Martin Sejer Danielsen

The dissertation examines place-name explanatory elements in the folkloristic genre of the legend. Empirically, I have analyzed material collected by Evald Tang Kristensen (1843–1929) in Northern Schleswig around 1900. Theoretically and methodically, I recreate the original contexts within which the legends were told, with the main focus on the biographies and repertoires of three legend tellers and the legends' relationship with the external landscape.

The dissertation takes as its starting point a critical examination of the research discourses in which the phenomenon has earlier been mentioned. Scholars have been interested in the legend as historical evidence for the origin of the place-name, and in other discourses scholars have argued for a common human need to explain things which could not immediately be understood and maybe even to recreate meaning in what appeared to be a 'meaningless' place-name.

Rejecting these generalized assumptions, I took my point of departure in an opposite hypothesis: People first at foremost want to tell legends with all their multi-faceted meanings, and the place-name explanatory element is thus a secondary product.

Reintroducing the theory of stedfæstelse (ɔ: 'anchoring') by Axel Olrik (1864--1917), I show how the place-name explanatory element in a legend works as the Aristotelian paralogism (fallacy) of reversed consequence. Thus the element is part of the rhetorical strategies which the legend teller uses to give credibility to his legend.

In the repertoire analyses I showed how place-name explanatory elements are closely connected to the context in which the legend was originally told. The legend teller Christian C. Haugaard used the elements as part of his personal style of narration together with his tendency to narrate with multiple details such as exact dates. He even sometimes made up place-name explanatory elements while he was narrating for Tang Kristensen.

The married couple Ane Poulsen and Jes Marcosen were, in opposition to Christian, passive tradition participants, and their legend-telling was first and foremost prompted by their wish to help Tang Kristensen in his folkloristic collecting project. Thus they try to remember what they know about antiquarian notes connected to the local landscape, including ideas on the origin of place-names.

Relationen mellem stednavne og den folkloristiske genre sagn er et meget lidt udforsket emne. Det til trods for en ellers oplagt kobling mellem de to fænomener der begge er produkter af menneskets sprogbrug og verdensopfattelse. Med denne bog præsenteres en teoretisk og metodisk forankret undersøgelse i et emne der kan betegnes folkloristisk onomastik. Undersøgelsens empiriske materiale består af stednavne fra Samsø og tilknyttede sagn fra det 19. til begyndelsen af det 20. århundrede. Bogen er en revideret version af forfatterens speciale fra 2013.

ISBN: 978-87-408-3075-0

A text critical edition of The Scanian Law (Danish: Skånke Lov) from the medieval Danish Runic manuscript AM 28 8vo (c. 1300) in The Arnamagnæan Collection at University of Copenhagen. The edition is a transliteration from Runes to Latin letters with text critical comments.

Edited for the Society for Danish Language and Literature (Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab) and published on the page 'Tekster fra Danmarks middelalder og renæssance 1100–1550'. Please follow the URL.

Always and over 20 years known under the by-name Fabricius: A study of name changes on the island of Samsø in accordance with the law of April 1, 1905

The article introduces the law on name change from April 1, 1905 with a study of changes of last names that took place on the Danish island of Samsø in the second half of 1905. The empirical data consists of the Name Change Register from the judicial district of Samsø. The law did not prevent the applicants from being granted the same names, so while 118 permissions to name change were granted on Samsø in 1905, affecting 407 individuals (i.e. main applicants plus their families), only 72 unique last names were granted, and only 65 if spelling variants were merged. Of all the applicants only three were not born on Samsø, and many of the names required were established by-names on Samsø. Of the 118 main applicants, as many as 113 had a patronymic as the last name before they were granted the right to change the name. Of these a small majority of applicants with primary patronymics as birth names kept their patronymics as middle names, while a large majority with secondary patronymics as last names chose to delete their patronymics.

Legends as a Source in Place-Name Research – a Preliminary Study

The study introduces legends as a source in place-name research. The article focuses on the folkloristic repertoire of dyer Christian C. Haugaard (1836–1920) noted down by the Danish folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen (1843–1929) in 1894 and 1902. From Tang Kristensen's original field records, approximately 230 place-names are registered from Haugaard’s repertoire of 36 legends and one verse; when recurring place-names are sorted together, 116 unique names remain. These relatively high numbers are primarily caused by two aspects: On one hand a legend's generic nature is to be localized in the storyteller's known landscape, and on the other hand the collector Tang Kristensen, inspired by the scholarly discourses of his time, could have influenced his informants to use place-names in their stories. With the point of departure in a legend example from Haugaard’s repertoire, the article examines the place-names found in legends. Many place-names are, admittedly, already known and registered in our archives, often in much older sources. But the legends also show hitherto unknown place-names, of which Den Røde Bro, the name of a bridge, is introduced and interpreted.

