SYMPOSIUM II

Archiving Folklore

FIRST SESSION

Chairman: Miss Maud Karpeles

CHAIRMAN: The outstanding work of Swedish scholars in building up and arranging folklore archives has long been recognized. Many of the best trained archivists in Europe have studied in Sweden and the general system worked out there has been taken over in other places. Since the first question we wish to open up in this discussion is that of the arranging of folklore archives I am glad that Dr. Åke Campbell of the Dialect and Folklore Archive in Uppsala has agreed to make the opening statements.

DR. ÅKE CAMPBELL (Landsmåls och Folkminnes Arkivet, Uppsala, Sweden): I should like to start by pointing out some facts about archives in general and about how they have originated and developed. In different countries their history has followed entirely different lines. In some countries they have been established by government authority and in some have been under the universities. But however they have been supported, they have all originated through the interests of individuals and of private local societies. This is even true of the large central archives. Every archive is the development of an idea of some one pioneer in the field. In considering archives it is always important to think of the fundamental urge that started the organization. Why did a particular archive start? What constitutes the principal point of its present-day development and aims? And what general plans are there for its future?

Many of the European folklore archives—for example those in Ireland, Finland, Estonia, and elsewhere—have originated to at least a considerable extent from a sound reaction against an overwhelming foreign interest which threatened the native cultural inheritance, the language, and the traditions. In such cases it is possible that nationalism may bring about a special classifying of the material and a particular approach to the traditions which will not be very useful to the seriously working scholar. But at the same time, in point of fact, I want to remind you that the particular archives I mentioned, those in Ireland, Finland, and Estonia, have shown that this special bias, this nationalistic interest, will not necessarily affect the archives. In those particular countries it is not correct to speak of nationalism as a factor that militates against sound scholarship. In those countries the keynote has been the love of the history of the people and the preservation of old traditions.

In other countries the reactions against industrialization and modern organization inspired the building up of folklore archives and the ardent rescue of the cultural heritage, especially the old rural culture. It is easy enough to notice this motive in such European countries as Sweden. With us, for example, we have always to face the problem of expanding our work to include the living folklore in the modern societies, the urban tradition, the lore of lumberers, of sailors, of workmen, and the like. In Uppsala and the other archives in Sweden this is our new problem, to get a new type of inspiration for our work. In some cases the early interest in the archives and in the collecting work, very often of local character, was confined to a very limited part of the whole field. This was because of the fact that the collections in the archives often originated as a help to some local history field work, a local museum, or some scholarly specialty such as dialect and literary studies, folk music, folk dance, folk art, home industries, or the like.

Everyone who has endeavored to examine critically the aim and object for his archive work has found how difficult it is to escape from his own narrow specialty and to reach a broader point of view without having contact with other scholars and other archives. The archivist must continually learn from the result of experiments carried out from points of view other than his own. For this there is nothing better than studying archives outside one’s own country and meeting fellow scholars just as we are doing here.

Although visits to other archives, central or local, in the same country or abroad, and discussion with other archivists and scholars is always fruitful, it is not always easy to get direct cooperation between them. The work will often be one-sided, especially in the relations between the central archive and local archives. A request for close cooperation brings good results only when there are actual needs from both sides. Moreover, cooperative work is not very good unless it brings results in a reasonable amount of time. Human interest works in that way, and if we go beyond the limit of this psychologically favorable time there will be no great results from cooperation.

One of the most important functions of an archive is the establishment of relations with local independent scholars and with local archives. These should be encouraged, and if they are, they are likely to contribute much to the central archive. Often such independent workers, particularly collectors, go far beyond the limits of the work done by the official central archive and in this way they open up new fields of inquiry. Sometimes, for example, you come across an expert, that is to say a workman who knows his job, a native who knows his birthplace, a sailor, or lumberman who has worked and gone many places and has had many experiences. About eight years ago, for example, at the archive in Uppsala I received a telephone call from the place-name archive near by. They told us that they had a man whom we could probably use. He was a lumberman from the woodland in the north. They had trained this man and had got several thousand place names from him, but they felt that they had exhausted his store of material from the little woodland parish. I asked the archivist whether he had taken down any legends in connection with the place names. We always want to add place-name legends to our archives in Uppsala. They agreed to send him over to us and in this way we got a new correspondent. At first he sent us legends and tales. Of course, we get very few folk tales from any of them, because they are a legend-telling people. Then I got to thinking that he probably knew a good many lumberman’s songs, and I wrote and asked him to collect these songs as well. There came from him folk songs of various types, ballads, lumber songs, sailor songs, some religious and even lyric and love songs. After a while this stopped and I wrote and asked him “Don’t you have any more songs?” He said “Well, I had some songs, but I don’t think you would care too much about them. They are the kind you call street ballads, about love or robbery or violence and they are printed as pamphlets and sold for a penny.” He sent us in a considerable collection of these and we now have these filed in a special envelope. He finally wrote us a letter and said, “Now I have to go back to my daily work and I cannot write any more. All I have left now is what I know about coal mining and everything about that.”

Well, we had in our archive two classifications of material which were very limited. Really it was like an immense brain with very little in the brain. There is a catalog that helps us continually remember. Of this kind of material we used to have two or three thousand cards and now we have over 200,000. While he was still in Sweden Dr. Sven Liljeblad made headings for us—about 7,500 different ones—and they are still there. The system was so well made that we could always put in new material without making any alteration in the big headings. As soon as we got new knowledge—not from books, not from scholars, but from the people—we would put it in these catalogs. So I went to my secretary and asked her to give me the material for coal mines. I put it on a table and studied it. We also had a student who had been in the very same parish and I noticed that he had made a description of the coal men. So I went out and found this student and discussed the whole matter with him, but before I left Uppsala I noted down every term for the legends of the coal men. I lived up there in an attic room for a week and talked to this man so that the list of eighty words soon became a list of 850. I came, then, back to the archive and the man began sending me material. He got money for it, of course.

You must understand that by a coal mine I am referring to the coal made from wood, that is charcoal burning. I finally suggested to him that he write a book on the ancient way of burning charcoal in the parish. This was during the war and they were making a good deal of money at the time because there was great demand for the timber. I made a trip to the community council and told them that I needed their help. I asked them if they would print the manuscript, saying that it was a description of their parish, and they agreed to do so. Then the man started to write and I asked him about the payment for his time and his expenses. He said, “Well, I can understand that you can’t pay me, that you are too poor for that because when I am working overtime now during the war I get a good salary. But to have a book printed, that is something and I won’t ask for any money at all.” So he started on the writing work and just a week before I left to come over to America his new printed book was on my table and we could send copies out to the community council. They have asked for a number of these copies to have in the schools. They use it as an elementary book in a course which we call knowledge about the homestead, and we teach it just as we teach mathematics and geography. I have used this as an illustration of how we can get local people to work, that is the people whose culture and traditions you want to study.

From about ten years’ work in the archives I have learned a good deal about these various kinds of tradition and I know enough about it so that I can usually open up the sources of tradition. Perhaps that is my specialty. Of course, I also can work out by means of the big catalog considerable lists of questions. Often the interest comes in this way. I may ask a man a question and imply a certain answer and he will then tell me that I am wrong, “You don’t know about that, now let me tell you.” And then he starts and gives me the details. Sometimes he even writes them out. I remember such a one on the matter of how to break horses.

