What is a religious narrative? Do religious narratives function in different ways than non-religious narratives? How may we fruitfully analyze and interpret religious narratives? These are questions that were discussed at two workshops in May 2022 at the University of Southern Denmark and again at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in November 2023.

Speaking animals, multiple universes, superhuman powers and entities are phenomena that are mostly associated with fiction, especially fantasy, superhero stories and science fiction. In much pre-modern literature, however, these phenomena do not necessarily signal fictionality, but truth in some sense. St George killed a dragon, the Greek past told of monster like the Minotaur or battles between titans and gods, and the mysterious annunaki mentioned on Sumerian tablets straddled the world of the gods and the humans.

If we read these texts through the lens of a post-Enlightenment, science-based worldview, we might misread their communicative purpose and potential. Narratology, as it has been defined, refined and further developed since its nascence as a literary discipline in the 1960’s, has mostly been based on this modern worldview and will thus categorize anything that defies this worldview as “unnatural”.

At the two workshops we wanted to engage critically with this assumption. In line with other proponents of a diachronic narratology, the general opinion of the participants at the two workshops was that what might strike modern readers today as unnatural, supernatural or outright impossible to believe in, had not been unnatural for the authors and readers who wrote and read these stories originally. Rather, in religious narratives “unnatural” elements do not signal that the author fictionalizes but that they use imaginative language in order to convey a higher, spiritual truth.