Erik Ljunberg Making Taxonomies of Supernatural Fauna a Cultural-Historical Investigation of the Construction of the Dwarf in Ord Og Sed

Erik Ljunberg Making Taxonomies of Supernatural Fauna A cultural-historical investigation of the construction of the dwarf in Ord og sed

Bachelor’s Thesis in Culture History 2018

Table of Contents Introduction 1 Knowledge is Culture 2 Traditionalization 4 The Source Material: Historical and Institutional Context 5 Questionnaires in Cultural Research 7 Questionnaire Nr. 22 - The Dwarf 8 Locating the Dwarf in the Replies 9 Constructing the Supernatural Beings as Characters in the Tradition 11 Conclusion 14 References: 15

Introduction “The flames, the flames are burning high in the ethnographic world!” This quote appears in Nils Lid’s foreword to his work on Christmas spirits and vegetation-demons (Lid 1933). It was first made in 1881 by Adolf Bastian, a major figure in German ethnography during the last half of the 19th century and a man who completed several trips around the world. His statement was made to lament the loss of the world’s ethnic cultures were undergoing rapid change in the face of colonization1. Norway in the early 20th century was not exactly a pre- industrial colony, but still a fundamental shift was occurring. As opposed to many other European countries, Norway was slow to industrialize its agricultural sector. Thus, in parallel with the unfolding ethnographic careers of Lid and his fellows, the commoditization of agriculture, bringing with it the powerful force of a cash-based market economy, was rapidly reshaping the contours of the Norwegian rural landscape. An old world was dying and a new one coming to take its place. Norwegian ethnographers heeded Bastian’s words and sent out a battle call urging people to salvage the last remains before they disappeared. Soon a rescue- operation came into effect. One small chapter in the history of this rescue-operation is the publication of Ord og sed, which I will say more about later. They were part of an attempt to

1 The exact quote found in Bastian’s work is slightly different: “Its burning in every nook and cranny of the ethnographic world; burning bright, fiercely, with full flame, it burns everywhere, a huge fire! And no one lifts a hand.”(Bastian 1881: 180, my translation).

collect as much as possible from the old way of life that was perishing. This also meant collecting information about folk-beliefs regarding supernatural beings. But merely collecting the information would not suffice; it also had to be put into a system. Organizing principles needed to be put in place which distinguished different supernatural beings from each other. Just like the animal realm had its taxonomies of different faunas, so too there had to be taxonomies of supernatural fauna. However, supernatural beings are not like other beings. They only exist in the imagination. Ways of classifying the animal realm may not function in the supernatural realm. Furthermore, classificatory systems come into being through human activity. The construction of the categories by which the world acquires coherence is an inherently social endeavor. It is subject to human needs, such as the need to prove a certain theory, or impose order and meaning on the world. We can demonstrate this by looking at the scientific treatment of the supernatural beings of folk-belief. A being whose outline was especially hard to delimit was the dwarf. By doing a close reading of questionnaire nr. 22 we can get a better idea of how the dwarf was constructed as a coherent and distinct being. The question, then, that needs to be asked is by what strategies was the dwarf constructed as a character in the folk-tradition?2

Knowledge is Culture In Plato’s Phaedo, he compares the skills of a dialectician to the skills of a butcher (Plato & Hackforth 2001: 133). A good butcher knows the animals’ anatomy well and makes his cuts right at the joints. This way he doesn’t use more energy than he needs. A good dialectician too, knows the anatomy of reality well, and when he puts his analytical scalpel to a phenomenon, he carves it right along its natural joints. Plato saw categorizing nature as a matter of discovering pre-existing divisions and naming them thereafter. The idea of a natural order which simply needs to be mapped out has remained a persistent idea in Western thought. We find the same idea embedded in Linné’s taxonomic system. However, it can be looked at in a different way. In the field of sociology of knowledge, classificatory systems are seen as inherently social products. As the sociologist Doyle McCarthy has noted; “Surely one of the singular insights of the sociology of knowledge for social scientific inquiry is to be found in its claim that social life does not stop at the “doors” of our being”(McCarthy 1996: 116). Rather, social life provides the space which structures what can be said, what is