About forty years ago there was a discovery in Europe among the philologists that farmers or workmen really knew not more than about two thousand words. Now there was a great fallacy about that. If you asked the psychologists how they tested this they would tell you that they sent out students with long lists of words and saw how many of these words the farmer or workman knew. But these students and psychologists knew nothing about the particular job that the workman was doing, so when they sampled from such a man they asked only about eighty words from the man about his specialty when the man’s real knowledge was at least 850. Only the man himself could tell me the words he knew. The farmer, of course, has many different jobs to do—cultivating the fields, grazing lands, on the sea, fishing, in the house; I should say that such a farmer has about 8,500 words. In the vocabulary of the charcoal burner I spoke to you about there are about 5,500 words. Of course not every farmer has this many but a good many of them do. I think we still have a good deal more work to do in exploring the language in this way.

CHAIRMAN: We are grateful to Dr. Campbell for these interesting remarks. Personally I found it extraordinarily cheering and stimulating to learn that the archiving of folklore is a very special and thrilling activity and is not the dull detection of dead things. I know there may be questions and comments on this.

DR. JONAS BALYS (Indiana University [formerly Head, Lithuanian Folklore Archives]): In Lithuania we have used a system which is made up from the experiences of many other archives. I visited archives in Finland, England, Germany, Estonia, and so on, and from our experiences in those archives we have worked out our own system adapted to local needs.

MR. SEAN O’SUILLEABHAIN (Irish Folklore Commission, Dublin, Ireland): I should like to inquire about the methods which are used in the various archives for handling the material when it comes in. If I remember, in Sweden they use single sheets of paper which are sent to the correspondents and collectors. These sheets are then sent in and are filed in an envelope. Now I should like to find out from Dr. Campbell, after I have made a few more remarks, what they do with these envelopes.

In Ireland we have a completely different system. We send out notebooks and every week we get in roughly ten notebooks or about a thousand pages. We don’t use envelopes at all for the storage of the material. We bind the notebooks into volumes. We have now about fifteen hundred bound leather volumes, each containing six hundred or eight hundred pages. For our full-time collectors we bind the volumes consecutively in the order in which they come in to the archive. Each collector writes about a hundred pages a week and these volumes are stored consecutively on our shelves. Our questionnaires we bind in separate volumes, but they are all part of the whole series. Then there are the school notebooks which we have. These we are now binding and numbering in a separate series. But I should like to know about what is done in these cases in the other archives. Dr. Shoemaker started an archive in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, according to the Scandinavian system I think, adapted of course to the American needs.

DR. CAMPBELL: What I have spoken about thus far has been the relation of the archive to independent archives and to collectors. But of course the point which has been brought up is very important and I will try to answer it. I must say that I approve of your system of the bound books. I am sorry that we don’t have these. It is a pity. I am going to try to have the diaries bound up, but it is impossible to go over our entire system from the beginning. Our system is largely a matter of national habit. To be sure, the Northern Museum in Stockholm binds our material into very large volumes, much thicker than yours and so heavy that you could kill your neighbor with them. But we can’t use the bound volumes because of the way we have started it. We must keep to this size of sheet and put them in envelopes. Every day we get several letters from scholars asking for certain material and we send out our original material. We simply do not have the money to copy all of it and so we send our valuable original manuscripts out to every central library or museum where they have houses built of stone and have the possibility of keeping the material safe from fires. We have many inquiries about particular customs or beliefs. Suppose a person writes in and wants to get something about the Maypole. We can send out the cards about this, but if we had to take the big volumes or even the small handy books we might have to send out a hundred of these books. Of course if we could copy, that would be the proper answer to the question.

DEAN STITH THOMPSON (Indiana University): Three years ago I was asked to work out a plan for a folklore archive for the Folklore Commission in Venezuela. I was quite without experience but had to make some recommendations. I think the problem that Dr. Campbell has brought up did not apply to Venezuela and so my recommendations did not take that into consideration. It seemed to me best to have the material that came in bound in volumes and then that these volumes should be thoroughly indexed. There are these two general systems and I find that even in our small, local American archives, these two systems are now being used. Miss Thelma James from Detroit is now accumulating a considerable archive using the Irish system of putting all the material of a particular collector together and trying to index that. On the other hand Louis Jones in New York State has worked according to the Swedish system.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON (University of Kiel, Germany): The envelope system is very good so far as it applies to the originals, because the originals are not written on pure linen paper and they are destroyed by use. If these are preserved in envelopes the original can be kept but they should be copied and the copies may very well be handled in the manner the Irish use. The originals, not the copies, should be consulted when the texts are edited, but I think to send out the originals from the archive is a very terrible thing. We must say no, we will not send the original manuscript; we can send only a copy of it. I think the government or the university that spends money for collecting originals ought also to find the money for copying the texts.

PROFESSOR REIDAR TH. CHRISTIANSEN (University of Oslo, Norway): When Professor Kaarle Krohn had charge of the Folklore Fellows Communications he would never dream of sending out any original manuscripts. He had inherited a large collection of notebooks and studies from his predecessors and was very careful of them. When I was a student there we tried to make copies. Scholars always had to pay a certain amount for these copies. Every time copies were made two or three duplicates were also made, so that if a second person wanted one he could get the copy for nothing. This system worked very well.

CHAIRMAN: Apart from the danger of having the manuscripts ruined or lost or damaged in some way by taking them out, there would seem to me this further disadvantage: that people who come to study at the archive would find many documents that they would need missing.

DR. ALBERT B. LORD (Slavic Dept., Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts): I should like to ask if in Sweden they do the same thing with records, tapes, wires, that is are copies made of these in the archives?

DR. CAMPBELL: As to the discs we have in our collection, we always copy them because we simply cannot send out the originals. But the cost usually comes from the scholar who is asking for these copies.

DEAN THOMPSON: This is a problem that in America I think we have not yet squarely met but I hope that we will work on it very soon. As you probably know the Folklore Section in the Library of Congress is certainly the logical place for depositing all our folklore records. But in addition to this central archive there are scattered around through the country a number of small private and semiprivate archives, some of them with official leadership such as that which Dr. Shoemaker has in charge. Now it is a question whether it would be possible to assemble all of our material in some kind of copies in the Library of Congress in one central archive. This is one thing that I have been wanting to happen and have been suggesting on every possible occasion. I put in a word of that kind recently at the American Philosophical Society and the Library of Congress seemed to be interested in it. In addition to the copying of the discs and tape and wire, there is also the matter of copying of manuscript material. I have thought that microfilm would be the logical answer so that in the one large central archive we could have a microfilm of all the smaller archives. I should be pleased to hear from some of the people who have these small central archives and know what they think of the feasibility of the copying which I mentioned.

MR. JASIM UDDIN (Dacca, East Pakistan): Is it possible to get duplicate copies from the people who are collecting the material?

DR. CAMPBELL: No. I don’t think it is possible. I don’t think we could have our collectors do that. Some collecting is done under extremely hard conditions. The Lapp is sitting on the floor and writing with his pencil. He will answer our questionnaire but it will be impossible to have him make a copy of this. Even people who have typewriters, of course, are very unwilling to make two copies.

PROFESSOR J. RUSSEL REAVER (Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida): Some of you may know that the archives of the Library of Congress now has a system by which it lends a tape recording machine and supplies of tape to collectors throughout the country. The original tapes are returned to the Library of Congress and then a copy is made there in the recording laboratory and these copies are then returned to the university library or other archive with which the collector is connected. As an example, I am now working at Florida State University on a collection of Florida folk tales and legends. .My materials are largely on the original tape. I shall no doubt make a number of manuscript copies of a large part of this material but this runs into a good deal of money. Perhaps eventually they might be microfilmed and microfilm copies distributed unless the manuscript itself is published and made available. In this country at least we are faced with the problem of preserving materials that are allowed to remain on tape or other kinds of recording and also of materials that eventually find their way into a collector’s own manuscript and may never be a part of either a local or central archive in Washington.

