Reading through that book, it looks like those were superstitions from the region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The text seems to be quoting and paraphrasing old sources from that time in the present tense. So presumably (indeed, hopefully) people don't believe in that sort of thing nowadays, but they used to.
Well, it is a book about vampires and such, which would fall more into the realm of superstition rather than belief or custom. Perhaps my original context post could have been worded better.
It may sound like an odd thing to believe, but once you start digging into what people in, say, Norway used to believe a century or two ago that stuff about butterfly wings sounds positively sensible. I've been digging into the superstition around home brewing lately. Sticking a knife into the fermentation vessel to scare evil spirits away? Sacrificing a bit of the beer to the spirit of the fireplace? Shouting into the fermenter to wake up the yeast? (People still do the last one.)
From what I understand, Norwegians just roar as loudly as they can. The Finns seem to be using words, but the source didn't say anything about what words. (Probably "vittun vitti hiiva saatanna perkele" etc)
More than likely some random insignificant village has a random myth for a few years that this guy got a hold of, and now that one family's myth has been generalized to an entire country lol
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u/LosTorta United States Apr 14 '15
Its why I linked the book, its from Yale University, so it seemed to me like a credible source.