Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area (review)

At 840 pages, Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Areais a great and sprawling book. Yet given the goals it sets for itself and the voids that it fills, it is remarkably concise. At the very least, here are two books in one: an encyclopedic catalog of masked festive traditions and a collection of essays exploring specific traditions from a variety of angles. Together, these two sections comprise both a summa of the early descriptive techniques of Nordic folklorists and a cross-section of current contextual and theoretical interests.

Two introductory statements outline the book's orientation and scholarly development. First, the editor's dedication ("in memory of Herbert Halpert and George M. Story") testifies to an inspiration from the outskirts of the Nordic area. Halpert and Story's edited collection Christmas Mumming in Newfoundland(University of Toronto Press, 1969) combined historic-geographic methodology with close contextual focus to change the direction of folkloric festival studies. Second, a two-page foreword by Bengt af Klintberg outlines how Danish scholar Carsten Bregenhøj's Helligtrekongersløb på Agersø(Akademisk Forlag, 1974) extended the Halpert-Story methodology to the study of Danish Epiphany mummings, how Terry Gunnell's The Origins of Drama in Scandinavia(Boydell and Brewer, 1995) worked to connect the earliest records of Scandinavian masking traditions with modern observations of their practice, and how Bregen-høj and Gunnell began a collaboration, in 1999, resulting in the present book.

Editor Terry Gunnell thickens the description with an introduction outlining the history, convictions, and orientations underlying the present volume (pp. 27-43). Crucially, Gunnell cites ways in which Scandinavian folklorists, following Carl von Sydow, revolutionized the historic-geographic approach by abandoning the effort to level diverse texts into some posited universal pattern and by insisting, on the contrary, that inferences regarding the background and meaning of customary practices "be based wholly on firm localevidence rather than international comparisons" (p. 38). This is an important qualification for North American readers, many of whom have summarily dismissed historic-geographic methods on the false understanding that they serve only to articulate the abstract patterning of preconceived notions.

Part 1 of the book, which runs to 447 pages, honors local knowledge through its close attention to the individual traditions surveyed, as well as by incorporating and building upon the archival work and published scholarship of generations of local experts. Leading specialists provide detailed surveys of seven Nordic regions: Christine Eike takes on Norway; Eva Knuts, Sweden; Carsten Bregenhøj and Hanne Pico Larsen, Denmark; Terry Gunnell, the "North Atlantic" (encompassing Orkney, Shetland, the Faroes, and Iceland); Urpo Vento, Finland and Karelia; Ülo Tedre, Estonia; and Adriënne Heijnen, Greenland. Each survey covers seven topics in the following order: a brief description of the region; early historical references to masking traditions; a characterization of the documentary sources for the survey; a précis of the "general features" of the festive activities surveyed; an overview of the region's calendrical masking traditions; a summary of noncalendrical traditions; and a conclusion.

The contributors vary significantly in the ways in which they flesh out this seven-part outline, and a brief review of some of the details of the discussions illustrates the range, sources, and scope of the national surveys. For example, the most detailed description of a region is the section on Denmark, which devotes seven pages to geographic and cultural variations, as well as to historical influences on variation. The most detailed section on historical references to masking traditions is the seventeen-page section on the North Atlantic, which draws most extensively on medieval Icelandic texts. For its documentary sources, the section on Finland and Karelia brings together 1,900 records, principally archival resources based on fieldwork conducted in the 1930s, questionnaires administered in the 1960s, and audio interviews and video documentation undertaken in the 1970s. The Greenland section, in its pr...