| This study focuses on Swedish ballad collection and publications in the nineteenth-century (1809-1909), approaching the topic from the perspective of folklore studies and the history of ideas. Seven important ballad editions are examined, along with letters and manuscripts from intellectuals who collected and edited the editions, and socio-economic and cultural contexts of the singers from whom the ballads were collected. In each chapter, one singer and a ballad is selected for a contextualized close reading and interpretation, readings which are compared to the representations of the songs and singers offered by editors. The study argues that in creating a national narrative, Swedish intellectuals silenced the voices of ballad singers. Editors misrepresented their sources and ignored contexts from which the songs emerged in order to create an image of a unitary ancient literary history for Sweden. The study looks at the ways that class and gender were erased in order to justify middle class values and imagine what Benedict Anderson has referred to as "deep, horizontal comradeship". The ballad editions demonstrate a changing attitude towards lower class people, particularly as they became more literate over the course of the nineteenth century. In the latest collections examined, people of lower class status shifted the focus from texts to people. The study contributes depth and complexity to the notion of causality so central to Benedict Anderson's analysis of nationalism, focusing on the methods used to make people and texts into national symbols, and how singers created counter-narratives to nationalist stories. The collections and singers examined are: Leonhard Fredrik Raaf's ballad manuscripts and the singer Greta Naterberg, Erik Gustaf Geijer and Arvid August Afzelius's Svenska folkvisor fran forntiden (1814-1818) and Greta Naterberg, Adolph Ivar Arwidsson's Svenska fornsanger (1834-1842) and the singer Beata Mems(en), Gunnar Olof Hylten-Cavallius and George Stephens' Sveriges historiska och politiska visor I (1853) and Eriksvisan, Eva Wigstrom's Folkdiktning I (1880) and Richard Bergstrom's Svenska folkvisor (1880), August Bondeson's Viskbok (1903) and the singer Adolf Olsson, and railway worker Karl Sigfrid Johansson's handwritten songbook (1906-1908) and his musical parody of a Johan Ludvig Runeberg poem. |