If I can throw in one more problem, it is that of the different kinds of tape recording machines we have so that not all tapes can be played on all kinds of machines. The scholar sometimes might not have the kind of machine that would play the tape which was sent to him.

DR. BALYS: I should like to say a few words about originals and copies. In Lithuania the collector first made his manuscript during the field work and later he transcribed everything and sent it to the archives. We found that it was often very difficult for other people to read the original manuscript done during the field work and we asked the collector always to keep his first notes and send us a copy. It is necessary that a system be worked out whereby the original and the copy can be referred to with clearness and accuracy. It is important that we be able to ask the collector whether on a certain page a certain letter is a u or an n, for example. So the collector must always keep his original and if by any chance the copy should ever be lost in the mail he can always reconstruct a copy for us.

CHAIRMAN: It certainly seems important that all collectors should keep their first notes.

PROFESSOR ALFRED SHOEMAKER (Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania): As far as the relationship of the central archive to the local archives is concerned, there is in this country a special difficulty. We have languages other than English in which we record. In southeastern Pennsylvania, for instance, we have approximately a half-million speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch, and the recording in folklore, as far as we are concerned in Franklin and Marshall College, is concerned almost exclusively with Pennsylvania Dutch, just as in Ireland the recording is concerned almost exclusively with the Irish language. I fail to understand how we can relate the two fields. A second special difficulty I have in mind is this: We excerpt the material that comes into our central office and unless the excerpt is the same in the central archive the original record will be of no use to them.

MR. ALAN LOMAX (New York City): It seems to me that if you followed this line of thought there would be about 150 archives in the United States which would have no relation to each other. There are many languages, and although Pennsylvania Dutch is one of the largest it is not the largest and there are many others where the cultural lines and patterns are considerably more divergent from the Anglo-American than the Pennsylvania Dutch you speak of. So that actually we have before us in America the problem of making a kind of supernational archive.

PROFESSOR SHOEMAKER: It gets too big and you can’t really work it.

MR. LOMAX: Well, then we can’t understand world folklore. If we can’t tackle the problem here where we have Armenian tales and Pennsylvania Dutch barn paintings and traces of African culture and about everything in the world, a great many of the patterns from all over the world, we will just have to give up the idea of world folklore studies. The material has to be brought together in order to make any sense of it, and I don’t see why the Pennsylvania Dutch should have a priority on staying in its own backyard.

CHAIRMAN: May I say something on that. I do appreciate the difficulties that Professor Shoemaker has pointed out. If you are going to have everything in one place it is going to be tremendous and perhaps it might get out of hand. It seems to me that the essential thing is that there should be some central place which knows what material is to be found in all the local archives. Now I remember that at the Folk Music Council Mr. Duncan Emrich said that it was impossible to envisage one archive that contained everything, but that there should be at the central archive a selection of everything and that that archive should know to which other archive people should be referred for the study of a special subject.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: I am certain that there must be in a particular country a central archive that contains not only a selection of material from the provincial archives and from private collections of folklore but all the texts. The original copies, however, can remain in the provincial archives and in the hands of private collectors. From these provincial archives one copy should be sent to the central archives. A selection of material is of no use for a specialist in folk tales, as I am. For instance, at the moment I am collecting all the texts of “The Tale of the Three Oranges.” In order to make my study I must have all the texts existing. There should be one place where I can write to get all the texts of that tale in a particular country. If I have to write letters to 150 archives in America, that is truly expensive.

MR. CHARLES SEEGER (Chief of Music Division, Pan American Union, Washington, D. C.): I can speak only for the musical end of things, and of course there I am all for the central archives, especially now that we have tape. This can be stored very adequately and there are even commercial companies now springing up in different parts of the country that will make tape for you rather inexpensively. But in that connection I must come back to this subject that was raised a while ago; we should look into the preservability of our tape, not to speak of the preservability of our acetate discs, since no one knows how long they will last. The central archives in Washington seem to me an inescapable thing. When it comes to a language like the Pennsylvania Dutch I will admit there is a subject where you have the Library of Congress stumped. I doubt if they have a specialist in Pennsylvania Dutch, though they do have in nearly every other language.

DEAN THOMPSON: I know that at the moment the Library of Congress has some rather extensive and ambitious plans. For example, I understand that the copying of the large Irish archives is now being done by microfilm and there is a discussion, certainly, of copying in stencil or microfilm some of the very largest of the European archives. Now if this is a possible thing for them to consider I see no difficulty at all in the copying of the relatively smaller archives in all parts of our country, even in the various languages. I think we should look forward to the time when a person can go into the central archive at the Library of Congress and consult the material brought in from archives all over the country. I don’t think that is too large a job for the Library of Congress.

PROFESSOR SHOEMAKER: Yes, but the crux of the matter is the indexing. Granted that you have the material there now, this vast body of folklore from all the countries and from all the archives in the United States, you have nothing unless you have an index. How is one to resolve that question?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: The solution to that problem I think would be to make a microfilm copy of the card index also. It is the card index that is the real key to the whole archive.

To my mind the foundation of every archive is the written page of manuscript, whether it was from an original writing by a collector or from a copy of a disc record. We never allow an original manuscript out of the Irish Folklore Commission Office because we know what human nature is and we know that manuscripts may never come back again. The British Museum, for example, is most insistent upon keeping everything, and I think its greatness depends upon that. When you go to any archive the manuscripts, the originals, should be there at your disposal if at all possible and if the material exists.

In Ireland we have not had a microfilm machine of our own, but the National Library in Dublin has had one. About eight years ago when the war became serious in Europe, the National Library started helping us to microfilm our manuscripts. It has also been getting microfilm from copies of all Irish material from the United States and from other countries and is also trying to have copies of everything relating to Ireland in the National Library in Dublin. We found that after five years only 120 volumes out of 1,500 have been done and that they were not keeping up with the growth of our archives. Six months ago we bought a microfilm apparatus and reading machine and we are now copying our own manuscripts. I think it will take about four years for us to finish this copying and then we will also have a microfilm copy made of our catalog. Then we shall deposit both kinds of records in the three or four of the great archives throughout the world.

The trouble with us in Dublin at the moment is our huge collections and the smallness of our staff until recently—until a year ago we had only three or four permanent catalogers. We have now cataloged only one-twentieth of all our material. To give you some idea of the richness of this material I will mention that the other day before I left Ireland I jotted down a few notes for this Congress. For example, for the dragon slayer story (Aarne-Thompson² No. 300) which is the commonest folk tale in Ireland, we have already cataloged 145 versions. And that is only one-twentieth part of the material. When all of the material is cataloged, as I hope it will be in ten or twenty years, then we will be able to place in Stockholm, in Washington, and in Berlin and various other countries complete microfilm copies not only of our manuscripts but of the index.

Our cataloguing is so far behind that we have now started on an interim catalog. That is for each bound volume we leaf through it and we make a typed sheet of its contents. We list all folk tales under the Aarne-Thompson numbers if they are of that type. Other folk tales we summarize. If they are heroic Irish folk tales we put them under the title by which they are usually known. The rest we more or less lump together. We do the best we can with indicating what are to be found on various pages of the manuscript—songs, verses, riddles, proverbs, and so on, on such and such pages. I think that when we deposit copies of our material we should also deposit a copy of our catalog, or else the people in the Library of Congress, for example, won’t know in what particular film a tale, a song or proverb is to be found.

CHAIRMAN: I think it will be well if we concentrate on this problem, the relation of the central archive and the local archive.

PROFESSOR HERBERT HALPERT (Murray State Teachers College, Murray, Kentucky): I think it likely that I have the smallest archive in existence, but I think that perhaps some of the things I have worked out in the hard way from the point of view of this little archive would also work with a larger one. The archive I am referring to is at Murray State College and consists of material which has been turned in by students who are taking my folklore and folk-song courses. They are required to turn in the material typewritten and in duplicate. I specify a minimum grade of paper, the size and form in which the material is to come in. They must get in the two copies. You see they are in a college class and I can demand certain work from them.

