The purpose of this article is to use North Norwegian legends and show how these oral stories have been used in the education at the Institute for Teacher Education and Pedagogic, University of Tromsø - Norway’s arctic university since the time I started this project at the end of the 1990s period. Here, there will be given a definition and expansion for the types of legends that exists, what was stated about it in the lecture plan (L­97) at the time, and what created the basis for this research. An important part of this work was to collect legends in order to document this traditional material for later, as a contribution to North Norwegian cultural history and, thereby, as a gateway to establish knowledge structures.

Przedstawiam zrealizowany projekt „Poznaj kulturę regionu, czyli bajanie z Żubrozwierzem” – warsztaty artystyczno-edukacyjne dla dzieci w wieku wczesnoszkolnym, jako atrakcyjną propozycję zajęć edukacyjnych. Głównym celem spotkań było przybliżenie dzieciom wielokulturowego bogactwa regionu i jego tradycji poprzez czytanie legend Podlasia.

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 purpose of this article is to analyse a northern Norwegian legend. Working with legends will provide a cultural insight and can thus be a gateway to establish knowledge structures. The main purpose of this paper is to reveal some of the diversity that a legend contains, and show that an analysis of this type of text can be a tool for dissemination and discovery learning. The analysis in this article is made from a multi-perspective approach: a literary perspective, religion, historical, mythical and folkloric perspective. The word legend is characterized in Norway as religious texts. The proper Norwegian term for the text being analysed here is actually “sagn”. However, I choose here in the English language to use the word legend instead.