The Genre of Trolls - Doria

difficulty for years on end, thus (?) people tell that when he returned home
from church, he was able to recite the parson’s sermon word for word”.
Whether this statement is literally true or a simile for his perfect memory is
hard to tell. People used to call him the Bishop, but he was also considered
an inveterate liar, which Wessman suspected might be occasioned by
his superstition (SLS 137, “Smärre notiser angående berättarna” (‘Minor
Remarks on the Narrators’), no pagination).
The more elaborate biographies reach their peak in the 1911 collection; a
few years earlier Wessman had encountered Berndt Strömberg (1822–1910),
the blind master storyteller, whose narratives touched on trolls as well.
Gun Herranen, who has devoted much of her efforts as a folklorist to
explore every available detail of Strömberg’s life and tales, claims that
Strömberg was unique among Swedish-speaking narrators in Finland.
Wessman recorded 120 folktales from him, and previous to his visits other
collectors had documented some of his stories, but to no great extent. The
texts are often long and complicated, yet easy to follow and stringent.
When Wessman found Strömberg in 1909 he was already 87 years old and
lived in a fishing croft in Leksvall in the parish of Ekenäs. Gun Herranen
deems the extraordinary wealth of details a characteristic feature of
Strömberg’s style (Herranen 1995: 156–157; cf. Herranen 1984, 1987, 1993).
Here I have used seven of his tales (SLS 202 Sagor II, 1; SLS 202 Sagor II,
8; SLS 202 Sagor II, 15; SLS 202 Sagor II, 19; SLS 202 Sagor II, 28; SLS
202 Sagor II, 61; SLS 202 Sagor II, 66). The same collection (SLS 202)
contains another story of trolls, narrated by the female elementary school
teacher Sandholm (SLS 202 Sagor I, 8). Wessman compares her version
with Strömberg’s in the notes accompanying the text, though it seems he
did not record Strömberg’s tale in full. In 1915 Wessman did fieldwork in
the southwestern archipelago, and on this occasion he recorded a text in
the village of Utö in the municipality of Finnby (SLS 255: 175–176).
Wessman primarily regarded folklore as an element of social intercourse,
Herranen claims, and he stressed the importance of a trusting relationship
to the folk. He felt no need to be thought of as a learned man, and he
pretty much let people believe whatever they wished of him. Ideologically,
his was a quest for genuine folklore, collected in a linguistically and socially
homogeneous environment. In keeping with a general tendency among
collectors of the period, he discarded traditions inspired by literate culture
(Herranen 1986: 221–222, 224, 226–227). In 1917, when the country was on
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