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within societies that for the most part lack writing, and that was the case for
nordic pre-Christian religion. although many dissenting views have been
advanced over the years about the precise operation and implications of oral
societies, one principle on which I think everyone can agree is that oral socie-
ties have more textual variation than written societies, whether we think of
the oral epic singers in the Balkans who told Milman Parry that the various
versions of a given song they had sung onto his wax cylinder recordings were
absolutely identical, even though any literate person reading transcriptions
can see that they were not, or if we think of the copiousness that Walter ong
said was typical of orality, or of the homeostasis described by Goody and
Watt, to name just three of the pioneers. today we can see that many of these
founding fathers were talking at cross purposes, and certainly the newer field
of memory studies has been able to generate a far greater consensus, but vari-
ation is an absolute fundamental of oral societies.
Variation has also been a particular focus of the field of folkloristics.
the historic-geographic method is at bottom an attempt to impose order
in a world of variation (and the performance metaphor foregrounds other
matters). But actually by the time Julius Krohn was finding his way to
the historic-geographic method through his study of Kalevala-style poetry,
professional folkloristics had come up with another, in my view better and
more permanent, way to deal with variation. as I mentioned earlier, the first
academic appointment in folkloristics at the university of Copenhagen,
even though it was called nordic philology, fell to Svend Grundtvig in 1863.
fifteen years earlier he had emerged the victor in the so-called “ballad-conflict”
(“folkevisestriden”), which attacked head-on the issue of variation. Ballads had
been in print for centuries in Denmark, always with the principle “one ballad,
one text.” Ballad editors compared the various versions available to them and
came up with one text, most often a composite. When, in 1847, Grundtvig
issued plans for a new edition of Danish ballads, famously promising to the
Danish reading public all there was of the ballad tradition, as it was – that
is, publishing all the versions of a given ballad, from early printed editions,
from manuscripts, and from oral traditions, using the original ortho-
graphy, and of registering variant readings in an apparatus – the reaction
was mixed. Detractors, led by the indefatigable lexicographer, historian,
and literary critic Christian Molbech, objected that such an edition would
be an unreadable mess; but in the end the issue was, I think, partly aes-
FOLKLORISTICS, MYTH, AND RELIGION