One part of the project is to teach them classification. They usually work out the arrangement of the material on a one-page index and they present that in duplicate. I won’t go into the details of the way in which these students classify their material. Usually they hand it in early enough to permit revision of it. Since I have a very few students I merely arrange this material alphabetically by the student and put it in a folder. A second copy is put in a classification file and classified by types. Thus all folk tales are put together and we then break those down and classify all of our folk tales. We have thus a kind of double file but we have the advantage of available typewriters and a number of girls working in the office. You see we do have one file which is kept sacred and is not to be touched except for very occasional checking.

As for the microfilming, the central archive would have to decide about whether it wants to microfilm the classification files or whether it would be best for them to classify by areas and by the original collector’s folder.

CHAIRMAN: Professor Bayard, would you tell something about your private archive?

PROFESSOR SAMUEL P. BAYARD (Pennsylvania State College, State College, Pennsylvania): I am afraid that my private collection which you dignify by the name of archive has very little to contribute to the present discussion in so much as it simply consists of a set of field books. One of these sets is textual and the other is musical. Part of this I keep in a safety deposit vault in the bank and part of it I keep at home, mostly in manila folders, for reference. So I have not met with any very complicated problems.

DEAN THOMPSON: May I ask if you think it desirable that folk material should eventually find itself in duplicate in the central archive?

PROFESSOR BAYARD: I should have no objection whatsoever. In fact it has long been my intention to send at least a table of contents to the archives at the Library of Congress. This would indicate something in as much as I try my best to use conventional titles for the ballads and songs which I have collected. But for many songs and for nearly all tunes merely sending in a list would be fruitless and I think we would have to work out some other plan.

DR. LORD: This whole relation of the archives of American folklore and the individual collector brings up the very difficult problem of the relation between the collector and the library in connection with any rights that he may have in his material. If we have material, should we go ahead and publish it and arrange our copyright and then afterward put it in the central archive, or will there be some way for the publication rights to be respected by the central archive?

CHAIRMAN: That is a very good point and I think deserves discussing just now.

PROFESSOR REAVER: The agreement worked out at present between the Library of Congress and the individual collectors seems rather satisfactory. If the collector works from the beginning and cooperates with the Library of Congress the material is sent in to the Library on the original records or tape and the collector retains rights to any use that is made of his material for publication.

A great deal of material which we have in Florida is on tape and there is now getting to be the important question as to whether we should feel required to copy all of this material into manuscript so that this manuscript can eventually be deposited in some central archive.

CHAIRMAN: May we defer that point for just a while and perhaps concentrate on the general principle of the independent collector handing over his material to the central archive.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: The independent collector certainly has to concern himself about the rights of publications when it is a matter of full texts and anthologies. But there are some collectors who are unreasonable about even having references made to their work, and I think these should not be given much consideration. I had an unfortunate experience with a Norwegian collector who refused to let me even refer to his work without payment of a considerable sum of money.

DR. CAMPBELL: We are faced with the problem of the rights of the collector to what he brings in to our archives and have agreed on the following: We reserve the rights of publishing whole texts for the collector himself. If someone asks to publish the text of a legend or a tale we consult with the collector and try to get his consent. We have had no real trouble in this connection. There is, however, another type of problem that arises in connection with the questionnaires. We have paid for these questionnaires and we feel that scholars can use them without any further consultation with the collector. Only if a questionnaire should be a very extensive thing that would be almost like a book would we think of giving further reward to the collector. Of course we would not allow an outsider to come in and copy five hundred pages from some collector and publish it as his own. With some collectors who have been working on the distribution of certain culture elements in their area we permit the collector to use his material to work up a book or an article and we retain that right for him for ten years. Afterward the material can be used by any scholar.

MR. JASIM UDDIN: I find that it is not difficult to collect but that it is very difficult to find out the place where the proper informants are to be found. Now if I collect some rare songs and send them to the public archive then they may be used by others without mentioning my name. Once I made a collection and showed it to a man of influence and a great scholar. He wrote down the places where these had been collected and he sent his own men and collected them and used them in his own name. This I am certain will happen again, so I am wondering what is the remedy. I am willing to give my collections to any public body, but I think there should be some way in which the collector is protected from such treatment.

CHAIRMAN: Mr. Jasim Uddin has raised a very important question and one that we should devote considerable time to. I propose that when we start on Wednesday afternoon we begin with this point. I hope your ardor and enthusiasm will not cool between now and then.

End of Session

SECOND SESSION

CHAIRMAN: At the end of our last session we were discussing what means can be used to protect the collector when he sends material into a folklore archive. Are there other remarks to be made on this question?

DR. CAMPBELL: We have had some interesting experiences in this connection in the archive at Uppsala. It happened that one time there were two collectors in the same area and both of these were also good performers and made money by their performances of folk material. One day one of these collectors came to our archives and asked to copy what the other man had collected in the same district. He said he would like to complete a new collection by means of the other collector’s material which had come to the Uppsala archive. I wrote the other collector about this. He told me that they had had a quarrel and that the other man wished to get his material so that he could use it in paid performances. This caused a very difficult situation because the man who asked for material from the archives said, “You have taken government money and therefore I have a right to copy this material.” Of course he was correct but then on the other hand there was the fact that he could take this government material and make money. I took a trip down to the country and finally reconciled these people, but it cannot always be arranged so satisfactorily.

Another thing that we give some consideration to is the large amount of collections which we have from certain of our collectors. I go through these once in a while and look through all the personal cards of these collectors and see how much material there is. If we find that a collector has worked for us five, ten, or fifteen years and there is a very considerable collection, then sometimes we publish this material, or part of it, in the archives. The man is nearly always very glad to have the book printed. We have continually to protect our collectors against the journalists who try to exploit their material. It is only the archivist who can really protect these collectors from being abused by journalists or the authors of books.

CHAIRMAN: So much depends on the wisdom and judgment of the archivist. I should like to remind you again of the point that Mr. Seeger has raised, that we must make a distinction between the scholarly use of the material and what is merely commercial. In every case the collector’s permission should be obtained. The archivist, however, could always give good advice as to whether the permission should be given freely or whether it is the kind of undertaking that should pay for the permission. The archivist must always work out the plan as to whether recompense is to go to the archive or to the collector or what part to each.

I have had some experience with the commercial exploitation of folk material. For many years now I have had control of the Cecil Sharp copyrights as his literary executrix. I have had to adopt a sort of principle and it may be helpful to indicate what this is. When it is a quotation to be used in a scholarly work I give permission freely, and this is in the spirit of our copyright law. Where a composer wishes to use a certain theme or melody and make a composition of it, there again I don’t charge a fee. Where there is a question of taking a whole song and including it in a collection, a school collection or possibly a choral arrangement, then it seems to me right to charge a fee. In this case, of course, the fee goes to the family, because the copyright runs for fifty years after death.

DEAN THOMPSON: There is another situation that is similar to this but brings up a new question. Miss Helen Creighton, who collects in Nova Scotia, got out a collection of material. Very shortly afterward a movie company went to her informants and re-collected from the informants and did what she feels is a very shoddy piece of work. This brings up the question of how much proprietorship a collector has in his informants.

