The Genre of Trolls - Doria

collection was entrusted to kompetenta fackmän (‘competent professionals’),
a measure leading to an increasing specialization among the collectors, and
also fostering a more critical distance to the material at the collection stage,
which was indeed what Lagus had hoped to achieve (Bergman 1981: 22–23).
The collectors were dissuaded from combining prose texts. Suitable occasions
for collection were mentioned in the instructions as festivities and
winter evenings by the hearth in the case of folktales, and normal speech
situations for proverbs. These were considered the natural performance
contexts ensuring authenticity. Present-day folklore research, however,
emphasizes that the collector influences the situation in “natural contexts”
simply by being present; there is no such thing as participant observation
unaffected by the observer. In interview situations the instructions stress
that the interviewee’s personality, the time and the place, and the narrator’s
expressive powers must be taken into account (FU 3: 105) before fixing on a
fieldwork strategy. The interview was, in practice, the most common
method of collection, and interviewers often quoted previously collected
tradition by way of illustrating what they were looking for. They were also
quick to explain why they were roaming the countryside to dispel any suspicion
harboured by informants (Bergman 1981: 28, 30, 39).
Collectors from the peasant class were probably better equipped to create
a relationship with the locals, as they came from similar cultural and social
backgrounds. It is hard to say to what extent the difference in social status
between the rural population and the many elementary school teachers functioning
as collectors has moulded the material obtained. Notwithstanding,
not only the social position of collectors and informants influenced their
relationship in the field encounter, but also the dominance of the fieldworker
in the interview situation. The unequal power relations in an interview
should not be overlooked as an aspect having an impact on the encounter
(see Vasenkari 1999: 58, 65–66). Nevertheless, many other factors
may affect the state of affairs.
From 1908 onwards the scholarship holders were mostly academics and
the social gap grew even more noticeable, but a small, but diligent band of
local collectors still carried out unpaid fieldwork in the communities where
they lived. Problems in the interaction with the narrator arose partly out of
the insecure political context, people were suspicious of strangers, or strong
religious feelings made people less inclined to pass on sinful things like folk
belief (Bergman 1981: 28–29, 32; Wolf-Knuts 1991: 35–36).
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Material and Context