source tools. The character of the historical research determines also the use of research methods, such as direct and indirect methods, perspective and retrospective, comparative, historiedemographic, historic-statistic and also methods employed in the research into other social sciences. The history of social work fulfills theoretical, formative-educational and pragmatic functions; it has interdisciplinary character and is closely linked to the history of related sciences.

History, archaeology and ethnography as disciplines unsuitable for the study of Slavic beliefs according to Dariusz Andrzej Sikorski in his „Religions of the ancient Slavs”

For the author of the book presented below, the topic of Slavic beliefs is only a pretext for formulating writing technique-related postulates. A discussion with D.A. Sikorski should not take place in the field of methodology, or the field of the substance, and even less in the field of extra-academic research motivations. A historian should give voice to the source accounts (which does not necessarily mean considering them historically reliable), and this is made possible by appropriate methods. D.A. Sikorski, on the other hand, believes that the method is secondary, as long as it leads to results that are consistent with the ‘state of the facts’, which in practice have nothing to do with the sources. His proposal, however, is unacceptable for it is characterised by unreliability, one-sidedness, undermining of source testimony and replacing it with one’s own fantasies in accordance with a preconceived thesis that „it is not known how it actually was, but it is known that the Slavs did not have their own beliefs”. The result is a methodological trap: positivism has been taken to its ultimate consequences and turned upside down, becoming voluntarism within which you can undermine whatever you see fit.