The Best Campfire Stories
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Loading... - Leonardo Rossi
- 30 Jun 2022
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I spent a good chunk of my childhood haunted by the family that ate a big toe for dinner.
They were fictional campfire-story characters—the boy who found the rogue toe, his mom who threw it in the stew, and the owner of said big toe, who came back to haunt them. But the eeriness of it all unsettled me for at least a decade.
Turns out I’m not the only one influenced by fireside legends. According to a study in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, campfire stories have shaped entire cultures, ultimately aiding humankind’s ability to understand each other. The author of the study, anthropologist Polly Wiessner, spent months with the Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers of Namibia and Botswana. Their tales explored cultural norms, such as the African sisters who rejected arranged-marriage spouses to select their own. Others took a spookier tone, like the friend who became a “murderous psychopath.”
Story plots may vary by location, but Wiessner found that the act of sharing fireside tales transcends time and culture. To celebrate this connection, we gathered beloved campfire stories from outdoor-adventure guides and historians around the world. Read on for some of our favorites, and fear not: the big-toe-stew tale did not make the cut (but the gut eater from Greenland most definitely did).
The Third Brother
Mythology is integral to culture in Lithuania; the country’s steeped in Baltic pagan traditions that thousands still practice to this day. Here’s Mindaugas Vidugiris, cofounder of Whatansu, an organization that hosts experiential camps for Lithuanian youth, on his favorite Baltic campfire story:
“Once upon a time, a father had three sons. Two brothers were smart, the third was stupid,” he says. The boys’ father tasked them with finding a scarf; whoever brought back the most beautiful one would receive their father’s inheritance. The three siblings left to retrieve the scarves and arrived at a crossroad in the forest, where a sign read: “Go left, you will find the fortune. Go right, your horse will be eaten by a wolf.”
The two smart brothers went left, says Vidugiris. The third and youngest brother took a right, lost his horse to the wolf, and found himself at an old witch’s house. If he worked there for one year straight, the witch promised he’d receive the prized scarf.
“All the brothers came back, but the youngest brought the most beautiful scarf,” Vidugiris says, noting he uses this story to prompt fireside introspection and conversation among young Whatansu participants.
A Rider on the Mountain: Baqueano Zamora | Chile
The soaring granite spires of Patagonia’s Torres del Paine National Park allure intrepid outdoor travelers. The peaks, known as Los Cuernos, also set the scene for one of the region’s most iconic campfire legends. A variation in rock color on Los Cuernos’ eastern side creates the shape of a gaucho, or horseback rider, according to Claudio Silva, a longtime guide for EcoCamp Patagonia, a sustainable geodesic dome hotel in Torres del Paine. To locals, this silhouette represents a regional icon. Read More...
