Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/140

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Society has lately been founded in Denmark under the name of "Danmarks Folkeminder," and has issued as its first publication a book of 115 pp. entitled "Fra Dansk Folkemindesamling, Meddelelser og Spörsmål." ("From the Danish Folklore Collection, Communications and Questions.") Copenhagen, 1908.

The first article, by Axel Olrik, the chairman of the Society, gives an excellent account of the National Folklore Collection referred to in the title, of which he himself is the director. It was founded in 1905 as a special department of the Kongelige Bibliotek, or State Library, the nucleus of the collection consisting of the large mass of material, both folk-songs and folklore, collected by Svend Grundtvig and purchased after his death by the State. To this Herr Evald Tang Kristensen has generously added his own invaluable collection of many thousand songs, poems, and tales noted during the last forty years direct from the mouths of the people, while Dr. H. F. Feilberg's complete folklore library of over 3000 volumes is also destined to find its way ultimately into the department. Several smaller collections have also been acquired, and new material is constantly being added, including everything collected by the "Danmarks Folkeminder" Society. It seems, indeed, according to the prospectus here given, that the society has been founded mainly for the purpose of working for the national collection, and the parts played by the two organisations are somewhat difficult to distinguish. Among other interesting additions to the library will be a set of copper reproductions now being prepared from phonographic records of folk-songs taken in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland.

But the directors of the new department had no intention of making it a mere storehouse of material; they were determined from the first that it should be also a workroom where native and foreign investigators could conveniently carry out their researches, and to this end they have prepared a series of catalogues and subject indexes which must prove of ever-increasing