"Life Story and Storytelling: A Preliminary Study of the Southern Jutlandic Storyteller Cæcilie Magdalene Hansen (1829–1919)"

The article introduces hitherto undiscovered biographical information on the storyteller Cæcilie Magdalene Hansen interviewed on the island of Als in Southern Jutland by the Danish folklore collector Evald Tang Kristensen in 1894. Three legends of Cæcilie’s folkloristic repertoire are analysed in relation to her biography and the historical time she lived in.

Cæcilie was born in the parish of Broager in 1829 as the daughter of a lodger, but soon thereafter she and her destitute family moved to a poorhouse. After Cæcilie in 1855 gave birth to an illegitimate son in the workhouse of Broager, she 1856 married the son’s father with whom she lived as a lodger and got six additional children. After her husband’s death in 1874, she remarried in 1878 with a widower from the island of Als; the island on which Tang Kristensen met her in 1894. In 1919 she died 89 years old and very poor.

In many of her legends, Cæcilie describes people’s meetings with mound dwellers; meetings that often involve her own family members as witnesses.

According to Cæcilie, her own mother from the west coast of Southern Jutland also had an extraordinary experience in which an almost biblical flood was predicted. When Cæcilie ascribes these experiences to her own family members it adds credibility to her legends.

In a larger perspective, the legends explore the otherwise unpredictable nature of threats against living conditions; threats that are especially great when you belonged to the lowest class in rural society where even small changes in weather conditions and society in general could send you on the wrong side of the hunger line.

Med udgangspunkt i to sagn indsamlet af den danske folkemindesamler Evald Tang Kristensen (1843–1929) hos informanten Christian C. Haugaard (1836–1920) i Åbenrå i 1894, viser jeg, hvordan sagn skaber betydning for fortælleren set i relation til hans egen person og til den samtid, som han levede i. Haugaard fødtes som søn af en kådner i Nørre Hjarup i Øster Løgum Sogn, men som ung flytter han til Åbenrå hvor han bliver udlært farversvend. Haugaard blev i eftertidens Åbenrå kendt for sin stærke dansksindede side, og han fremstilles som en person, der trodsede den tyske øvrighed. Denne side af ham kommer til udtryk i et sagn, hvor han netop afsøger temaet om forskellen mellem juridiske og moralske love i samfundet. Sagnet er i øvrigt inspireret af en litterær kilde. I det andet sagn kommer hans forhold til samfundets økonomiske vækst til udtryk; man ser hvordan han selv er opvokset i den fattigere del af landbosamfundet, ligesom man fornemmer, hvordan han har prøvet at ændre på sit sociale ophav, hvilket måske ikke helt er lykkedes.

In this paper I question the folkloristic categories of the etiological legend and the place-name explanatory legend. The paper was read at the symposium held in the memory of Wilhelm F.H. Nicolaisen (1927–2016) arranged by the Scottish Place-Name Society at the University of Edinburgh on November 5, 2016.

In Danske sagn [“Danish Legends”] (1892-1901; 1928-1939), the Danish folklore collector Evald Tang Kristensen (1843- 1929) published some legends under the typological headline “Kirkenavnets fremkomst” [“Appearing of the Church Name”]. With the point of departure in my MA-thesis (Danielsen 2013) some theoretical and methodical principles regarding the work with name explanatory legends are introduced, and a qualitative selection of legends explaining the origin of church names are analysed in order to demonstrate how these legends differ from the onomast’s understanding of the names. Examples of legends or legend pieces presented in this article are stories of naming processes, and it is shown how the church name as name within the legends is quite different from name researcher Bent Jørgensen’s definition of the names as formally secondary compounds.

The medieval Danish manuscript AM 28 8vo containing int. al. the Scanian Law is written entirely in runes. An innovation in the runic punctuation system has been made during the transmission of runes to Latin manuscript culture. The word dividers consisting of two dots above each other are sometimes expanded with more dots, so that three, four or  five dots are set in a line above each other. These expansions may very well have been made by the writer himself and/or a corrector, but the possibility that later readers made some expansions cannot be ruled out. Although these expanded word dividers appear with some irregularity, the function of them is to divide chapters into sentences, clauses and other more or less independent parts. As such the expanded word dividers have a function similar to the punctuation found in a closely related manuscript of the Scanian Law written in the Latin alphabet. This is a discovery that has not previously been made.