Arv Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 2020 ARV Nordic Yearbook of Folklore Vol. 76 Editor ARNE BUGGE AMIUNDSEN OSLO, NORWAY Editorial Board Lene Halskov Hansen, København; Fredrik Skott, Göteborg; Suzanne Österlund-Poetzsch, Helsingfors (Helsinki); Terry Gunnell, Reykjavik Published by THE ROYAL GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS ACADEMY UPPSALA, SWEDEN Distributed by eddy.se ab VISBY, SWEDEN © 2020 by The Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy, Uppsala ISSN 0066-8176 All rights reserved Articles appearing in this yearbook are abstracted and indexed in European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences ERIH PLUS 2011– Editorial address: Prof. Arne Bugge Amundsen Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages University of Oslo Box 1010 Blindern NO–0315 Oslo, Norway phone + 4792244774 e-mail: [email protected] http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/forskning/publikasjoner/tidsskrifter/arv/index.html Cover: Kirsten Berrum For index of earlier volumes, see http://www.gustavadolfsakademien.se/tidskrifter/tidskrift/arv Distributor eddy.se ab e-post:[email protected] Box 1310, S-621 24 Visby Telefon +46(0)498 25 39 00 http://kgaa.bokorder.se Printed in Sweden Exakta Print, Malmö 2020 Contents Articles on Digital Humanities and Folklore Peter M. Broadwell & Timothy R. Tangherlini: Geist, Geest, Geast, Spøgelse: Challenges for Multilingual Search in Belief Legend Archives ........................................................................................... 7 Venla Sykäri: Digital Humanities and How to Read the Kalevala as a Thematic Anthology of Oral Poetry .............................................. 29 Trausti Dagsson & Olga Holownia: Legends, Letters and Linking: Lessons Learned from Amassing and Mapping Folklore and Viewing as Part of 19th-Century Culture Creation .......................... 55 Katherine S. Beard: The Eitri Database: A Digital Humanities Case Study ........................................................................................ 75 Pia Lindholm: Finland-Swedish Folklore as a Versatile Online Tradition Source ............................................................................... 93 Mari Sarv & Janika Oras: From Tradition to Data: The Case of Estonian Runosong .......................................................................... 105 Other articles Anders Gustavsson: Nineteenth-Century Cholera Epidemics in Sweden from a Popular Perspective ................................................. 119 Book Reviews Aarbakke, Thea: Forfattermuseumsfunksjonene (Lars Kaijser) ........... 151 Cocq, Coppélie & DuBois, Thomas A.: Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North (Alf Arvidsson) .................................... 156 Danielson, Eva: Skillingtryckarna (Gunnar Ternhag ) ......................... 159 Frykman, Jonas & Löfgren, Orvar: Den kultiverade människan (Mats Lindqvist) ............................................................................... 161 Gerndt, Helge: Sagen ‒ Fakt, Fiktion oder Fake? (Anders Gustavsson) ........................................................................ 165 Gustafsson, Sofia: Järtecken (Anders Gustavsson)............................... 166 Jarlert, Anders (ed.): Reformationen i Lund ‒ Malmö ‒ Köpenhamn (Anders Gustavsson) ........................................................................ 168 Klintberg av, Bengt: Vänster hand och motsol (Ane Ohrvik)............... 169 Lindqvist, Katja (ed.): Kompetens i museisektorn (Teemu Ryymin) ... 170 Løvlie, Birger et al. (eds.): Tru på Vestlandet. Tradisjon i endring (Anders Gustavsson) ........................................................................ 172 Lundqvist, Pia: Ett motsägelsefullt möte (Anders Gustavsson) ........... 173 Ramsten, Märta: De osynliga melodierna (Karin Hallgren) ................ 175 Rasmussen, Tarald (ed.): Å minnes de døde (Ulrika Wolf-Knuts) ....... 177 Resløkken, Åmund Norum: ’Ein lut av det nære levande livet’ (Torunn Selberg) .............................................................................. 179 Roos, Anna Marie: Goldfish (Ingvar Svanberg) .................................. 180 Schön, Ebbe: Ängel med bockfot (Anders Gustavsson)....................... 182 Strand, Karin: En botfärdig synderskas svanesång (Inger Lövkrona) .............................................................................. 183 Ternhag, Gunnar: Jojksamlaren Karl Tirén (Krister Stoor) ................. 