Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Religions

Sardinian Folk Tradition

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The folk belief system of the island of Sardinia, layered over the island's prehistoric Nuragic civilization and its rock-cut Ozieri culture tombs, surviving mainly as orally transmitted legend about spirits, fairies and household customs collected from rural informants from the nineteenth century onward, rather than as a formally organized pre-Christian religion with a named pantheon.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin Period
from 1875 1
Sardinian folk belief survives mainly as legend about spirits, fairies and household customs collected from rural informants from the nineteenth century onward; it is not documented as a formally organized pre-Christian religion with a named pantheon, and nothing ties its content to a founding period, even though the island's prehistoric Nuragic civilization and Ozieri culture tombs it is loosely layered over are themselves dated. 1875 is recorded only as the rough era of the earliest folklore collection, not as an origin date for the belief system.
Cross-Tradition Connections

Objects and Practices of This Tradition

Sources
1. Leggende e Racconti Popolari della Sardegna (Turchi)
Dolores Turchi, Newton Compton, Rome, 1999Turchi's anthology of collected Sardinian legend material
Open Questions (1 open question)
Does Sardinian folk belief connect to the island's prehistoric Nuragic religion, and if so how?

Sardinian folk belief is described as layered over the island's prehistoric Nuragic civilization and Ozieri culture tombs, but the folklore itself was recorded only from the nineteenth century onward, and nothing currently establishes a documented line of transmission between the prehistoric archaeological culture and the modern oral material.

What would resolve this Archaeological or textual evidence linking specific Nuragic-era ritual practice to a named figure or custom still recorded in nineteenth or twentieth century Sardinian folklore would establish an actual continuity, rather than a merely geographic layering.
archaeology and folklore studiesDolores Turchi, Leggende e Racconti Popolari della Sardegna (Turchi)
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