2 Translation has been an issue in writing this thesis. There are many words in the Norwegian material that simply have no good correlate in the English language. If an approximate English phrase was available, I generally used it and noted the Norwegian term in the footnotes. Where a translation wasn’t possible, I used the Norwegian term in italics. The Norwegian word folkelivsgransking has been translated to “ethnology”.

considered worth investigating, and what categories knowledge shall be formulated within. McCarthy claims that knowledge is inseparable from culture, indeed, as she says, knowledge is culture. “To assert that knowledge is culture”, she elaborates, “[...] is to insist that various bodies of knowledge, such as those of the natural sciences or the social sciences, operate within culture—that they contain and transmit and create cultural dispositions, meanings, and categories”(McCarthy 1996: 116). Universities and research institutes play a special role in the creation of cultural categories, because categorization is such a fundamental part of what they do. Thus Arnfinn Pettersen says: “University subjects are a good way to understand the world, but they are also part of creating it by constructing terms and categories by which we make it meaningful” (Pettersen 1999: 74). This idea is repeated by the anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, who says:

The notion that scholarly formulations are abstract analytical tools occupying a special epistemological realm that stands apart from the phenomenal world they analyze has come under increasing attack. Theories and methodologies, rather, are coming to be regarded as cultural products that are deeply embedded in the social, political and historical circumstances of their production and reception. (Briggs 1993: 387)

This insight provides a good theoretical foundation to look at the questionnaires in Ord og sed, and how they attempt to approach the confusing array of entities in the fauna of folk- belief. Folklorists and ethnologists in the past had the challenging task of creating a system out of a sometimes bewildering complexity of beliefs. Kverndokk explains that “while traditional tales about the gnome, hulder, neck3 [...] and other beings are multitudinous and at times contradictory, folkloristics has developed a categorizing apparatus in order to create clear and discrete categories.” (Kverndokk 2011: 76). This especially applies to the beings in the questionnaires. More so than other aspects of folk-culture, the supernatural beings are examples of constructed categories. Ole Marius Hylland explains that the study of spirits and ghosts4 in Norwegian folkloristics has been a “character-constructing [...] enterprise” (Hylland 2011: 113). Hylland argues the folk-belief beings only appeared as characters to the degree they were constructed as such. This same problem occurred to Jochum Stattin in his doctoral work on the Swedish neck-tradition. He set out to investigate the neck-tradition, but

3 Translated from nissen, huldra and nøkken. 4 Translated from vette and gjengangere

was unable to subsume the material within a coherent category without distorting it. For some people, the neck was just a catch-all term for supernatural beings in general (Stattin 1984: 19). “After a while”, he says, “the neck-tradition, as well as other kinds of traditions, seemed to evaporate as soon as I put them under my magnifying glass” (ibid.)5. The neck did not appear as a differentiated and discrete being because it had a real existence in the world, but because it had been processed by the folkloristic categorizing apparatus. Science plays a part in creating the objects it studies, perhaps especially so in the cultural sciences. This is a basic premise in sociology of knowledge, and also the premise behind the claim that knowledge is culture, which we got from McCarthy6. It serves as the theoretical orientation for what will follow.

Traditionalization The term tradition stood at the centre of the questionnaires. In questionnaire nr. 22 about the dwarf, tradition is used in the singular form; the tradition. Phrasing tradition in singular form implies homogeneity. One gets the idea the tradition is something stable and monolithic. Indeed, folklorists and ethnologists operated under this assumption for decades. For Herder, the spoken poetic expressions of the people defied the passing of time. Their durability through the ages made them a stable rhythm. Their unchanging endurance allowed them to become like a song that could “be sung again for as long as men wanted to sing it” (Herder 1969: 85, cited in Bauman 2004). Considering the dwarf as part of the tradition endowed it with an authority that only tradition could impose. But if, as implied earlier, knowledge is culture, then also tradition must be culture. Tradition exists within the context of social life and thus embodies its fundamental meanings and categories. This moves us away from seeing tradition as something static to something dynamic. On this topic Bauman says: “In recent years [...] there has been an emergent reorientation among students of tradition, away from this reified view of tradition and toward an understanding of tradition as a discursive and interpretive achievement[...]”(Bauman 2004: 147). Tradition, according to Bauman, comes into being discursively. To describe how this happens he has chosen the term traditionalization. This opens up for the possibility of looking at the actual textual strategies