186 Geist, Geest, Geast, Spøgelse Challenges for Multilingual Search in Belief Legend Archives Peter M. Broadwell and Timothy R. Tangherlini Abstract We describe the challenges of devising a federated multilingual search engine for a series of otherwise unconnected tradition archives. The international project, Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends (ISEBEL), solves several challenges from this broader problem. First, the collections are made searchable through a single interface by implementing an Open Archive Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) system for three target collections (Netherlands, Germany and Denmark). To address the problems of searching across multi- lingual collections, we devise a hybrid system that relies on Neural Machine Translation using a Transformer architecture, and expert created tables of domain specific terms. By integrating these approaches, users can search from a single portal over a corpus of nearly seventy thou- sand legends in English. Results are returned from all of the language groups in the collection, while places are projected on a map. Keywords: Legend, multilingual search engine, language, computational folkloristics, archives Introduction If legends collected in the late nineteenth century are any indication, rural Danish farming communities were the sites of fairly consistent – and alarm ­­­­ ing – supernatural intrusions. Witches threatened the production of milk and the churning of butter; ghosts and revenants rampaged through cemeteries and barns; the fields, dotted with boulders thrown by long vanished giants, were filled with hidden folk who, when angered, threatened to tear the roofs off farmhouses; basilisks banged about in old beer kegs; serpents slept in the stone walls separating fields; the local church, surrounded by even big- ger serpents, was also the stomping grounds of Satan; and brownies made life indoors unpredictable at best (Kristensen 1980). People venturing out- side the village could be waylaid by robbers in the woods, drowned by river spirits, seduced by elves, or lured to their deaths in the ocean by merfolk. Standing between villagers and these threats were Lutheran ministers, cun- ning folk, wandering Norwegians, brave farmhands or a person’s own quick wits or dumb luck. Late nineteenth century Denmark’s belief landscape, in 8 Peter M. Broadwell and Timothy R. Tangherlini short, was just as filled with dangers and disruptions as were the political, physical and economic landscapes of the time (Gunnell 2005; Tangherlini 2005). Indeed, it is this interdependence between belief and the lived world that undergirds interpretive perspectives on legends that reveal their crucial role in the ongoing negotiation of cultural ideology in times of considerable change (Gunnell 2009; Taussig 2010; Tangherlini 2013a). Of course, these observations about Denmark also lead to a question: while all this was going on in Denmark, what was happening in neighboring coun tries? Certainly, nineteenth century southern Sweden seemed to be in the grip of similar, yet subtly different, supernatural threats, while Norway’s tall mountains and deep fjords played host to a distinctive set of violently threatening beings (Klintberg 2010; Christiansen 1977). Northern Germany and the Nether lands again shared some overlap in the belief landscape, but the particular characteristics of their versions of these supernatural threats, along with other unheard-of threats (at least from the perspective of Danish farmers) ensured slight differences in the belief topography (Bächtold- Staubli et al. 1927–42; Saatkamp & Schlüter 1995). Iceland, perhaps because of its island status, had a divergent set of beliefs, although aspects of its witchcraft and wizardry had some commonalities with earlier, poten- tially pan-Nordic, beliefs (Mitchell 1997; Mitchell 2011; Gunnell 2012). Understanding the areas of overlap, commonality, and potential influence between and across not only national but also linguistic borders, provides greater nuance to interpretations of the impact of beliefs on worldview in local communities (Dundes 1971; Dégh 2001). Yet developing research col- lections from disparate archival and print resources that can help answer these questions is a considerable challenge. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mark the heyday of broad national folklore collecting and archiving, at least in Northern Europe (Estonian Folklore Archives 2017). Although most national archival col- lections were initially envisioned in the context of emergent Romantic nation alist ideals and, as such, to support the imaginings of the “nation” as a coherent culturally homogeneous entity, the linguistic diversity of “nations” necessarily also meant that many of these archives included records in all of the languages of the nation in question, whether those languages were con- ceived of as dialects or as wholly independent (Bendix 1997; Hult 2003). Searching even in a fairly narrow “national” archive, thus, could tax the linguistic abilities of many researchers (Gunnell 2010). The Danish folk- lore archive, for instance, includes stories recorded not only