ეპიკური კანონების კონცეფცია სკანდინავიურ ფოლკლორისტიკაში. THE CONCEPTION OF EPIC LAWS IN NORDIC FOLKLORISTICTS

Abstract

The first decade of the 20th century was the most fruitful period for the discipline of folklore studies – design on international catalogue of the system of European tale types, revised many times and constituted a fundamentally edition for scholars oriented on historical- comparative research. At that time started the first challenges to structural studies of narrative genres. These researches are not as well known as the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) and Vladimir Propp (1895-1970). In 1908 at the 4th interdisciplinary congress in Berlin has been presented the papers of Scandinavian folklorists Axel Olrik (1864- 1917), Kaarle Krohn (1863-1933), and Alexander Bugge (1870-1929). The essay of Axel Olrik was an attempt to delineate some of the principal laws governing the composition of folk narrative. Unlike folklore studies of the same time, Olrik’s “Epic Laws of Folk Narratives” (1909) have withstood the criticism of the passing years and they continue to be a strong theoretical background for each new generation of folklorists. The paper attempts to present Axel Olrik’s essay from the perspective of contemporary folkloristics. The German word “Sage”, as defined by Olrik, is virtually an all-inclusive term and is meant to incorporate such forms as folktale, myth, legend, and folksong. This definition is important inasmuch as Olrik feels that “the Epic Laws” are not limited to just one genre. To Olrik the world of Sage is an independent domain, a realm of reality separate from the real world, subject to its own rules and regulations. These “Sagenwelt” rules are such that they take precedence over the everyday rules of objective reality. It is for this reason, he argues, that folklore must be measured by its own laws, not the laws of everyday life. Folklore does not have to obey any laws but its own. Axel Olric calls the formal rules of folk narratives “the Epic Laws” which inlculde: the Law of Opening and Closing, the Law of Repetition, the Law of Three, the Law of Two to a Scene, the Law of Twins, the Importance of Final Position (‘das Achtergewicht’), the Law of the Single Strand, the Law of Pattering, the Use of Tableaux Scenes, the Logic of the Sage, the Unity of Plot, and the Concentration on a Leading Character (Olrik 1965: 140). Whenever a series of persons or things occurs, then the principal one will come first. Coming last, though, will be person for whom the particular narrative arouses sympathy. We may designate these relationships with nautical expressions, “the Weight of the Bow” and “the Weight of the Stern” (Dan. ‘forvaegt’, ‘bagvaegt’). The centre of gravity of the narrative always lies in the Weight of the Stern (Germ. ‘das Achtergewicht’). Olrik’s conception of these laws is analogous to what anthropologists term a superorganic conception of culture. By superorganic, anthropologists mean that culture is an autonomous abstract process, sui generis, which requires no reference to other orders of phenomena for an explanation of its origin, development, and operation. If the organic level includes man, the superorganic is “above” man, and it is independent of and thus not reducible to purely human terms. The rationale is that just a man himself is considered to be more than the sum of inorganic (chemical) elements of which he is composed, so the superorganic is aumed to be more than the organic elements which underlie it. Superorganicists in anthropology have abstract patterns or principles, such as evolution, governing human behavior and culture. Because Olrik’s epic laws are conceived to be superorganic, thei presented as actively controlling individual narrators. The folk narrator, according to this view, can only blindly obey the epic laws. The superorganic laws are above any individual’s control. This kind of thinking, although it apparently makes folklore somewhat akin to a natural science, takes the folk out of folklore. With this approach, it becomes almost irrelevant that folklore is communicated by human individuals to other human individuals. From the point of view of modern folkloristics, this topic is quite suspicious. Olrik was not the only folklorist to advocate superorganic laws. An example is Walter Anderson’s law of self-correction, according to which narratives essentially correct themselves and thereby keep their remarkable stability safe from the possible ravages of errors or inadvertent changes (Anderson 1923: 397-403). Folklore because of its rigid adherence to recurring forms and themes makes excellent source material for those interested in discovering principles controlling human culture generally. Without of doubt, Olrik’s theory on epic laws is one of the strongest arguments in favor of a structural approach to folklore.