5 Stattin eventually abandoned the attempt to force coherence upon the neck-tradition, and instead focused on the cognitive pattern which all supernatural experiences were premised upon. My contention is that the editors of Ord og sed kept trying to construct the supernatural beings as coherent categories because of their potential as links between pre-Christian religion and contemporary folk-belief. 6 We could also mention Berger and Luckmann, who more than anyone have brought sociology of knowledge to the attention of academia. Their term reification, which denotes the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, is highly applicable to scientific treatment of supernatural beings in the folk-tradition (Berger & Luckmann 1991: 105).

by which traditionalization is accomplished. Through the process of traditionalization, statements about the dwarf achieve their legitimacy by locating the authorship of the utterances not with the informants or collectors, but in the tradition. When tradition is founded on successive repetitions through time - a song that is “sung again” - then statements about the dwarf made in the present, could be authorized by linking them to past discourse, giving the impression of continuity. Thus we can say the reification of the supernatural beings happened, in part, through a process of traditionalization. Resløkken has called the questionnaires “a technology that systematizes and translates a heterogeneous material into traditionalized texts” (Resløkken 2018: 29). In reading the questionnaire about the dwarf we are presented with a good example of how this technology operates.

The Source Material: Historical and Institutional Context Nemdi til gransking av Norsk nemningsbruk (NGNN from here on) started publishing a series of publications in 1934 called Ord og sed. The questionnaires were part of these publications. NGNN was part of a field of study called folkelivsgransking. To understand this field of study we must first mention that Norway has had a custom of studying folk-culture using primarily two lenses. One looks at things like legends, stories, fairytales and myths, and the other looks at things like objects, customs, tools, and architecture. This division of labor corresponds roughly to the split between the mental and the material.7 The immaterial sphere was mostly under the purview of folkloristics, while the material sphere came under the heading of ethnology, although its material focus did not become significantly pronounced until after 1950’s. The most important year in the history of Norwegian folkloristics was 1886 when Moltke Moe was named the first professor in “Norwegian language and folk-culture”, and the most important year for ethnology was 1940 when Nils Lid was named the first professor of ethnology (Amundsen 2013: 27). It's important to mention that these kinds of studies go back to the early origins of nationalism, and are intimately tied up what has been called both the discovery and invention of Norwegian culture (Eriksen & Rogan 2013: 14). In the first half of the 1800s figures like Faye, Landstad, Asbjørnsen and Moe began to travel around the country to collect pieces of what they saw as authentic Norwegian culture. Two ideas guided these efforts. The first was the idea that the rural peasant class were the ones who possessed true Norwegian culture. The second was that documenting this culture was valuable in itself,

7 Of course the real split between folkloristics and immaterial culture on the one hand, and ethnology and material culture on the other, was not always as easy to uphold, and their demarcations were more flexible in practice.

regardless of its theoretical usage. These notions remained as guiding principles for much of the history of folkloristics and ethnology, even long after they had become serious recognized academic disciplines, and they lingered still in the background as the questionnaires in Ord og sed were formulated.

