Markus Lindholm and Pål Hermansen - Selected Title Authors

What is your book about?

The World of the Butterfly approaches butterflies as subjects rather than as objects or zoological categories. This means that we don’t confine their portrayal to rational explanations, but instead enter the butterfly’s world with the expectation of encountering real, living beings. Rather than reducing them to “in reality, this is just…”, the book revives the sense of wonder in the astonishing phenomena that we, as biologists and researchers, are confronted with – whether it be the miraculous metamorphosis, the marvelous colors and patterns, the strange, erratic flight of butterflies, or the migrations they sometimes undertake that can span entire continents. This perspective also leads us to explore what people before us have thought and marveled at, through art, poetry, and religious myths, or through the many interactions between the world of butterflies and that of humans, be it in the form of silk production, as raw material for myths, or as food (!).

What sets your book apart from others in the same genre?

This book takes a different approach than almost any other. Books about butterflies typically focus on species and provide analytical explanations, presenting butterflies as zoological objects. The World of the Butterfly isn’t a book about objects, but an educational journey of natural philosophy and deep ecology, approaching butterflies as subjects, as a “someone.” Both the language and imagery we employ have therefore been chosen to leave space for the poetic dimension of the butterfly’s world. It evokes a fundamentally new and more meaningful perspective of both butterflies and nature, one that legitimizes intense wonder and represents a departure from the utilitarian objectification of our natural surroundings.

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See full presentation of the book here

See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the autumn 2025 here