Bengt af Klintberg is above all renowned as the Swedish expert on contemporary legends. But he started his career with a master‘s thesis about tale-type AT /ATU 755 and over the years has refined and completed his findings.
So this book is the result of a lifelong interest in and conclusive exposition of his findings. At the same time it may be the last good example of the classical "type monograph" as developed by the Finnish (and Swedish) school.
The subject is the story of a wife who prevents the birth of her children, but afterwards repents and is punished or, more precisely, expiates. Apart from the oral variants there are some literary adaptations that af Klintberg includes (222-258), some of them by well-known authors (Lenau, Andersen, Hofmannsthal). Af Klintberg emphasizes that at times storytelling took place as often by writers as in the villages, so the distinction oral/literary can be deceptive (266).
But in contrast to former scholars he does not lump all European variants into one "type," as he quite correctly looks at the type as a unit of tradition, i.e., he excludes all stories that are not interconnected by a common line of tradition. (For partial parallels with other legend types, see pages 193-196)
Af Klintberg belongs to a generation of folklorists who quite well saw that they ought to include "structuralism" in their methodology, but who had no direct clue how to do it (see pages 195 f.). In this case he misses an opportunity. We might well, on the one hand, accept the "type" ATU 755 as defined by af Klintberg but at the same time accept the existence of a broader unit as a "structural formula"—just as we as linguists may study the tradition of a particular Wellerism, on the one hand, and the structural (syntactical) formula of the Wellerism in general, on the other.
Under the type AT 755 af Klintberg includes 152 variants from Scandinavia, Finland, some Baltic countries, and Dutch Frisia (172-193). In these variants the heroine is a preacher's wife, the pregnancy is prevented by black magic, the wife then suffers from a stigma (in most cases she cannot cast a shadow anymore), she is divorced by her husband, and as atonement she spends a night or more in a church where she is confronted by her unborn children. In the end she comes back to the village of her husband, remains unrecognized, spends a night on/in an oven, and is found dead the next day (exact motif analysis is on pages 89-159, in English on pages 269-271).
There are two possible digressions, which af Klintberg, perhaps wisely, has avoided. Firstly, what about medical reality? Which methods were known for contraception or abortion? How far were they known and how far were they kept secret? As interesting as these facts may be, they probably have little relevance to our story because here the methods are purely magical and fantastical. (For the more general attitude toward children and childlessness, see pages 200-204).
Secondly, what about religious ideas? The story presupposes that the number and the fate of the children is predetermined and can be foreseen—we find the same idea in medieval Scandinavian balladry (and even the fact that the older children will have a happy life, whereas the youngest will be unhappy—and so, in our story, more prone to forgive its mother). All this seems to be a feature of Old Norse fatalism, not unusual and not incompatible with Christianity (201). But the story presupposes that the children preexist even their conception and, if unconceived and/or unborn, live on as a kind of ghost—an idea which is rather unheard of and hardly reconcilable with Christian theology.
Af Klintberg stays in the realm of the classical type monograph. After defining the type he gives an overview of all variants, their particular features and their position in geographical space (and time). He distinguishes between two ecotypes (that is, subtypes within different geographical areas—the ecotype was the particular Swedish addition to the Finnish methodology). Thereafter follows the real problem: reconstructing the lines of tradition. For this, the cultural historian depends on hints within the material and on his or her ability to find them out, and here af Klintberg is very fortunate. In the northeastern ecotype (around the Baltic Sea), the wife sleeps on the oven (which was quite customary with the traditional ovens of Eastern Europe). But in the southwestern ecotype, she sleeps in a kind of baking oven—which doesn't make much sense, except if we look at it as an attempt to make sense of a misunderstood source otherwise incomprehensible for someone who didn't know Eastern European ovens. So the story originated in the northeast and then wandered to the southwest.
An interesting chapter poses the question how far the stories are “legends (sägner)” and how far “tales (sagor)” (166-197). He treats this not so much as a question of “belief narratives” vs. “fictional narratives,” but rather as a question of stylistic features. He agrees with W. Liungman that the competence to tell a long, complicated, and ornate story was not established in Scandinavia before early modern times (263). (One wonders if this is confined to prose and what he thinks about Old Norse sagas). So one of the widespread religious legends about voluntarily childless women was transformed into a complex religious tale which only in the twentieth century resumed the form of a legend again (264).
Another interesting chapter speaks about the ways different variants can present the different perspectives of their narrators, which in our case mostly depend on the narrator's gender (198-221).
Af Klintberg's book demonstrates, above all, the contemporary state of the art in tale-type monography. At the same time, it represents a far wider branch of scientific research: what we might call the “cultural-historical” methodology with its four steps: (1) collecting the variants and deciding which of them are connected by tradition and/or diffusion; (2) “sequencing” the variants into elements which are either syntagmatic (follow or, more precisely, are combined with another) or paradigmatic (mutually exchangeable); (3) reconstructing the lines of tradition and diffusion; (4) interpreting the changes in form or content which come along with this tradition and diffusion. This kind of methodology is found as well in the study of customs and material objects, not to mention also the commentaries in folklore atlases. But even for me, a cultural anthropologist with completely different fields of work, af Klintberg's book offers a comfortable entry point into the history and literature of Scandinavian folkloristics. (The English summary, pages 259-268, is at some points more precise and outspoken than the Swedish text; the book includes a bibliography, pages 296-306).
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[Review length: 1112 words • Review posted on August 20, 2020]