Ord og sed was first published in 1934. By this time the study of national folk-culture had progressed significantly. Many different organizations were involved in studying and recording Norwegian culture and their activities were quite intertwined in practice. Among these, Norsk Folkeminnesamling was one of the central actors. It was established in 1914 to serve as national archive of material collected by folklorists. The folklore-community around Oslo became more organized because of it and it helped catalyze the careers of people like Knut Liestøl and Reidar Christiansen, which were important figures in establishing the field as an academic discipline. There was also Norsk Folkeminnelag which published the archived material, and of course the University of Oslo which held the professorships in folkloristics. In 1922, the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research (Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning in Norwegian) was established. One of its subsidiary organizations was NGNN, established in 1933 as the branch of ICCR responsible for studying Norwegian folklore and ethnology (Kyllingstad 2008: 287), and it did the actual publishing of Ord og sed. More specifically, the purpose of NGNN was to gather information on words used to describe beliefs, customs and objects (Kjus 2013: 144). It received its funding from ICCR and the Nansen fund. The main figure behind the organization was Nils Lid who had been hired by ICCR to carry out research on folklore and ethnology in 1924. Lid’s ideas provided the overarching program for the activity of the organization. One of his interests was drawing connections between contemporary beliefs and practices to an older pre-Christian religious tradition in order to elucidate a primitive universal foundation from which cultures had evolved. He rejected the split between folklore and ethnology and believed the old folk-culture should be studied as an organic whole (Kyllingstad 2008: 288). Since he operated under the assumption that old remnants of previous stages of development could survive the transition to later stages, an idea he got from Tylor, Lid believed that a broad analysis of rural societies based on great amounts of empirical data, combined with a comparative analysis of material gathered from around the world, would allow him to identify such remnants. One of the methods he chose to accomplish this was the use of questionnaires.

Questionnaires in Cultural Research Questionnaires as a research method has a long and widespread history. In the age of armchair anthropology, figures like Tylor and Morgan gathered much of their data through questionnaires sent out with travelers, explorers and missionaries (Stocking 1983). In Europe, the method was pioneered by the German folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt who sent out 150,000 questionnaires in Germany, France and Scandinavia in the third quarter of the 19th century, in an attempt to map out the customs of agricultural peoples in support of his thesis about a pan-European pre-Christian primitive religion based on the “vegetation-demon” (Tybjerg 1993: 30). Mannhardt was hugely influential on Lid’s own thinking, and Lid got many of his guiding insights from him. Indeed, Lid founded the whole project of the questionnaires on a Mannhardtian foundation. Swedish folklorists and ethnologists also collected material using questionnaires at the universities in Lund, Gøteborg, Uppsala and Stockholm (Kjus 2013: 139). Lid had tested the method himself in 1920 when compiling data for his master’s thesis, though on a much smaller scale. In 1929 he sent out a call to all the municipalities of Norway requesting people who could be responsible for receiving and responding to the questionnaires, and he subsequently appointed correspondents in 586 municipalities (Kyllingstad 2008: 286). 131 lists were sent out between 1934 and 1937 all over the country to a small legion of collaborators. Later on more questionnaires were sent out. Once a year all the questionnaires were gathered for publication in Ord og sed which came out almost every year between 1934 and 1947 (Resløkken 2018: 12). Typically a questionnaire would include a page or more expounding on the topic concerned, an attempt to both educate the correspondents and guide the collection of information. The topics they dealt with ranged far and wide due to Lid’s methodological aptitude to study folk-culture as an organic whole, and included things like fishing techniques, supernatural beings, baking, brewing and names of animals and plants. The use of questionnaires was based on a very specific research method premised on a two-staged process. First, collaborators gathered material from the informants and sent it in to NGNN. Then professional folklorists and ethnologists looked at the material and analyzed it. Splitting the research process into two stages, one executed by teachers, teaching-students, and farmers, which are typical examples of Lid’s collaborators (Kverndokk 2011: 85), and the other by educated analysts, gave the researchers the liberty to outsource the collection process to their army of collaborators, but it also presupposed the initial collection - the actual meeting between the collaborator and the informant - was something that could be left to untrained individuals, as if that stage of the process was somehow non-scientific. For the

researchers the split between research and collection had great benefits because it afforded them the opportunity to compile huge amounts of geographically specific data on a small budget8. But the presumption that the analysis was in some way absent from the formulation of the questions or the interaction with the informants, and could enter the process only in the final stage, had significant flaws. Having spent some time on the context of the questionnaires, we shall turn to look at one of them specifically.

