The Genre of Trolls - Doria

marily in relation to questions of genre. Genre may be viewed as a type of
intertext, and thus, intertextuality will be examined in the guise of generic
intertextuality or intergenericity (for the latter term see Plett 1991: 21), under
which the other aspects (parody, chronotopes and novelization) may be
subsumed, as they address particular features of “the problem of speech
genres”, to use Bakhtin’s phrase (Bakhtin 1986b: 60–102).
The narrator, Johan Alén, was born in 1825 and died in 1891. At the age
of fifty, when Jakob Edvard Wefvar interviewed him, he was living in the
village of Rejpelt in the parish of Vörå. He was a cottar, and worked as a
carpenter and shoemaker. He was also known as a brewer of ale. Being too
old to benefit from the generally accessible schooling introduced at about
this time, he was still deemed to have received a decent education,
according to the parish records (Wolf-Knuts 1991: 66). He was an expert
on humorous tales, as his recorded repertoire attests: of 26 texts, 15 are jocular
tales, including one tale of the stupid ogre; 2 (the ones analyzed here)
are parodies of wonder tales; 3 are legends and 2 are fables, while the last 4
are serious tales of magic (see Appendix A). In this connection it might be
noted that jocular tales form a relatively small part of the folktale material
stored in Finland-Swedish archives, and if Michèle Simonsen is correct in
assuming that humorous narratives and anecdotes have constituted the most
popular types of stories in all periods of European history (Simonsen 1995:
99), these genres are severely underrepresented in our collections. A bias in
favour of the long and complicated wonder tale on the part of the fieldworkers
is certainly wholly plausible, as is a disinclination to reveal the
more obscene stories of the repertoire to a stranger on the part of the
performer, and I believe that jocular tales may well have been more frequent
than the recorded material indicates.
6.1 Genre
Before we turn to the first story, I need to introduce the first set of analytic
concepts to be applied. In accordance with the definition given by Charles
Briggs and Richard Bauman in their article “Genre, Intertextuality, and
Social Power” (1992), I understand genres as “generalized or abstracted
models of discourse production and reception”, mediated by their relationship
with prior discourse, i.e., intertextuality (Briggs & Bauman 1992: 147).
They are powerful means of shaping speech into ordered, unified and
Genre 219