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

Part II: Ane Margrete Hansen: Tales from Jutland, Denmark (1889)

I I ANE MARGRETE HANSEN Tales from Jutland, Denmark (1889) INTRODUCTION National Treasure and Local Culture Bengt Holbek Edited by Henning K. Sehmsdorf WHENEVER DENMARK is mentioned in connection with storytelling, the first name to pop into the heads of most people is that of Hans Christian Andersen. It is true that he was a great storyteller, and his more than a hundred and fifty tales and stories are renowned throughout the world with good reason; but the fact is that he has much less to do with traditional storytelling than is generally assumed. In the first place, he took the themes of no more than a dozen or so of his stories from traditional tales, and second, he reworked them so thoroughly that he created another art form. It certainly has its own merits, but it does not convey a genuine impression of the popular storytelling still flourishing in his lifetime. One needs to consult the treasuries of folklore for that. Public interest in folklore was minimal until the nineteenth century. The Romantic movement in literature, and later also in art and music, found new and fascinating sources of inspiration in the traditional culture of the common people, and the national movements of Europe found what was regarded as documentation for national aspirations and claims in the same sources. In Denmark, these movements first focused on the traditional ballads, which had been recorded frequently since the Renaissance. Individual ballads were reworked by Romantic poets, editions were brought out, and melodies were collected from the lips of the people. In 1847 a veritable battle raged in scholarlycircles as to the correct and proper way of editing this national treasure. Then a real war broke out in 1848. The mounting political aspiration of the Germans was to gather their numerous minor kingdoms, duchies, independent cities, and German-populated but foreign-ruled territories into one unified, national realm. This led to rebellions in the provinces of Lauenburg, Holstein, and Slesvig, which were governed at the time by the Danish Crown (the first two were mostly German, 121 I22 ANE MARGRETE HANSEN whereas Slesvig had a mixed Danish and German population). The uprising was suppressed after a couple of years, but in the turbulent decades to follow the waves of national sentiment rose high among Germans as well as among Danes. This is when folklore collecting began in earnest. Svend Grundtvig (1824-83), son of one of the national leaders of the time and winner of the "ballad war" of1847 inasmuch as his principles for editing the ballads had been accepted by the sponsor, who would pay for publication, wrote an ardent exhortation in a new national magazine called Dannebrog (the name of the Danish flag) in February 1854 urging his compatriots to collect folklore. A host of students, officers, teachers, daughters of the bourgeoisie, and even the nobility heeded his call, and soon the records came flooding in. Thus the first major collection of Danish folktales came about, along with collections of legends, songs, games, rituals, beliefs, and other folklore materials . The flood became a trickle after 1864, when a Prussian-Austrian alliance conquered the provinces that had rebelled earlier. The wave of fervent Danish nationalism subsided after this painful defeat, but by then the texts were in Grundtvig's hands. He published as much of the material as possible in the three-volume collection Camle danske minder i folkemunde (Old Danish Lore in Oral Tradition, 1854-61) and thus for the first time made a major selection of genuine Danish folktales available to the general reader. Its influence is occasionally discernible in later recordings of folktales. By the time Grundtvig was appointed university lecturer in 1863, the folklore movement had come almost to a standstill. Nevertheless, Grundtvig now planned a monumental national edition of all major categories of folklore and to this end devised a system for the classification of his corpus. His aim was to produce an edition of Danish folktales that would rival those of the Grimms in Germany, Asbj0rnsen and Moe in Norway, and Afanasiev in Russia. This monumental edition of national folklore was to be Grundtvig's personal contribution to fending off the German nationalism beating against the border to the south. His plan was to gather all existing records of Danish folklore and produce the most perfect and poetic forms possible. He was never a field-worker himself and the lives of traditional singers...