Questionnaire Nr. 22 - The Dwarf In 1935 Ord og sed published their second issue with 15 different questionnaires. One of them concerned the supernatural being in the Norwegian folk-tradition called the dwarf. ICCR sponsored it and Nils Lid wrote it. He had a particular interest in supernatural beings in the folk-tradition at that time (Resløkken 2018: 160). NGNN sent it out to their army of collaborators and in return they received 45 replies. Replies came in from almost all the counties, except Finnmark, Hedmark and Aust-Agder. In terms of geography, the south- eastern parts of the country figured largely, producing 25 replies, while only eight replies came from Western Norway. Southern Norway produced three replies, while eight came from Trøndelag and three from Northern Norway. When the questionnaire came out, the nature and origin of the dwarf was a topic of debate. Its historical roots were hard to trace and finding characteristics that were shared across contexts was difficult. According to Reichborn-Kjennerud, the dwarf was a part of Norwegian folk-belief already during Snorri’s time (Reichborn-Kjennerud 1934: 87). He classifies it as a subcategory of the category vette, which is a sort of spirit9. Pre-Christian Norwegians, he says, thought dwarves were spirits of the dead. It is precisely this question of the dwarf’s status the questionnaire seeks to settle. Reichborn-Kjennerud deduces the historical characteristics of the dwarf from studying Norse etymology, since the only other historical source available was the Edda, which he thought was a poor indicator of folk-belief. Still he offers a short description. The dwarf was a small creature who lived in mountains and big rocks. He was nifty and good at producing different kinds of artifacts, especially if it involved blacksmithing. He was clever, but he had a temperament, and he was good with medicine and a bow and arrow. He was known for

8 The fact that it was geographically specific was not a coincidence. It was tailored to meet the research needs of researchers who were highly concerned with tracking the spread of elements of folk-culture in order to determine both the origin of such elements, and their “true versions”. 9 There is no good English translation of vette, so I chose the term spirit. The term vette has a specific usage in Norwegian folkloristics denoting spirits who are neither divine nor ghosts.

abducting people and taking them into the mountains (Reichborn-Kjennerud 1934: 87-92). Several of the questions in questionnaires touch upon these very characteristics. Whereas many questionnaires began with a long article, sometimes up to seven pages long, list nr. 22 only starts off with a few sentences. It asks: “Is there anything in the tradition about “the dwarf” as a spirit?”(Lid & Solheim 1935). And then as a preface to the list of twelve questions it says: “Of those beliefs and legends about him which are especially important to get details about, we mention:” The first question concerns the physical appearance of the dwarf. How he is dressed? What are the colors of his clothes? Specifically it asks if he has a special hat that can make him invisible and a belt that makes him strong. Question nr. 2 wants to know if the dwarf is afraid of the light. Many supernatural beings in Norwegian folklore had a fear of the light, and knowing if it applied to the dwarf was important in order to place him in the larger taxonomic system of folk-beliefs. Question nr. 3 asks whether he lives in the mountains or in big rocks, etc. In questions four and six they ask about his personality: if he is mischievous and temperamental, if he ever bothers people or makes them ill, or if he helps people who have been nice to him. Question nr. 5 says:

“Are there legends that the dwarf takes unbaptized children? Or that he abducts girls into the mountains? Is he generally interested in the women, and does it happen that he has children with them? Do they say that the dwarf is a thief and that he imitates people and gives them a stiff look? Do they use the phrase dwarf-tongue?”

The next question is: Have people heard the dwarf playing music in the mountains? In questions nr. 8 and 9 they ask about the dwarf’s abilities as a blacksmith; if he makes things out of metals, what the names of these things are, if rock crystals are called dwarf-rocks, and if they use these rocks to cure cows, and lastly if he has treasures in the mountain. Questions nr. 10 and 11 concern the dwarf’s status as a healer and if he is good with a bow and arrow. The last question asks if there is any tradition with the dwarf connected to Christmas, and if he was a spirit that had to be called home a certain day before Christmas and then driven out a certain time afterwards.

