Tangherlini - Danish folktales, legends, et other stories

THIS BOOK AND ACCOMPANYING DIGITAL CONTENT ARE the end result of a rethinking of standard, published folklore collections. Early in my studies of folklore, I found myself wondering about the people behind the stories I had read. A growing drumbeat in folklore circles seemed to be suggesting that earlier collections were based on suspect premises, in part because of the collecting that lay behind them and in part because of the overt editorial intrusion that intervened between the voice of the teller and the printed page. The implication was clear that early folklore archives were of little use for the study of folk expressive culture. Because I was predominantly interested in the role folklore played in people's understandings of economic, social, and political changes in late nineteenth-century Denmarkand therefore could not undertake my own fieldworkI began hoping that I could somehow recover the connection between storytellers and stories and get back to the important connections that exist in storytelling as a teller moves from one story or song to the next.

While I wrestled with doubts about the legitimacy of existing folklore collections, I struggled with several other frustrations related to the collections. The first frustration was based on the way stories in the early collections were classified. Because most classificatory schemes were more or less idiosyncratic and developed for particular collections or publications, it was difficult to find comparative material either from the same tradition or from other traditions. At the same time, I often found myself wondering why a story appeared in one part of a collection when it could easily have appeared in a different part. The second frustrationwas closely related to the first: because most collections were arranged topically, one had little choice but to base one's study of stories on the existing topic maps and story classifications.

Bengt Holbek's seminal work, Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1987), was an inspiration to me, not so much because of his groundbreaking work on analytical methodologies for the study of fairy tales but because of his thorough work on the archive of Danish folktales compiled by the nineteenth-century collector Evald Tang Kristensen. I based my dissertation and subsequent book, Interpreting Legend (1994), on the archival methods Holbek proposed. My goal was to explore the connections between storytellers and their stories, recognizing that a holistic view of a storyteller's repertoire could lead to a deeper understanding of how individuals use traditionparticularly storytelling traditionas a deep cultural resource as they navigate the challenges of daily life. Unlike my Nordic colleagues, who, starting in the 1960s, had already begun to emphasize the study of individual repertoires as a key to understanding an individual's worldview, I wanted to focus on more than a single individual and a single community. I believe tradition is based on the interactions of many people in large, overlapping groups that span large social and geographical distances, so I needed to focus on the repertoires of many individuals from diverse backgrounds and different parts of the tradition areain this case, Denmark. Ultimately, I decided that the best approach to interpreting folklore was to focus on a large group of individuals and the even larger number of stories that made up their repertoires.

As I began teaching folklore at UCLA, it became apparent to me that along with my students, I was missing a key piece for solving the Nordic folklore puzzle. What we needed was a Nordic folklore collection that included good English translations and thorough archival materials and was predicated on the idea of individuals and their repertoires. Until 1999, when Reimund Kvideland and Henning Sehmsdorf's collection of fairy tales from Nordic storytellers' repertoires, All the World's Reward, appeared, all the available collections of Nordic folklore in English were based on a topic model of folk narrative traditionand even their collection was limited to a single genre, a form of topic modeling in itself. John Lindow's excellent collection of Swedish legends and folktales (1978) isbroken into sections on This World, The Other World, and The World of Religion, and Reidar Christiansen's collection of Norwegian folktales (1964) includes the categories Historical Legends, Legends about Magic and Witchcraft, Legends about Ghosts, the Human Soul and Shapeshifting, and so on. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf's earlier compendium of Scandinavian folk beliefs and legends (1988) is arranged according to a similar topic model. It is difficult to discern in these collections the connections between individual storytellers and their stories. Another glaring problem for a course in Nordic folklore was that not a single substantive collection of Danish folklore existed in English translation.