Traces of supernatural beings or attempts to produce millstones from erratic boulders?

The young glacial landscape of the Southern Baltic Lowlands contains a large number of erratic boulders with which local folk tales are associated (Juśkiewicz, et al. 2025; Piotrowski & Wróblewska 2024). There are motifs referring to the origin of the boulders and all kinds of traces - cracks, scratches, depressions, cup marks, holes were interpreted as the effect of supernatural interference. They were seen as traces of a devil's chain or of being struck by a devil's whip. Depressions and holes were interpreted as the marks of claws, hooves or even the devil's buttocks or a giant's hand. In the case of some of these boulders, the belief that they had a cultic purpose became firmly established, e.g. as pre-Christian sacrificial altars (so-called Opfersteine) or solar cult objects. Local names for these stones alluding to the intervention of saints, angels or demonic beings have survived to the present day. We will try to identify both anthropogenic and natural processes that led to the formation of microforms on the surface of the boulders, considered 'supernatural' in folk tradition.

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (Grant No. 2019/35/B/HS3/03933).

References:

Juśkiewicz, W., Jaszewski, J., Brykała, D., Piotrowski, R., Alexander, K.M. & Juśkiewicz, K.B. (2025). Supernatural beings of Pomerania: postmodern mapping of folkloristic sources.  Journal of Maps 21 (1): 1-15,  https://doi.org/10.1080/17445647.2024.2434015

Piotrowski, R. & Wróblewska, V. (2024). “Memory of stones”. The motif of millstones production from erratic boulders in folk narrations from northern Germany and Poland: between a memory of craft and an object of memory. Fabula 65 (3-4): 334-355,  https://doi.org/10.1515/fabula-2024-0017