The Genre of Trolls - Doria

The majority of fieldworkers stressed the imminent death of tradition,
and they perceived their work as a rescue operation aimed at saving valuable
ancient folk memories for posterity, and they were looking for genuine
folklore and folk culture (cf. Lilja 1996: 27). Education was seen as a
threat to the survival of tradition, while the collectors themselves frequently
worked as teachers and therefore contributed to the documentation of
those traditions their profession was said to obliterate. Contemporary
tradition was not held in very high regard. Neither widespread traditions
nor common ones were alluring objects of inquiry, and these were often
disregarded, as were beliefs the collectors themselves embraced. In coming
to a new place, the collectors were frequently informed in advance of previous
activities there—sometimes they even knew which informants other
collectors had visited—and when the project of supplementing the archive
was initiated, many fieldworkers avoided consulting former interview-
ees. Occasionally they went as far as to refuse travelling through par-
ishes previously explored; they only wanted “new”, hitherto undiscovered
material.
As a result of the efforts at geographic and textual supplementation, texts
of diverging provenance were combined. The procedure is well attested in
song transcriptions, but Anne Bergman does not exclude the possibility of
its application to prose material as well. Many collectors appear to have
entertained the idea of an original form that could be reconstructed if different
variants were fused (Bergman 1981: 30–32, 36, 40), a thought also in
currency among scholars of the historic-geographical or the Finnish school,
inspired by Kaarle Krohn, professor of Finnish and Comparative Folklore
Research in Helsingfors (cf. Dundes 1974 on the devolutionist premise in
folkloristic theory). Folktales were often recorded as examples of vernacular
speech, and the collectors were interested in both folklore and linguistics.
The record is nevertheless regarded as a more accurate description of
the collector’s language than of the narrator’s; it does not provide any unmediated
access to the speech of the interviewee. Source criticism is further
complicated by the propensity of the Society’s examiners to “correct”
examples of the vernacular (Bergman 1981: 32–33).
The material was to be submitted as clean copies, neatly ordered and
supplied with a table of contents. This work was time-consuming, and
the internal order of the records was probably disrupted. The Literature
Society advocated separate note pads for different genres, wherefore the
The Sources 53