The Genre of Trolls - Doria

the verge of a civil war, he travelled the Ostrobothnian countryside recording
narratives, 12 of which are included in my corpus (SLS 280). Karolina
Grannas from Härkmeri in the parish of Lappfjärd, 78 years old at the
time, contributed one story of trolls (SLS 280: 362). Robert Hannus, a 72year-old
Härkmeri resident, recounted one story (SLS 280: 357), while Olga
Nummelin, 79 years old and hailing from Sideby, told a similar one (SLS
280: 379). Anders Ek from Kärklax in the parish of Maxmo, 82 years old,
narrated a story retelling the supernatural experience of a work mate (SLS
280: 503–504). One text from Vörå lacks information on the informant
(SLS 280: 635–636), which is rather unusual for a collector like Wessman.
In the parish of Solf, Sofia Snåfs, 69 years old (SLS 280: 131) and Isak Snåfs
(SLS 280: 132) from the village of Munsmo, narrated one story each, as did
Johanna Berg, 84 years old, in the village of Rimal (SLS 280: 136), Albertina
Hellman, 86 years old (SLS 280: 129) and Eva Sund, 87 years old, from the
village of Sundom (SLS 280: 130). Johan Grönlund, farmer in Taklax in
the parish of Korsnäs, 69 years old (SLS 280: 295) and Anders Rovhök, 81
years old, living in Fröjnäs in the parish of Övermark (SLS 280: 312) also
told him one story each. A year later, in 1918, he was recording folklore in
the parish of Ekenäs when he met Alma Sundström in Skåldö, who related
a narrative for him (SLS 290: 493).
As a rule, Wessman’s records of folktales are in the vernacular, reproduced
with painstaking faithfulness, while other texts, such as the ones
extracted from SLS 280, are rendered in normalized language with occasionally
inserted dialectal expressions explained in notes at the bottom of the
page, a practice he evidently considered superfluous in the transcripts in the
vernacular, in which the notes mostly relate to other extant versions, in
manuscript or in print. For the longer narratives, the notes are thus recruited
for exercises of scholarly comparison, whereas in the case of shorter
ones, the annotations form the running commentary of a linguist, even
though the words selected for annotation seem somewhat puzzling in
hindsight. A possible explanation for Wessman’s divergent transcription
methods is that the texts comprising SLS 280 were something of a byproduct
of the collecting trip; the real purpose was to collect single words
in the vernacular, not entire stories (SLS 280, Wessman’s field report).
Axel Olof Freudenthal (1836–1911) was a prominent figure in the Swedishspeaking
circles of the time; he strove for the protection of the Swedish
vernaculars and Swedish culture in Finland (Steinby 1985: 61–66), and he
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Material and Context