Daisies Rise to Become Oaks. The Politics of Early Folktale Collection in Northern Europe

It is well known that the first collections of folktales played a key role in the “creation” of national identity in many nations in the mid-nineteenth century. This wider political role is often most apparent in the introductions written to accompany these early volumes, which give readers guidance as to how the material contained in the volumes should be understood. This article compares several such introductions from Northern Europe, namely those written to accompany Norske Folkeeventyr (Jørgen Moe, 1852), Popular Tales from the Norse (Sir George Dasent, 1859) and Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Jón Árnason, 1862–64), noting not only the differing functions that the authors of these introductions saw their work as having, but also the complex web of academic relationships and influences that lie behind the genesis of these works.