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

Part IV: Johann Bäckström: Tales from Österby, Swedish Finland (1885)

I V JOHANN BAcKSTROM Tales from Osterby, Swedish Finland (1885) INTRODUCTION "Laughin~ It Off" Gun Herranen Henning K. Sehmsdorf IN 1843, A GROUP of university students started on a tour of the countryside beyond the Swedish-speaking coastal area around Helsingfors (Helsinki) to study and collect Finnish dialects and folklife. In the group was J. O. 1. Rancken (r824-95), who eventually became known as the first important promoter of Swedish folklore and traditions in Finland. Rancken, a native of Bjarna, in Swedish Finland, fell ill before the group had traveled far from the capital and during his convalescence came into contact with oral traditions in the Swedish language that he recognized from his own childhood. In r846 Rancken accepted a teaching position in the city of Vasa, in the northwest corner of Swedish Finland, and in the spring of r848 published an extensive article in a regional newspaper (Ilmarinen, April rand 5, r848) calling on "friends of the fatherland" to collect "memories in poetry and custom " that would document the traditions of the Swedish population along the coast preserved in their way of life, schooling, work and leisure activities, food and clothing, and-most important-their folktales , proverbs, riddles, sayings, and folk songs of all kinds (romances, ballads, children's songs and rhymes, jocular songs, and songs involved in games and dance). In sounding a clarion call for collecting Swedish traditions, Rancken stressed that such a venture posed no threat to the nationalist cause in the ongoing struggle for political freedom after Finland had been wrested from Swedish control by Russia in r808-9 and for an indigenous Finnish culture that could hold its own against Russification as well as against Swedish cultural hegemony. On the contrary, the effort would cast light on the cultural exchange between neighboring traditions and strengthen the sense of the cultural identity of Swedish Finland as separate from that of Sweden. For some time, however, few scholars heeded Rancken's call. Since the publication of the first edition of the Kalevala by Elias Lonnrot in r835, folklore study and 245 246 JOHANN BACKSTROM collecting had focused on Finnish-language poetry and folk songs in the Kalevala-metric tradition, which were found mainly in the area east of Helsingfors toward and behind the Russian border. Rancken, by contrast, concentrated on the southwest coast of Finland . In the summer of 1849 he made two field trips on foot near Vasa and in the northernmost reaches of Ostrobothnia (on the west coast of Finland), but his modest collections from these excursions were burned in the great fire of 1852, in which most of Vasa was destroyed. When the school where Rancken taught was evacuated (to Jacobstad, in Ostrobothnia ) for more than ten years, he used the opportunity to ask pupils to write down the customs, folk narratives, and beliefs of their home communities. The result of this new strategy, which he continued throughout the 1860s and 1870S, was a collection of nearly two and half thousand items, of which three-fifths constituted folk songs and song games, one-fifth were folk tunes, and one-fifth were tales. Many of Rancken's pupils later became students at the University of Helsingfors and remained active as folklore collectors, among them, notably, Jakob Edvard Wefvar (I840-19II), the son of a cotter from Munsala in Ostrobothnia. At the university Wefvar studied Scandinavian philology and became a member of Svenska Landmalsforening (Swedish Dialect Association), the aim of which was to collect folk speech, preferably in narrative form. It was natural to ask informants to tell a story, and "story" was usually understood to mean a folktale or anecdote. In 1866, the year after Wefvar enrolled at the university, Axel Olof Freudenthal (I836-19II) was appointed lecturer (later, professor) of Old Norse and Swedish. As curator of the student organization Nylandska Avdelingen (Nyland Society), Freudenthal became the foremost source of inspiration for students, including Wefvar, to collect Swedish dialects and folklore. In 1885, Svenska Litteratursallskapet i Finland (Swedish Literary Society in Finland) was founded to begin systematic documentation of the origin and development of Swedish folk culture in Finland, and eventually the society absorbed the activities and collections of the two former organizations. In 1937 a folklore archive was established at the University of Helsingfors to preserve and index the Swedish-Finnish collections. During 1867-68 Finland suffered the worst famine in its history. Reduced to utmost poverty, Wefvar had...