The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (Pantheon Books) - Jacob Grimm [373]
The serious study of popular story began, in Europe, with the Romantics. With the Grimm brothers the science came of age. With the foundation in Helsingfors, in 1907, of the Finnish society of the “Folklore Fellows,” the now colossal subject was coordinated for systematic research over the entire world. The technique of the Geographic-Historical Method, perfected by the associates of this pivotal group,‡ enables the modern scholar to retrace the invisible path of the spoken tale practically to the doorstep of the inventor—over the bounds of states, languages, continents, even across oceans and around the globe. The work has required the cooperation of the scholars of the five continents; the international distribution of the materials has demanded an international research. Yet the work started in the usual way of folklore studies, as a labor of local, patriotic pride.
About the middle of the nineteenth century, a strong nationalist movement had begun to mature in Finland. Buffeted for five hundred years between Sweden and Russia, the little nation had been annexed in 1809, by Czar Alexander I. Since the close of the eighteenth century, Swedish had been the official academic language. A group of young patriotis now began to agitate for the restoration of the native spirit and the native tongue.
Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), a country physician and student of Finnish philology, collected ballads and folk tales among the people. His work was a northern echo of the labors of the Brothers Grimm. Having gathered a considerable body of folk poetry around the legendary heroes, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkainen, and Kullervo, he composed these in coordinated sequence and cast them in a uniform verse. 1835 he thus published the first edition of what has since become known as the folk-epic of Finland, the Kalevala, “The Land of Heroes.”*
Julius Krohn (1835–1888), the first student at the university to presume to present his graduate thesis in Finnish, devoted himself to the study of the folk tradition, and in particular to the materials gathered by Lönnrot in the Kalevala. He discovered that among the ballads and popular stories of the Swedes, Russians, Germans, Tatars, etc., many of the motifs of Lönnrot’s epic reappeared, but in variant combinations. The Kalevala, therefore, could not be studied all of a piece; its elements had to be traced down separately. With this discovery he took the first step toward the development of the Finnish geographic-historical method.
Julius Krohn next found that not all the Finnish examples of a given theme could be compared trait for trait with the foreign versions; only what seemed to him to be the oldest of the Finnish forms closely resembled those of the neighboring lands. He concluded that the materials of the native epic had entered Finland from without and had undergone within the country gradual modification.
Furthermore and finally, Julius Krohn perceived that each of the native modifications seemed to be limited in its geographical distribution. He took care, therefore, to keep precise note of the geographical sources as well as chronological relationships of his materials. In this way he was enabled to study the transformation of the motifs of a tale in its passage from mouth to mouth over the land and through the years. “First I sift and arrange the different variants according to chronology and topography,” he wrote to the Hungarian philologist, P. Hunfalvy in 1884; “because I have discovered that only in this way is it possible to distinguish the original elements from the later additions.”*
With respect to the Kalevala, Julius Krohn concluded that neither was it a very old legend nor were its materials originally Finnish. The narrative elements had arrived on the waves of a culture tide that had streamed over Europe through the centuries. Stemming from the gardens of the East and the fertile valleys of Antiquity, they had crossed