The Genre of Trolls - Doria

2 MATERIAL AND CONTEXT
2.1 General Considerations
My primary material consists of 123 records made by many different collectors
in various parts of those districts in Finland housing Swedish-speaking
inhabitants. In addition to these texts, I have cited 72 other records which
constitute my secondary material. The largest part of the material stems
from the Folk Culture Archives of the Swedish Literature Society in Finland
in Helsingfors, some records belong to the Rancken Folklore collection
currently deposited at the Department of Folklore at Åbo Akademi
University. Finally, 26 texts are drawn from printed sources, predominantly
publications dealing expressly with folklore and folk culture.
The geographical distribution of records from Nyland (Uusimaa) and
Southwest Finland is almost even, but Ostrobothnia has yielded more than
fifty per cent of the texts. The Åland Islands are poorly represented in my
material, having contributed only two records. The primary corpus consists
of prose narratives of trolls, supernatural beings mostly inhabiting forests,
hills and rocks.
It is questionable whether it is possible to make any pronouncements on
the actual distribution and vigour of troll traditions in the Swedish-speaking
areas in Finland on the basis of the amount of records alone. Collection
was often guided by the personal interests of each fieldworker, and the
entire scope of traditions in a community was hardly covered by even the
most industrious of collectors. In addition, some parishes received more
attention than others. The politics of collection probably had a profound
influence on the formation of the collections now extant, and the lack of
records from a particular area cannot be equated to a lack of tradition
(Bergman 1981: 22–23; Wolf-Knuts 1991: 34–37; cf. Lilja 1996: 182).
In the following I will give an account of the ideology constructed and
sustained in and through the collection of Swedish folklore in Finland. All
translations from the Swedish are mine unless otherwise stated. I will also
provide a brief description of the context in which the records were made,
focusing on the material from the Ostrobothnian parish of Vörå, which
will be the object of some in-depth studies in chapters 4, 5 and 6. 10
10 In this thesis I refer to the sites of collection as parishes, even though this administrative
unit was replaced by the municipality in 1865–1868.
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Material and Context