Black Gentleman

This empirical study of the Devil in the collections of the Estonian Folklore Archives, reflecting the world of belief inhabited by the Estonians in the 19th and 20th centuries, is also a book about suspicion and fear in everyday life. It describes how religious folklore has drawn borders between the human and the non-human, how it has modelled the Other, the supernatural and social evil. As a study of folk narrative, and legends in particular, it mainly discusses variation at the level of motif with special reference to the visual guises of the Devil.