CHAIRMAN: I think this is a most unfortunate occurrence, but it seems to me one in which the collector has absolutely no redress, unless he can get the informant to make a promise that he will not give this material to anyone else. It would be an extremely difficult thing to keep it from being done. We have had that happen in England also. I am glad to say very rarely. Recently this has been happening more frequently than it used to. We try always to be very scrupulous.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I wonder if there wouldn’t be some way of establishing a set of standards or a principle of courtesy. Perhaps we could get people to agree upon a certain code of conduct. I have had some experience with both kinds of difficulties that Miss Karpeles has mentioned. I had a very fine singer in the country with whom I worked for a good many years. I continued with him until I got into the army. This was a very big project; I took down his whole repertoire and the repertoire of his family. It was not something that one could rush into print. While I was in the army I found that some musicians had discovered this singer through my records at the Library of Congress. They had visited him and taken down by ear a large part of the repertoire which he had not been singing before I stimulated his memory. All I could do about it, since I didn’t get the book into print, was say nasty things to him.

CHAIRMAN: I imagine that real scholars if they got together would naturally adopt a correct method of handling this situation. I don’t believe we could say that an informant who has already given songs to one person should always be tabu to all other collectors. There may be all sorts of reasons to follow up in collecting or perhaps to collect from a different angle or something of that sort. But common courtesy would suggest that this is never done without the permission of the original collector. Unfortunately the people who are most likely to infringe against that code of common courtesy are those who have no respect whatsoever for what we say or do not say. How do you feel about that Dean Thompson?

DEAN THOMPSON: I doubt whether any resolution that we might make in this body would have any effect.

MR. JASIM UDDIN: What is the remedy for these difficulties we have just discussed?

CHAIRMAN: Unfortunately we are not almighty here in this assembly and these are really things that we can’t give a definite answer to. As to another point you made about the people submitting material which is not really what they collected but which is their own composition, it seems to me the only remedy is to build up a body of scholars and scholarship so that the composed elements can be recognized and that one can distinguish these composed elements from the others.

PROFESSOR ADNAN SAYGUN (Director, Conservatory of Music, Ankara, Turkey): It is clear that folklore can be considered from two different points of view, the scientific and the commercial. We have all over the world some scholars who study folk material from the scientific point of view and then we have others who collect material from the people and make a profitable business with this material. As a scholar I want to collect the folklore, I want to note it down, to record it, and to analyze it and do other work with it which interests me. It may well be that the quality of the work does not interest me especially, for the important thing is to get the material itself. I am not concerned about how well sung a song may be. That is the commercial point of view. I think we have to try to keep from confusing these things. I know some collectors who prefer singers who have a good voice and sing very well and they are not much concerned with whether the song is an authentic folk song. On the other hand for the scholar we would rather have an old woman eighty or eighty-five years old who cannot sing very well, if she can give you an old and authentic melody. The scholar tries to transcribe such melodies from a scientific point of view. He has to use notations that are not usable in a commercial handling of the songs. The businessman will take these songs and transcribe them, put them on records and on the radios. I think these are two different things and they just have to be kept apart.

CHAIRMAN : Now I know that Mr. BØDKER would like to make a communication about the Copenhagen archive.

MR. LAURITS BØDKER (International Folktale Archive, Copenhagen, Denmark): In Copenhagen we have established an International Folktale Institute. This has some support from the Danish government and some help from other sources. It is our purpose to bring together in both the original languages and in translations into one of the main European languages as much of the folk-tale material in the world as possible. We want to bring in not only all of the material but also information about it and especially all of the relevant geographical facts. A second goal is to list all of the folk tales which we have in our archive according to the system made by Dr. Thompson and other scholars. The third purpose is to facilitate the use of this material by all scholars over the world. Professor von Sydow wanted the institute placed in Copenhagen partly because of the city’s central geographical location in Europe and secondly because in Denmark we have always had a very large collection of folk tales. We also have in Copenhagen one of the greatest folklore libraries in the world. We are really just starting. Up to the present time we have received about fifteen hundred unprinted folk tales from the Folklore Institute in Lund. These were collected in the southern part of Sweden. Dr. Christiansen has promised us that when they are copying material in Oslo they will also send us a copy of all the Norwegian material, and the same promise has come from the archives in Dublin. The Institute has also begun a revision of the unprinted catalog of the library. This catalog consists of about two hundred thousand references to riddles, folk tales, folk beliefs, customs, and so on, all over the world. In due time all of this material will be typewritten and arranged in accordance with indexes already made, and we should be able to give folklorists and students of literature both in Denmark and in Sweden references to published and unpublished material. This morning I learned from Mrs. Danielli that the English Folk-lore Society has given us a grant and I can only say that we are very grateful for that help. It shows that there is some interest in the work. I shall be glad to discuss the Institute with any of you privately and show you some of the things that we have done and something of our plans for carrying on in the future. We expect to do our work not as masters but as servants, and our main purpose is to give help to folklorists everywhere. We do need the help and encouragement of you all.

DEAN THOMPSON: This International Folktale Institute is undoubtedly designed to serve a very important need. The folk tale, of course, is about as international a thing as one can imagine and the material is extremely difficult to get together. It is scattered all over the world. Ideally all of this material should be brought into one center so that the scholar could examine it and could work without having to take enormous journeys that sometimes have to be made. I know that Professor Anderson in order to do his great study of “The Emperor and the Abbot”⁶ made a trip all over Europe. So if we could get all the material together in one center, that would be a great gain for folk-tale study. There are many practical difficulties about all of this and I should like to get together a small group of persons who happen to be here and are members of the sixth section of the International Commission of Folk Arts and Folklore. I hope that we can discuss the matter of the Copenhagen Institute and see if there may be some help that can come from the International Commission.

CHAIRMAN: Do you not think it would be a good plan, Dean Thompson, to start on the question of indexing systems? Would you start the discussion yourself?

DEAN THOMPSON: As you probably know I have not done any work in indexing outside of literary folklore and even there I have touched the folk song only so far as narrative motifs happen to come into them. I can therefore open up the discussion of indexing only for this relatively small part of the whole field of folklore.

I think it might well be appropriate here to talk for a little about my own plans for carrying on the two types of indexing to which I have given a good part of my life. For the folk tale and also for narrative folklore of all kinds there seem to be two general types of indexes that are of value. There is first of all an index of complete types, that is complete units that have an independent life of their own. And then there is an index of motifs, the individual items that sometimes go to make up these larger independent units and sometimes do actually exist as independent units themselves.

The first kind of index to be worked out was an index of types, that is of these larger independent units that we ordinarily know as tales. It may be remembered that Antti Aarne, with the help of a number of European scholars, worked in the first decade of the century and finally published an index of folk tales. This came out in 1910. That index of folk tales was essentially confined to Europe and it had a considerable emphasis on north Europe. It was practically a complete index of the Finnish collections, for example. But there was very little from southwestern Europe. In spite of the known influence of India on the European tale there was practically no representation of the tales of India. Now, there is no doubt that we need for practical purposes a much better rounded index of tale-types than now exists. The revision which I made of this work in 1928 did not greatly expand the number of types. It has many faults and much incompleteness. If I live long enough I hope to make a revision of this work.

There are several areas that are absolutely necessary to cover in any adequate index of tale-types for the European-Asiatic area. The whole Near East is of very great importance. We need to have some kind of index of the tales of Turkey, for example, and I am hopeful that Professor Eberhard may help out with this. A very considerable collection of Armenian tales has been made in Detroit and this also should help to fill out the picture of that strategic part of the folk-tale world. .My ideal in the revision of the Type-Index² would be to provide an adequate check-list of the tales known in the general cultural area extending all the way from the west of Europe, including Ireland and the British Isles, clear over to somewhere beyond the Near East. This is a regional type-index. One thing that is almost absolutely necessary to finish before this can be done is a type-index of the oral tales of India. For a long time I worked on this alone and now, fortunately, Dr. Balys is helping me with it. I should expect that this index might be finished within a year or two.

