Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/232

 206 down without tasting it. But the hospitality was great, and these poor people shared their wretched food with me as with one of themselves. One woman used one of her husband's shirts as a table-cloth to do me honour, another wiped the ceiling dry three times in one evening, so that the water which dripped from it might not destroy my paper; a third wished to give me some elder-flowers home with me, they were the only thing she could part with; a fourth would darn my stockings and mend my clothes, and so on. In return I often had to write letters and contracts, be mediator in quarrels, and the like.

"In the next place the collector must be a swift penman, so as to write down quickly whatever is told. It plainly impresses them when the pen goes so rapidly, and when their own story is read out to them word for word, it makes them willing to tell more. It is my invariable rule to write down at once anything that I want to have. I never let the reciter or singer go through his story or ballad without setting it down there and then. Experience has shown me that it loses greatly when told a second time; the whole form is poorer and the presentation of it less lively."

In another passage, Kristensen emphasises the value of this method in these words:

"It is of no use to ask the teller of an Æventyr to repeat it exactly as he did before, for he neither can nor will do so; the story is got by heart, it is true, but it is no mere rigmarole, and the narrator puts something of his own into it, even accompanying his recitation with a certain amount of action and facial expression. All this cannot be reproduced in print, scarcely even imitated by another reciter."

It is one great advantage for the collector that the Danish reciters and singers seem as a rule to be fairly communicative with what they do know, and to have no objection to their words being taken down; some of them in fact become all the more eager to tell their stories, being convinced that the collector is serious and is not merely desirous of passing the time.

To win their full confidence, however, it is necessary to be thoroughly at home in the various dialects. This fact