Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/235

 Rh But Kristensen's view is a different one, and has also much to be said for it. In his eyes, folklore is not merely a collection of interesting legends, customs and beliefs, in which one specimen of each type is all that is wanted. Popular beliefs are to him not only a part of the history, but of the psychology of the people, and every detail which can help to secure a permanent image of what is essentially perishable is precious enough to be worth preserving. Hence he has not confined his interest to ballads, fairy-tales, ghost-stories, and whatever else folklore as ordinarily understood concerns itself with; he has also carefully noted and preserved common phrases and expressions, the common jokes of the country, and every little detail which could be gleaned from the older people as to the plain every-day life of the past generation. However little interest much of this may have for the present day, trivial and tedious as much of it may seem now, we have only to think how we should revel in such a collection relating to bygone centuries, to see that work of this kind is certain to rise in value with every decade that passes over it. Kristensen has made it possible for the future student to realize in all its details the mental and social condition of the average Jutland peasant, in a way that nothing else could have done. To do the same kind of work for our own village and country life would be no small claim on the gratitude of posterity for anyone who undertook it in the same spirit and with the same qualifications.

Even from a folklore point of view, however, this excess of material is in some ways a gain. While it may be true that one good version of a story renders a dozen poor ones of comparatively little value, yet the existence of that dozen establishes one fact, that the tale is really a popular and not an individual one. In cases where the different versions supplement each other, there can be little objection to giving all of them in full; in fact, this is much to be preferred to the formation