On Nordic Folklore Archives

Folklore archives in northern Europe can be traced back to 1831, when a number of young intellectuals in Finland, since 1809 a grand-duchy of Russia after centuries of Swedish rule, sought to find the roots of their country, neither Swedish nor Russian, and therefore founded the Finnish Literary Society (Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden Seura). The problem was that there was no literature in Finnish, or at least no written literature. The members of the society thus sought to record the oral literature of the countryside, and the most energetic of them, Elias Lönnrot (d. 1884), became a household name, creating a national epic, Kalevala (literally the land or territory of Kaleva) by stitching together parts or all of the various short oral poems he had collected on numerous collecting voyages, especially in the Karelia region, with some lines he composed himself. The epic went through various iterations but is best known from the 1849 version.

The members of the Finnish Literary Society kept the notes and papers from their collecting in their own homes until 1890, when they were able to deposit them in a grand neoclassical building the Society built in Helsinki, which still stands and now houses what must surely be the largest folklore collection in the world (one of the treasures I have had the pleasure of seeing in this archive—in its most secure location, of course—was a field notebook in Lönnrot’s own hand). The other Nordic countries got their own archives in the 1900s; in Denmark, for example, in 1904 (Dansk Folkemindesamling 'Danish folklore collection' in Copenhagen), a collection based first on the collections of the great ballad scholar Svend Grundtvig (d. 1883) and subsequently enlarged through acquisition of the collections of other folklorists, among them Axel Olrik (d. 1917), H. F. Feilberg (d. 1921), and Evald Tang Kristensen (d. 1929).

Official folklore archives in Sweden followed suit. In 1913 Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (d. 1952), arguably the premier folklorist of the earlier twentieth century, joined with a colleague to found an archive at Lund University (Lund University’s Folklife Archives/Lund universitets folklivsarkiv: LUF), which was originally and still is dedicated to the teaching of folklore there.

1919 saw the founding of a university department of Folklore in Gothenburg (Institutet för folklore [Göteborg]: IFG), including an archive with three parts, one of which you will also see in these pages: the collections of the Western Swedish folklore association (Västsvenska folkminnesföreningen, VFF).

At Uppsala University in 1914 collecting efforts in dialects and folklore going back to the last quarter of the 1800s were recognized with the formation of a research institute called Undersökningen av Svenska folkmål ('Investigation into Swedish dialects'), whose goal was to formalize research and collecting in those two areas. In 1928 a division dedicated to folklore was formalized and the name changed to the Dialect Archive (Landsmålsarkivet). This is where the common abbreviation for materials you will see here originated (Uppsala Landsmålsarkivet): ULMA.

Besides these university archives, now nationalized into a single government entity (the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore / Institutet för språk och folkminnen, officially abbreviated as Isof), there were also many archives at various museums and other institutions. The most important of these grew up at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, based on questionnaires sent to volunteers all over the country from 1928 until 2016.

These words will, I hope, serve to show that folklore archiving was a big business in Sweden in the first half of the 1900s. The period of collecting was from the end of the nineteenth century down into the twentieth, and several millions of recordings found their way into the archives. Since many of the informants were relatively old when the collections were made, the traditions exemplified extend well back into 1800s. Generally we know the identity of the informant (the person who recounted the folklore item) and the collector, as well as the parish and date. Collections were often driven by questionnaires that originated at the archives to support various research projects.

In the 1970s there was a reaction, perhaps inevitable given the spirit of the times, against the archives, which were seen as painting an idealized bourgeois picture of the Swedish peasantry, one that had never existed, and more generally a picture of Sweden's past that excluded industrial workers and others. On an international level, this coincided with the "performance turn" in folklore research, the realization that folklore was not just "items" (as it very much is in archives) but more saliently the result of interaction between living and breathing beings who have a stake in what is being recounted. Fredrik Skott’s 2008 study Folkets minnen has gone a long way to redeeming the archives, but even without it there was much excellent work in Sweden from the 1970s onward based on archival materials; of these, Bengt af Klintberg’s catalogue of Swedish legends is in many ways a culmination.

Studying performance shows folklore at work; studying the archives shows its historical past. To this day the best work on fairy tales, in my view, is Bengt Holbek’s 1987 Interpretation of Fairy Tales. Using archival records, namely the extensive collections of Evald Tang Kirstensen, and matching informants with parish and other information about them, Holbek is able to show that fairy tales in Jutland, Denmark, were the property of the lower agricultural class, what he terms the "rural proletariat," and that that the gender of the informant could be linked in interesting ways to the gender of the protagonists in the tales. From this basis he went on to formulate a theory that the fairy tale, in its Danish context in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, facilitated a kind of collective daydreaming, in which the impoverished rural servant class, many of whom could never marry, dreamt of marriage and an imaginative rise in social status, all the way to royalty. This hypothesis cannot be proved or disproved, but it could never have been put forward without the archives.

The materials gathered in this book offer a sample of the riches that are to be found in the Swedish folklore archives; even those taken from written sources almost certainly have a corresponding entry in an archive. They show some of the ways people in rural pre-industrial Sweden related to their tree and plant environments, expressing their concerns, hopes, and fears in everyday life.

References

• Herranen, Gun & Lassi Saressalo (editors). 1978. A Guide to Nordic Tradition Archives. NIF Publications, 7. Turku.

• Holbek, Bengt. 1987. Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective. FF Communications, 239. Helsinki.

• af Klintberg, Bengt. 2010. The Types of the Swedish Folk Legend. FF Communications, 300. Helsinki.

• Skott, Fredrik. 2008. Folkets minnen. Traditioninsamling i idé och praktik 1919-1964. Avhandlingar från Historiska Institutionen i Göteborg, 53. Gothenburg.