Such a type-index of the European and west Asiatic area would not ordinarily be valid for a study of the tales of other areas of the world. For example, it would not fit into the listing of the native African tales and it would not be valid for the North American Indian. It is a very difficult problem as to what should be done in the future development of type-indexes. I have in mind as a project for one of my own students to attempt at least a preliminary type-index of North American Indian tales. An index of Africa should certainly be made and one for Oceania. I don’t know whether there is sufficient unity in the Far East to make a general Far Eastern type-index, but when Miss Ikeda came to us two years ago she brought over what seems to be an extremely interesting type-index of the best-known Japanese folk tales. And now as a part of her doctor’s thesis she is making a comparative study of this Japanese material and is integrating it into something like the type-index system and seeing what relations there are with tale-types in other parts of the world. It would seem to me, therefore, that we can expect as an end result to have several type-indexes rather than a single one. That does not mean that you would not occasionally find one of the European types in Africa. I had a student some years ago who made a special study of that kind, that is, of the European-Asiatic borrowed tales in Africa, and I myself made a study of the European tales among the North American Indians. I feel certain that similar studies could be made in Oceania and in other parts of the world. We must, therefore, work toward the construction of several type-indexes. I think we should not be in too great a hurry to make these indexes, because we have to wait until certain other parts of the world have been covered in order to round them out.

So much for type-indexes. The other index is that of individual motifs. It is to this that I have given most of my attention in the last years. I became interested in the index of individual motifs when I first began to work with the American Indian material. I found that among the American Indians, although there were many well-defined types known all over the country, any real distribution studies would have to be based upon the small motifs that seemed to move around not quite independently but with a good deal of mobility. For that reason I began to work on the general Motif-Index.⁷ This occupied most of my time for fifteen years, and I am now trying to revise it. I believe that it has been found valuable as a reference work for scholars who are interested in particular items, and the more complete such an index is the better. There is one important difference between the Motif-Index and the Type-Index. The Motif-Index is not regional; it attempts to cover the world. It tries to deal not only with oral material but also with traditional literary material such as the great literary collections of tales, like the Panchatantra. The more inclusive it is finally, the better. Dr. Balys and I are working actively every day, except for the respite of this congress, on a revision of that Motif-Index. We depend upon other scholars to bring in huge areas, and we have been very fortunate in getting that cooperation. As an example, I should mention that Professor Tom Peete Cross has just sent in a manuscript on which he has spent fifteen years. This is a motif-index of the Early Irish Literature down to about 1500. Miss Boberg of Copenhagen during the war made a similar index of a large segment of the Icelandic sagas. We are working at this all the time and I am hoping that we can go to press with perhaps the first volume of the revision of the Motif-Index in a matter of a year or two.

DR. SVEN LILJEBLAD (Idaho State College, Pocatello, Idaho): For the other aspects of folklore than the literary, Mr. O’Suillea-bhain and Dr. Campbell are certainly prepared to speak because they have been working specifically in that field for many years.

MIT. O’SUILLEABHAIN: As I indicated in my talk yesterday we in Dublin are using a special Irish adaptation of the system of cataloguing already developed in Uppsala. In this catalog the folk tale and folk literature are merely one rather small section. We are interested also in the social history, customs, and beliefs of our people. We have found the Uppsala system excellent for our needs, and I am convinced that it is applicable to almost any country in the world. It was only when I went to Uppsala that I saw the real scope of folklore. Many of the people in Ireland think of folklore as merely folk tales and riddles and proverbs. But working with Herman Geijer, Sven Liljeblad, and Åke Campbell completely wipes that idea out of one’s mind.

We find the Swedish system entirely satisfactory in Dublin. Although we have actually indexed only about one-twentieth of our material we already have 150,000 excerpted cards and we suppose that we will eventually have a good many million.

In our cataloguing of folk tales we have found that we have had to make special adaptations of the Aarne-Thompson Type-Index.² There are first of all some special forms of the international tales in Ireland, those things which Dr. von Sydow calls oikotypes. There are, for example, a large number of a particular form of the Cinderella story which is known in Ireland. Then we have two great cycles of heroic stories in Ireland which do not belong in the regular index. The Ulster cycle dealing with the Court of Conchubar, King of Ulster, and then the cycle of Finn McCumhall. We have also some miscellaneous hero tales and we have to make special categories for all of these. Beside these wholesale additions to the Aarne-Thompson register, we have had to add to every section, and I am sure that a number of additions will have to be made if the Aarne register is to be revised.

As far as the Motif-Index⁷ is concerned we find that the smallness of our staif in Dublin made it impossible to start cataloguing motifs in any great extent. Nevertheless we do have some thousands of motif-cards now being made.

In spite of our limited goal we have a great deal to do. There are five of us cataloguing full time and it will undoubtedly take three or four years to make an interim catalog, that is a rough catalog of the tales, the poetry, proverbs, riddles, mythological traditions, customs, and beliefs. Any good archive must, I think, catalog all of these things and do it in the greatest detail. Students in other countries decide to write their theses on particular aspects of a belief or custom or narrative and write in to us. We wish that we could answer all questions that come in and we do so as nearly as we can. Our interim catalog will at least help us to indicate what material we have.

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON (University of Abo, Finland): We are very fortunate that the cataloguing of folk tales has proceeded so successfully as it has. In Finland we had Aarne and now here in Bloomington we know what has been done to carry on his tradition. I should like to draw attention to the fact that the ballads are not indexed at all. In Europe we have some catalogs in the various libraries but we have nothing in the way of a general index. When I went to Abo in 1926 my friend and teacher, Kaarle Krohn, suggested that I could start indexing all the northern ballads and if possible also all European ballads. But we haven’t had the money for doing it nor the proper people. I think if we are going on with ballad studies we must have some kind of ballad indexes. I have been very much pleased to hear how much interest there is in ballads in this country.

CHAIRMAN: You mean, Professor Andersson, a subject index I suppose, not a music index?

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON: Of course we also need a musical index. In Sweden just at present they are carrying out a catalog of about seventy thousand tunes and I hope this will be continued, but this is, of course, a different question from the cataloguing of subject matter.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: The ballad catalog is an indispensable thing. There must be one, but I think not an international catalog. There should be several separate national ballad catalogs and indication of international types. Some countries, of course, could be handled together as, for instance, the Scandinavian countries or southern Europe. But these international ballads are not nearly so numerous as one would suppose from the note in Child’s English and Scottish Popular BalladsSometimes the parallels indicated there are very superficial. Already there are what may be called national catalogs for several countries. In Germany ballads are referred to by the numbers in Erk-Böhme. The Russian epic songs also have their own system of titles or formulas which serve pretty well. Every nation must have its own national ballad catalog and this should contain not only narrative ballads but also folk songs and even literary songs of a folk nature.

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON: I agree with Dr. Walter Anderson that we must have these national catalogs and that our indexing should also contain lyrical songs. I think it would be a very important result of this conference if we could get started on indexing for ballads.

CHAIRMAN: I would like to ask Dean Thompson something I am not very clear about. Are not these international catalogs of tales founded on national catalogs? Is not the first step the national catalog? And I would also like to ask about the question raised by Professor Walter Anderson. Is it true that the ballad, the narrative ballad, is less international than the prose tale? That is an entirely new idea to me.

DEAN THOMPSON: Your question is not easy to answer. At the time Aarne started working on his international catalog there were not any national catalogs at all. But he started his index actually with making a national catalog for Finland and he got help from various folklore scholars in other countries. He used the Danish catalog that had been worked out years before by Grundtvig and in some ways used imperfect national catalogs for several countries. Then after Aarne had made his tentative catalog, there began to be surveys made of the tales of various countries in which Aarne’s system was used. And in a way the system preceded, then, the making of the national catalogs. Eventually some fifteen or twenty countries have had their tales thus catalogued. So we have proceeded first to make a tentative index and then to catalog tales of various countries by it and thus bring out the imperfections of the index—then eventually correct the index, then make more national catalogs and so on until both index and national catalogs will become more and more correct.

