Axel Olrik

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Axel Olrik (1864-1917) was a Danish folklorist, and a pioneer in the methodical study of oral narrative.

His Principles for Oral Narrative Research, recently translated by K. Wolf and J. Jensen, Bloomington, Ind., 1992, was first published (in Danish) in 1921, after Olrik's early death (Nogle grundsætninger for sagnforskning).

Olrik applied his methods also on the Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus, attempting to reconstruct the sources used by Saxo.

Summary of the Principles

“Principles” is divided into five chapters comprising 196 sections. The book is quite short; the translation runs to only 115 pages.

Each section is concise and precise in defining subjects such as the different types of oral narratives (historical saga, lay saga, legend, etc.), how to determine when two unrelated narratives have been combined and how to disentangle them, horizon and localization (the geographic setting of a tale and a geographical feature used to substantiate a story), and the Epic Laws. Some sections include Professor Olrik’s illustrations from Scandinavian material.

Epic Laws

The Epic Laws describe many features familiar from fairy tales: three characters participating in the story (Cinderella and her two stepsisters); ascent, by which Olrik means that the last occurrence of an event is decisive (it is baby bear who discovers Goldilocks); use of actions rather than descriptions to illustrate a character’s personality; and the element of the fantastic that creeps in during transmission, even when the oral narrative is based on historical events.

Beyond the Laws

The Epic Laws take up only twenty sections of Olrik’s work. The rest consists of definitions, formulae for analyzing narratives, and observations of how narratives pass from oral tradition into writing and back. Examples follow.

• Oral narratives must be studied as part of the collective literature of the people who produced the narrative, if only for its content describing social organization and social customs which do not appear in writings produced by the culture. §1
• Definition of a self-contained narrative as a unified plot, the episodes of which are necessary to moving the story along, and are the type of thing seen in oral narratives (as defined in the Epic Laws). If a self-contained narrative is extracted from a longer narrative, and shares characters with the rest of the narrative, then the extracted portion is genuinely part of the longer narrative and not a stand-alone story. §26-§27
• Whoever claims to have identified written material as a source of an oral narrative, is responsible for proving the assertion. §31
• Written sources may contribute to oral narratives but are almost never accurately orally transmitted, mutating to something more like indigenous folklore of the transmitters. §48
• Oral narratives with a localization (an indication of a geographical feature of the people’s residence) are always based on some historical or cultural event of the people transmitting them. §130, §144
• To demonstrate a relationship between two narratives, first determine the type of the narrative, then examine the individual episodes as to number, content, and sequence. When these are identical, then same-named characters in each narrative, who fulfill the same roles and have the same characteristics, can be equated. §147
• Oral narratives never carry the impression of a single person’s style unless they are recorded very close to the beginning of their transmission. §164

Doublet

Olrik emphasizes that oral narratives frequently contain doublets, in the definition of two similar episodes that follow one after the other and are apparently accepted by the transmitter as equally important. (§36) The transmitter of the doublet does not consciously know that they are versions of the same story. (§155) Sometimes they derive from separate sources which end the same and have been conflated over the years of transmission. (§156) Sometimes one version arises as the transmitters tried to lengthen the narrative. (§157) If the doublet produces an abrupt break in the plot, it may have been added recently and if not, it developed early in the transmission history. (§158-159) Olrik urges caution in deciding whether a doublet is present or not. (§160)

Impact

Olrik lectured on the Epic Laws in 1908 and Hermann Gunkel read a transcript of the lecture. He was so impressed that he corresponded on the subject with Olrik and refers to the laws in Legends of Genesis. Susan Niditch refers to them in her Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature, a study related to orality as defined by Eric Havelock. Otherwise little about Olrik’s work besides the Epic Laws has made its way into scholarly endeavor, according to the introduction to the English translation.