Locating the Dwarf in the Replies As was mentioned earlier, folklorists and ethnologists have toiled with the task of creating a system out of a sometimes bewildering complexity of beliefs. This is exemplified by Stattin’s difficulty in establishing distinctions between different traditions of supernatural beings, which, as Stattin said, “seemed to evaporate as soon as I put them under my magnifying

glass” (Stattin 1984: 19). The same problem arises when trying to define the unique characteristics of the dwarf. More specifically, the challenge lies in trying to separate the attributes of the dwarf from the attributes of two other beings: the gnome and the domestic spirit10. These were treated in the last issue of Ord og sed in 1947 and had their own separate questionnaires (Lid 1943). According to Nils Lid, one had to distinguish between the Christmas spirits11 and the domestic spirit. The domestic spirit went under several names: gardvord, nisse and haugebonde (Lid 1928: 63-64). In addition to this was the dwarf. But when reading the responses to the questionnaires a rigorous distinction is hard to find. Many use the terms interchangeably. One reply from Telemark who was responding to questionnaire nr. 22, has nothing to say about the dwarf, but he says they have something similar called hauge-bondi; in other words Lid’s domestic spirit. This creature, he adds, tends to stay around the houses, but also sometimes lives out in the woods, in the mountains or between the mounds. O. Skibdalen comments that in Telemark, the dwarf goes by the name nisse or haugety. The first name is the name for the gnome, and haugety is another name for hauge-bonde, or domestic spirit. He elaborates that the creature looks like a little man with a red hat, and he likes to live in mountains and mounds, descriptions we can recognize from questionnaire nr. 22. This kind of answer is almost formulaic for many of the responses. Instead of answering questions about the dwarf, or simply saying they have no information about him, they begin explaining the attributes of similar creatures. Apparently the dwarf, gnome and domestic spirit are so similar that the respondents felt it was appropriate to supply information about the other two if they couldn’t say anything about the first one. M. Sandem from Akershus mentions there is no tradition regarding the dwarf where he lives, but they have a significant gnome-tradition. Replying to questionnaire nr. 118 about the gnome, Bjørnhaug from Telemark notes that people in the old days used to believe in the gnome, and people still tell tales about him, he says. He adds that another name used to describe him is tusse. This name shows up in many replies to questionnaire nr. 22. P. Oppebøen from Telemark comments that the term “dwarf” is not used in his village, but rather tussen. He then goes on to list its characteristics: small man, red hat, lives in mountains, and so on. The same name appears countless times in replies the questionnaire about the gnome, as for example in the replies from J. Farsjø and G. Smeland. Replies to other questionnaires also contain this interchange of terms. S. Ryssdal from Sogn og Fjordane, replying to the

10 Nisse and gardvord in Norwegian. 11 Jolesvein in Norwegian

questionnaire about the domestic spirit, starts relating stories about the gnome. In another reply to the same questionnaire B. Skipevåg from Rogaland says another name for the domestic spirit is tuftekall. This name appears again in F. Salveson’s reply to the questionnaire about the gnome as he is listing alternate names. By now it should be evident that one would have a hard time fitting these beings in a taxonomic system. There are no clear-cut divisions separating the gnome, the domestic spirit and the dwarf. Rather, it seems we are dealing with belief-complexes with partial overlap. Of course there are regularities and patterns that show relative stability. Some descriptions about the dwarf are never used about the gnome, such that he is good with a bow and arrow. Many descriptions about the domestic spirit are never used about the dwarf, such that he guards the farm. But many descriptions are used about all three of them, for example that they resemble small men with colored hats who sometimes live in mounds. The problem arises when trying to categorize these beings by the same principle as beings in the animal kingdom. They have completely different modes of existing. The supernatural beings in the folk-tradition have a narrative existence; they exist in stories. Thus they will be different depending on the story being told. If they appear as distinct entities it is because they have been constructed as such. In Kverndokk’s terms, they have been put through the folkloristic “categorizing apparatus” (Kverndokk 2011: 76). Or, to use Hylland’s phrase, they have been subject to a “character- constructing [...] enterprise” (Hylland 2011: 113), or with Resløkken, a “technology that systematizes and translates a heterogeneous material into traditionalized texts” (Resløkken 2018: 29). We can now look at how this happens in questionnaire nr. 22.

