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The Nordic Storyteller: Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen
Editor: Susan Brantly and Thomas A. DuBois
Date Of Publication: Feb 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0145-4
Isbn: 1-4438-0145-3
The Nordic Storyteller: Essays in Honour of Niels Ingwersen consists of a set of nineteen research essays plus an introduction, written by colleagues and admirers of Niels and Faith Ingwersen, leaders in the field of Scandinavian Studies in North America for some four decades.

A first section of seven essays, entitled “Songs and Tales in Oral Tradition,” presents research in the area of folklore studies, including balladry, saints’ lives, incantations, healing, legendry, and personal experience narrative. Articles take up such issues as classification, thematics, cultural and historical change, and the effects of technology on daily life. A closely related second section, “From Oral Tradition to Literature” includes three essays which examine the adaptation of oral tradition to literary forms, focusing on the works of P. Chr. Asbjørnsen, Esias Tegnér, Elias Lönnrot, F. R. Kreutzwald, and the illustrations of Arthur Rackham—all figures important in the rise of folklore as a key interest of Romantic nationalism.

A further set of nine essays grouped under the title “Tales in Literary Form” examine aspects of the writings of some of the greatest storytellers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including H. C. Andersen, Herman Bang, Henrik Ibsen, Jóhann Magnús Bjarnason, Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, Isak Dinesen, Martin Andersen Nexø, Billy August, Hans Scherfig, Peter Høeg, Klaus Rifbjerg, Leif Panduro, and Kjartan Fløgstad. Articles address topics including autobiography, source criticism, symbolism, personal and national identities, and the representation of political ideals.

Together the essays of this volume demonstrate the unflagging salience of narrative—of storytelling—in the personal lives and social experiences of Scandinavians and their neighbors, past and present.

Susan Brantly received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1987. She is a professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her books include The Life and Writings of Laura Marholm and Understanding Isak Dinesen. She has written several articles on contemporary Swedish historical fiction by writers such as P.C. Jersild, Sven Delblanc, Sara Lidman, Per Anders Fogelström and others.

Thomas A. DuBois holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Finnish Folk Poetry and the Kalevala, Nordic Religions in the Viking Age and Lyric, Meaning and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe. With Leea Virtanen he co-authored Finnish Folklore, and he has edited a collection of articles entitled Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia.

"The Nordic Storyteller offers a cornucopia of articles with a considerable historical range. We learn not only about saints, black books, strong wives, lumberjacks and hygiene, and about the role of storytellers across the Nordic region, but also about the rich cross-pollination between folklore and modern literature."

—Karin Sanders, University of California at Berkeley.

"The serious engagement in these essays with questions of nationalism, colonialism, representations, cultural history, folklore methodology, and film studies-- all treated with the sort of sensible and sensitive approach characteristic of the man to whom they are dedicated-- make this anthology an important contribution to scholarship on the Nordic region specifically, as well as to the humanities more generally."

—Steven Mitchell, Harvard University

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