The project

Who We Are

Le Jourdain documents Baltic coastal folklore in English — the traditions, beliefs, and oral accounts from communities between Kiel and Klaipeda that have not been widely written about outside their original languages.

What we are trying to do

Most serious scholarship on Baltic folklore is written in German, Lithuanian, Latvian, or Polish. Most English-language material on the same subject is either tourist writing or too general to be useful. We are trying to occupy the space between those. We work from archives in Kiel, Vilnius, Riga, and Gdansk, and we spend time in the places we write about.

We are not an academic publication. We do not publish in peer-reviewed journals. We cite our sources, we try not to claim more than the evidence supports, and we write for people who are curious rather than people who are credentialed.

Le Jourdain has been operating since 2021, based in Kiel.

The writers

Two people, one coastline

Elke Bartmann

Folklore documentation, archival research

Bartmann spent seven years working for the cultural heritage department of Schleswig-Holstein before leaving to pursue independent research. Her background is in archival studies, with a particular focus on the Pomeranian and Rügen collections held in Greifswald. She covers the western and central Baltic material — German-language sources, Pomeranian traditions, and the folklore of the German Baltic islands.

Her entries tend to draw more heavily on archival sources. She has a particular interest in the gap between what was collected and what was published, and what that gap reveals about the people doing the collecting.

LinkedIn profile

Tomas Vaičiūnas

Lithuanian oral traditions, field research

Vaičiūnas grew up in Palanga and studied cultural anthropology in Vilnius before moving to Kiel in 2018. He has been conducting informal oral history interviews with communities in the Lithuanian and Latvian coastal belt since 2016, and has contributed to two Lithuanian-language collections that have not been published in English. He covers the eastern Baltic material — Lithuanian, Latvian, and Curonian traditions.

His entries draw more heavily on field material and recent interviews. He is less persuaded than Bartmann by archival sources alone, and more interested in how traditions survive or change in living communities.

LinkedIn profile

On sourcing and claims

We cite archival sources by collection and year where possible. For oral material collected directly, we describe the collection context without identifying informants by name unless they have given explicit permission. We do not fabricate accounts. When we are uncertain whether a tradition is still active or only historically documented, we say so.

If you have corrections, additions, or material you think we have mischaracterised, please use the contact page. We read everything sent to that address.

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