The Genre of Trolls - Doria

collectors, and maybe of his local audience as well; a preference for the
wonder tale is quite evident in the sheer size of the collections of that kind
of material as compared to the much smaller corpus of jocular tales. This is
pure speculation on my part, but I think it is a distinct possibility. However,
there are some weak spots in this argument. The first is that Alén’s
narratives were collected very early, and he can hardly have encountered
any folklore collectors before Wefvar interviewed him, since he was one of
the pioneers; this might suggest a local exaltation of the genre of the wonder
tale, or of a noted performer specializing in that genre, but that is by no
means certain. The second is that Wefvar does not seem to have disdained
jocular tales, for he recorded many of those that have been preserved. That
does not exclude the possibility that he might have asked Alén for wonder
tales as well, and that he received the parodies as a response to that request.
Nevertheless, such a scenario makes the existence of the apparently serious
wonder tales even more mysterious than it was before, unless we posit that
Alén narrated them when he had calmed down enough to take Wefvar’s
entreaty for what it was, a probing of the extent of his repertoire, but that
is, once again, mere speculation. Alén’s incentives in this regard remain
indecipherable.
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Genre, Parody, Chronotopes and Novelization: the Wonder Tales of Johan Alén