All the World's Reward: Folktales Told by Five Scandinavian Storytellers

Part I: Olav Eivindsson Austad: Tales from Setesdal, Norway (1907-1926)

I OLAV EIVINDSSON AUSTAD Tales from Setesdal, Norway (190 7-1926) INTRODUCTION Norway's Last Great Storyteller Reimund Kvideland Henning K. Sehmsdorf THE BEGINNING OF folktale collection in Norway is identified with the publication of Norske folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folktales, r84r-43) by Peter Chr. Asbj0rnsen and J0fgen Moe. The two Norwegian collectors modeled themselves on their German forerunners, Jakob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, whose Kinder- und Hausmiirchen had appeared in r812-22. In presenting the oral narrative tradition of the rural folk of eastern Norway to an educated, urban readership, the editors gave priority to aesthetically satisfying texts, which they retold in a modified Dano-Norwegian, incorporating dialect expressions and syntactical rhythms of distinctively Norwegian speech. As collectors , Asbj0rnsen and Moe saw themselves as combining the roles of scholars and traditional storytellers, "standing above, but at the same time maintaining close contact with, the folk" (Moe r852, viii). Like most folklorists of their generation, they felt that what presumably were the oldest narrative traditions preserved the spirit and lifestyles of the folk most faithfully; and if the texts they found appeared fragmentary and deteriorated, it was the task of the collectors and editors to "restore" them (see Kvideland and Sehmsdorf r989, 4). In effect, Asbj0fnsen and Moe created literary redactions-book tales-of the oral narratives they gathered, and these they offered to their readers as generically Norwegian folktales. On the other hand, the two collectors paid scant attention to the storytellers themselves, to their individual creativity, performance styles, and repertoires, to their personall or family backgrounds, or to the local cultural milieu from which the tales came. Not until after the turn of the century did folktale scholars in Germany , Scandinavia, and Russia begin to take a sustained interest in the cultural provenance of storytellers and their tales. During the same time period a number of Norwegian scholars presented at least partial reper- 14 OLAV EIVINDSSON AUSTAD toires of individual storytellers identified with specific cultural regions. For instance, in 1923 Knut Loupedalen published thirty-seven tales by a single narrator from Telemark (Eventyr og segner (ra Telemarki, Folktales and Legends from Telemark). A year later Rikard Berge presented segments of three repertoires from Telemark, one from Sunnfjord, as well as texts sent to him by a Norwegian-American woman, who had learned them from her grandmother in Romerike (Norsk sogukunst, The Art of Norwegian Storytelling; see also Berge 1933, 1934). In 1929 Nils Lid published twenty-two tales collected by Moltke Moe in 1878 from a storyteller in Flatdal (Folke-eventyr (ra Flatdal, Folktales from Flatdal). None of these collectors, however, published the entire repertoires of individual storytellers. The only near-complete Norwegian tale repertoire ever to appear in print was collected by Torleiv Hannaas, professor of dialectology and folklore at the University of Bergen, who between 1907 and 1926 paid ten visits to the well-known storyteller Olav Eivindsson Austad in his native Bygland, Setesdal. During the total of about two weeks' time which Hannaas spent in Bygland, he wrote down most of Austad's known repertoire of forty-three tales, of which thirty-five were printed in Sogur (ra Sa!tesdal (Tales from Setesdal , 1927). As Hannaas emphasized in his foreword, he was aware that he was breaking new ground in publishing the work of a single storyteller in a separate volume: "All the tales in this book are told by Olav Eivindsson Austad. Recordings from others have not been included here. I wanted to demonstrate just how much even one storyteller can call his own. This has never been done before" (1989,7). Hannaas was not the only collector to record Austad's repertoire; nor did it consist only of tales. Austad also told legends, three of which were published by Hannaas, and he sang epic songs, jocular ballads and verse, as well as stev, which are improvised formulaic four-liners sung to traditional tunes. Two other folklorists recorded portions of Austad's repertoire. In 1913, Johannes Skar recorded four of Austad's tales, including a fragment (AT 952: "Little Hans") not noted down by Hannaas (Skar 1961-63,3:45). Between 1917 and 1920, Knut Liestol wrote down a number of Austad's songs as well as thirteen of his tales while mentioning two more (AT 480 and AT 577), which he did not record (Liestol 1921). Of the thirteen Liestol wrote down in extenso, eleven are practically identical with versions published by...