Constructing the Supernatural Beings as Characters in the Tradition Earlier we noted how statements about the dwarf achieved their legitimacy by locating the authorship of the utterance not with the informants or collectors, but in the tradition. There are two grammatical devices which achieve this and they both occur in the first sentence: “Is there anything in the tradition about “the dwarf” as a spirit?” One is phrasing tradition in the singular form. Once tradition is made singular it obtains the unchanging nature which is required for it to grant legitimacy to the dwarf’s existence. Traditionalization has a reifying function because it bestows legitimacy on the objects of tradition. The other grammatical maneuver is the choice of the word “in”. Tradition is formulated as a place the dwarf exists within. Things abide within the tradition as if it was a storage space. Once the dwarf is located there, all subsequent mentions of him refer to his location within this space. We also said that tradition receives its authority from being imagined as a repeating pattern through

time, or a song that is “sung again”. Furthermore, since every “song” gets repeated or re- performed, a link is formed between the current performance and its earlier iteration, which again is linked to its previous iteration, and so on. Herein lies the notion that texts (or utterances) in the tradition form an intertextual chain stretching backwards in time. Or as Bauman has said: “When a text is “sung again,” an intertextual relationship is established, the core of an intertextually constituted tradition of textual continuity through time” (Bauman 2004: 147). Placing an utterance within the intertextual chain not only lends it the authority tradition endows, but since tradition is premised upon a constant recontextualisation of utterances as each utterance is reiterated, this both serves to detach the utterances from their context, and underscores their constancy across contexts. If we imagine not only utterances to be part of this process, but also textual entities such as the dwarf, then it becomes clear how the process of traditionalization served to reify its existence. Resløkken points out something interesting about questionnaire nr. 22. In the first sentence the dwarf is written with quotation marks. Those who know Lid’s larger research project can surmise that this grammatical measure is meant to accentuates the dwarf’s true status as a spirit resulting from personification (Resløkken 2018: 161). Nils Lid subscribed to the theory that personification was a process that produced beliefs in spirits. Personification happened in primitive stages of cultural evolution when people symbolized natural phenomena as real entities (Lid 1928: 25). For example, Lid claimed the last sheaf of the harvest was a personification of the fertility of the soil. When the dwarf is assumed to be a spirit and thus a personification, its temporal roots suddenly extend far back into the past. The dwarf’s status as a distinct being in the folk-tradition becomes strengthened by anchoring it in the ancient past. As noted by Resløkken, the quotation marks also have another effect (Resløkken 2018: 163). Once the quotation marks have been used in the first sentence, they disappear and the dwarf is written without quotation marks in the remainder of the text. This has to do with the second sentence in the questionnaire, which goes: “Of those beliefs and legends about him which are especially important to get details about, we mention:” In other words, all the questions which follow concern the dwarf as a character in beliefs and legends. Except for the last question where the quotation marks are back again. It asks if the tradition contains anything about the dwarf as a spirit that had to be called home a certain day before Christmas and then driven out a certain time afterwards. Now the dwarf is not a character in the beliefs and legends anymore. The quotation marks are there to underscore the fact that the dwarf is not really a dwarf, but a special kind of spirit. The act of putting in the quotations marks puts the whole status of the dwarf into question and gives him two layers. One