DR. CAMPBELL: We have not really touched upon the general indexing problem. We have been now discussing special indexes. There are a good many problems which we would be much interested to discuss in detail. I wonder if there is time for discussing them in that detail here at present. To mention one special problem, we have about eight thousand legends. Now there is the Motif-Index, which we might possibly use. It is a question whether our European legends can be best indexed by using the Motif-Index.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: I should like to add a few words on the question of the epic legend. In Norway we have been trying to classify these epic legends. We have made a list of all the narratives of this kind and we have assigned them tentative numbers in our Norwegian system. We hope to work out a collaboration with scholars elsewhere, for example, in Denmark, Sweden, and Holland and above all with Dean Thompson here to help make that list fit into an international scheme.

DEAN THOMPSON: I want to call attention to the fact that there is a place in the Fourth Symposium for a discussion of indexing and classification. It seems to me this is a matter that interests a relatively small group and perhaps we can carry out the details of these indexes better in private conversation.

DR. LILJEBLAD: The question of the classification of material does reach over into the matter of questionnaires. Questionnaires are based primarily upon the material which is collected and classifications are in turn based upon these questionnaires. They have a mutual relationship which is impossible to ignore.

DEAN THOMPSON: Shouldn’t we leave the further discussion of indexing and of questionnaires to the next session?

CHAIRMAN: Yes, I would say that this would be of interest to nearly all of us, because we are all interested in some branch of folklore and the classification of folk tales and ballads is of very general interest.

DR. LORD: I agree that it is most important for all of us who are interested in stylistic research; it is absolutely necessary that we should catalog motifs if we are going to study the process of composition.

PROFESSOR GEORGE PULLEN JACKSON (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee): Since our hour is running out I should like to ask a question in regard to procedure. Indexing is also a matter of indexing tunes, because tunes are parts of ballads. Now I think we do not have so very many people here who are interested in indexing tunes but at least that is a thing that has to be considered. I should certainly like to hear some ideas on the part of people like Charles Seeger and Sam Bayard and others who have run into this thing. But I would not want to impose that discussion on this large group. I should like to know how many of those here would like to get together for a little private discussion of the motif indexing and cataloguing of tunes.

CHAIRMAN: There seems to be quite a good number. Perhaps Dean Thompson can work out some arrangements for this small group to meet together. This now brings our session to a close.

End of Session

THIRD SESSION

CHAIRMAN: At our last meeting you will recall that we gave some discussion to the rights of collectors and although we ventilated the matter I think we got nowhere in particular. We then spent a long time on methods of classification. I personally found this most instructive, even though it was dealing specifically with folk tales. It seemed that all sorts of problems arise there which can be applied to other branches of folklore. Today I propose that we restrict ourselves to archive techniques and concentrate on rather technical matters. And those of us who have had experience will do a good deal of the talking but that should not mean that the others have to remain silent. Very often it is the people who are not experts who are able to ask a pertinent question and contribute a remark that will be of value. The very answering of a simple question often is the best way to make a difficult problem clear. I suggest that we continue a discussion of indexing systems and especially learn about what systems are already in existence, what uniformity should be sought, and what is the advantage of such uniformity. I have asked Professor Christiansen to open the discussion today.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: When I talk about our experiences in Norway we must remember all the while that the situation is entirely different when you have a central archive and a largely or almost exclusively homogeneous stock of people to deal with. We soon found out that in order to get any work done at all, in order to answer letters, give information, catalogs were the most important thing in the archive. The first thing we did was to make a geographical survey of the country. We divided the country up into about eight hundred districts. We made four cards for each district, cards for folk tales, for songs, customs, beliefs, riddles, and proverbs, and so on. That is now finished and kept up to date. It is possible for us to furnish anyone who writes in to us material about any particular district. Now this is complete only as far as the manuscript collections go. We are now working to fill in all the printed material from books and especially from the files of old newspapers. The older local papers gave a good deal of space to these things.

The next problem in the archive was the actual arrangement of the materials. We can disregard the folk tales because we already have the printed Aarne-Thompson system. Our tales are arranged by that system, of course, with some necessary additions. The classifying of folk songs was somewhat more difficult. We have not limited our work to the ancient ballad tradition, that is what is known in English as the Child ballad tradition. We have now arranged some eight or nine hundred of the older ballads, and we are now faced with the question of the newer songs and ballads. Up to date everything in connection with these has been very sketchy and only provisionally worked out. We usually give the first two lines and a brief sketch of the contents of the narrative songs.

There is also the problem of historical traditions or legends. These would obviously fit better into a systematic arrangement than into a mere alphabetical one. We had no index like the Aarne-Thompson to work on and we did not find that we could use the Motif-Index except for references. We tried to separate the epic units and to a large extent that was possible—possible as long as we were dealing with stories not related as immediate experiences. We have found that when people tell of immediate experiences they do not fall into traditional patterns. But if one of these immediate experiences passes through two or three intermediate storytellers the traditional scheme very soon appears, even in a span of from five to ten years.

I may mention in passing some interesting experiments with this kind of thing. As you can readily believe we have innumerable stories about the Germans during the occupation. In Norwegian history we have a few important events which tradition has kept alive. There are, for example, the exploits of our patron saint, Olaf, a large body of religious tales, that is tales about religious leaders in the early days of the conversion of Norway to Christianity. Then we have all the stories about the great plague in the fourteenth century. There are tales of the war with the Swedes around 1800. Then the next great theme was the Occupation. Stories of the Occupation started through broadcasting. These began as soon as the Germans were out. The papers tried to get in as many stories as possible from people who had gone through experiences in the Occupation. There was an astonishing reply and many most ridiculous stories turned up. The facts of these could be checked, because some of the persons, frequently university professors, had been selected as heroes and you could ask them about the stories. Now I think that in almost every case the story was not true. What interested us was that even within these four years the general epic clichés have tended to reappear. There is hardly any account of a small skirmish or battle when the “rivulets do not run in blood” and we are just now waiting for “blood to rise above the ankles.” So even for these local legends the epic systematic register turns out to be the obvious thing to use. Our ultimate plan is for cooperation with similar work in other countries, with the final distant aim of getting something like an addition to the Aarne-Thompson index for this particular kind of material.

As for the primary experiences when people claim to have had adventures, for example with fairies, or doings with witchcraft which are told in a simple way, we have to keep broad outlines and to arrange our cards in simple groups such as “seeing fairies,” “visiting fairy houses,” “listening to fairy music,” and so on. Similarly we have to work out simple classifications for real historical traditions—for example, about old people, about musicians, farmsteads, and so on. These fit into systematically arranged slips. As far as custom and belief are concerned, the most difficult thing is to arrange these properly, because there is a constant interplay between the mere alphabetical system and the system arranged according to contents. We are always working in different ways, reshuffling our cards in all these long boxes and finally trying to evolve some sort of combination so that when people write in to get information about beliefs concerned with certain days, for example, we can open the register to Friday and find plenty of notes about what should or should not be done on that day. When you come to a subject like children, for example, where you have birth, education, and so forth, you have obviously to go back to a systematic arrangement again. All this means that we have to go in for cross references and do this in a very systematic way. We have found that the cross references fill up about as much space as all our other references put together. But without them the whole index is practically useless. This sounds very complicated, but we have this all in our boxes and it does seem to work out fairly well.