superficial layer, and a second, more fundamental layer where the dwarf’s true identity is revealed. Splitting the dwarf into two beings, one apparent being and another real being, while emphasizing his real being, further solidifies his status as a distinct being in the folk- tradition. The questionnaire also uses another method to construct the dwarf as a character; describing his physical characteristics and his feelings and temperament. In his article about another supernatural being, Ole Marius Hylland says literary analysis commonly distinguishes between three different techniques a text can use to establish a character (Hylland 2011: 112). In the first one the narrator provides some commentary on the person's characteristics. Questionnaires which had longer introductions are good examples of this. Technique number two is to let the text show the person through descriptions of visible and audible external characteristics. The first question is a good example. It asks about his looks and the colors of his clothes. Then it gets more specific and asks if he has a hat, helmet or belt. These questions lead the readers of the questionnaire to visualize the dwarf as a concrete, visible being with a specific appearance. The third technique Hylland mentions is to let the reader experience how the character thinks and feels. Examples of this in the questionnaire are the many references to the dwarf’s psychological traits. Is he favorable and helpful? What is his temperament? Is he prone to anger and rage? Is he quick to learn? These questions lead the reader to get a sense, not merely of the dwarf’s visible and external characteristics, but of his mental life. This is when the dwarf as a character really starts to appear. The reader has to use his or her own feelings as the reference point when imagining how the dwarf feels. The readers project their anger in place of the dwarf’s anger, thus creating a bond which certainly serves to fortify the dwarf’s status as a character. The two literary techniques that Hylland mentions, describing the exterior and interior of the character, operate in the questionnaire through the questions about physical appearance and psychological traits. Through inquiring about the visible characteristics of the dwarf, an image is subsequently evoked in the imagination of the reader, and just like characters come to life in novels through descriptions, the dwarf also comes to life as a character through these visual cues. And just as intimacy is established between readers and characters in novels through revealing glimpses of the characters inner life, the interior depth of the dwarf is established by references to his temperamental disposition. As a result the dwarf emerges as a constructed literary character. The literary character-building in combination with the process of traditionalization are the two main factors which contribute to the reification of the dwarf.

Conclusion In this thesis I have assumed that social and cultural factors determine categorization rather than the things being categorized. The problem of categorization is something which particularly afflicted folklorists and ethnologists who toiled with the task of creating a system out of the multitudinous and sometimes contradictory array of supernatural beings in the folk- tradition. This became particularly evident when we compared replies to the questionnaires about the dwarf, gnome and domestic spirit where many informants did not distinguish consistently between them. Looking at how the publishers of Ord og sed set forth to investigate the dwarf gave us the opportunity to see the various means by which the category of “dwarf” was constructed and reified. One of these was linking contemporary discourse about the dwarf to past discourse. The textual strategies used to do this we called traditionalization. I also claimed that the continuous recontextualization of texts in the tradition, which detaches the text from any particular context while simultaneously emphasizing its constancy across contexts, had a reifying effect. Moreover, claiming a divide between the dwarf as a real being and an apparent being, gave the dwarf added substance. Literary techniques of constructing a character played a role in this as well. We see, then, at last that categories such as the dwarf are cultural categories. They arise out of a larger field which simultaneously contains the scientist, the informant and the belief-complex, where each plays a part. In the case of the cultural-historical investigation of the dwarf carried out by the early Norwegian ethnographers, this larger field shaped the way knowledge was pursued and formulated. The nation-building foundation of early Norwegian ethnography, along with the individual projects of the scientists, inspired as they were by the ethnographic trends of their time, being evolutionist and origin-seeking in nature, significantly influenced the way the scientists formulated their agendas and interacted with their data. Thus the slogan “knowledge is culture” calls for a different approach to investigating material such as the questionnaires in Ord og sed. The question becomes not “is this good or bad science”, but rather; “what was the specific configuration of the cultural field such that it created the necessary preconditions for the emergence of this specific project of inquiry?” Despite all of this there is a tendency to forget the social reality of certain categories. This is certainly the case with the supernatural beings in Norwegian popular conception. Little has remained of their inconsistencies and ambiguities in popular belief. We remember them through their constructions, as coherent, whole, and precise. For this we have to give some credit to the early Norwegian ethnographers.

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