As to publishing such lists and indexes I don’t think that would be very useful. It is my conviction that every institute has to have at least its own index of customs and beliefs separate from the general index. It is possible that some day there may be a sort of general index of everything where you could be told to which national or individual catalog you could go to find particular items. I realize that the general motif-index of folk literature is well on its way, but there is a considerable difference in making a general index of customs and beliefs and I think that at least as I see it at the present these things cannot be fitted together.

MR. SEEGER: May I ask Professor Christiansen how he indexes the tunes?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: I ought perhaps to say that we simply have not taken that up in our folklore institute, because we have our own institute for musicology and they have their indexes. But I am not at all certain what index they use. Whenever we get a tune or melody we always hand it over to them for working on. We do have a small set of records but these we also have passed over to them.

DR. CAMPBELL: I wonder about the cross references Professor Christiansen speaks about. Do you have, for example, cross references between legends and folk belief when they refer to the same thing?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: Yes, of course we have. I think it is impossible to distinguish between a legend and a folk belief. A legend, for example, often illustrates a special practice or belief, and here we find cross references to be a very great help. We have, for example, stories about witches and of course this involves the belief in witchcraft. This is one of the main reasons why the cross references have a rather unpleasant tendency to grow and overshadow the rest of the index.

PROFESSOR SHOEMAKER: What are you doing in Norway with the classification of games?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: We merely arranged games under a general heading and then have tried to classify them under such captions as singing games, competition games, counting-out rhyme games, and the others in a way that you are already familiar with. We have kept shuffling these groups about until it seems to us we have got a system that works fairly well. There will always be a few odd groups of various kinds which don’t fit into a catalog, but I don’t believe that you can avoid that.

CHAIRMAN: I would like to ask you whether your games would not come in with the beliefs? Would there not sometimes be many things that would be necessary to put into both catalogs?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: I don’t believe that that would be true for many Norwegian games. For example, I think there are no Norwegian games that have to do with witches. I know that there has been a very considerable amount of speculation as to the origin of games but we have found it more practicable to leave such things out of consideration.

MR. SEEGER: When you refer a question to the Musicological Society do they have some key to the material that you give them so they can refer back to your records?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: Certainly, in a small circle like that mostly centralized in Oslo, in the capital, we all work together and practically all of us know a good deal about the others’ tasks. If we have a dance coming in to the music people and if there is a text to it they will immediately come to us or call us. When somebody asks us about a special game, how was it played, we get out a text of it and then we take this down to somebody who is ail expert on folk music and ask him whether he has any information as to the tunes used on that and so on. We all work very closely together. If we don’t run into a man in an hour perhaps we can always phone to him in five minutes. So it has worked out very well in that way.

MR. SEEGER: Do they typify the tunes with some set name or standard name or something before they hand them over?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: Yes, of course they do. We know nothing about the musical aspect of it in our place. We merely say to them, “What tunes do you have that are used to the ballad of the Two Sisters?” Then they will say, “We heard a fine tune used perhaps with other words. Would you recognize that if any other texts are connected with it?” I know that that has happened. All this is very informal and we have not worked out any systematic plan of cooperation.

CHAIRMAN: As I understand it you don’t have any system of tune classification, but you classify your songs according to the subject with which the tune is connected.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: Yes, as A practical arrangement that is what we do.

CHAIRMAN: Perhaps at our promised conference on musical classification which we certainly will not escape, we can discuss this more in detail.

DR. CAMPBELL: I would like to say something about the classi-, fying of Swedish legends which I have been at work on. In Sweden we have an immense collection of legends. We don’t have, relatively speaking, a large number of folk tales. We are very poor in that respect but we do have a rich tradition of legends. It is very interesting that we especially have good mythological legends. Of course in addition to that we have local legends, historical legends, and all the rest. It is easy to divide the legends into large sections that I have just mentioned, but then we go on to make more detailed classifications. I have discussed this matter with Dr. Oskar Loorits of Estonia and we have gone through all our material. We have come to the decision that it is not necessary to try to make a thorough classification that can be used all over Europe, but to use a classification system that will apply just to the Swedish material. The reason that these special classifications have to be made is that the interest of various people in legends differ so much. Now you take the Gaelic legends, you will find that they have to do with fairies and with dead people but we don’t have fairies in the same way, and especially we don’t have stories of dead people that are coming back to life in the same way. We do have, of course, ghost stories but they would not fit into the same classifications as the Gaelic ghost stories. I am wondering if the folklorists in other parts of Europe have had the same experience and feel that the legends should be classified separately for each country. Or should we try to get some common system of classification?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: I would like very much to stress the point that every country has to make the arrangements based upon their own material. Any question of an international arrangement seems to me very far off. Practically all the spade work has to be done first separately in each country. Even in neighboring countries like Norway and Sweden there is a great difference between legends especially in connection with the fairy beliefs and beliefs concerning the devil. In Norway, for example, our legends connected with witches and the devils and that kind of thing have been placed apart because in Norway this is a rather late importation dating from about 1450 and it is still very much alive. The mass of our legends we put under two headings, one of them we call mythological. I realize that mythological is a bad word and that it does not really describe anything. The other is historical and includes semihistorical local legends under headings of the experiences of persons, places, events, and so forth. And then we have all kinds of cross references to these.

DEAN THOMPSON: In working on the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature it does not seem to me that I have found the legendary material so intractable as has been suggested. That is to say I have used legendary material from all over the world, and with notable exceptions and with making proper modifications, the general framework seems to me quite possible to bring together into a single scheme. I have, of course, no ambition to superimpose the scheme of the Motif-Index on any group working with legends, but I would like to call attention to the fact that after the present edition of the Motif-Index was completed I had a student go through and take out all the motifs for which there were references to any books of legends. It seems to me that such a check list might form the basis for a special index of general legends. It does not have all the items, of course, but it might well form a framework. In any case when I am revising the Motif-Index I shall be very glad to get hold of some of these local legend indexes so that I can thus round out the general study.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: It seems to me that an international type-index of legends, or at least of European legends, is possible and even desirable. Antti Aarne used exactly the same system for Estonian and the Finnish legends. I think, such an index is possible and desirable, but not for the moment. It will be a very difficult task to compose it since there are such great differences between the repertoire of legends in the different European nations. In Ireland, for instance, there are many legendary types that are absolutely unknown in other European countries, for example in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Such an international index is very desirable for the future but for the present time I am afraid that it is impossible.

PROFESSOR REAVER: I am not clear as to why we should have to wait for the international index if it is ever going to be possible to make it. The legendary materials seem to me not likely to change and the problem is not likely to be different in the future from what it is now.

CHAIRMAN: If I understood Professor Anderson correctly his point was that sufficient work has not yet been done on the legends of the various countries to formulate this international catalog and that it would be misleading if we based a catalog on purely arbitrary subjects before these national catalogs were ready.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: That is just what I meant to say.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I recently did a legendary study on supernatural music and I found it was very difficult to assemble material because of the lack of indexes. I found, however, that the same themes were repeated for nixes and pukas and fairies and saints. There would always be a supernatural being who would teach music for a price or for a sacrifice. And then there are legends about learning music by accident. All across northwest Europe and in the United States we hear of people accidentally overhearing music or learning music in dreams. There is frequently the substitution, then, of one supernatural figure for another. As far as classification is concerned it would simply be necessary to say that a supernatural being teaches music and not specify whether it is a fairy or a saint or what, then we could have proper cross references.

PROFESSOR SIGURD ERIXON (University of Stockholm, and the Northern Museum, Stockholm, Sweden): I agree with Professor Walter Anderson that there are many difficulties now for making international indexes. This is true in all branches of folk culture. In our particular archive, an institute which is only for the research in folk life, we are indexing only the material actually in our own museum, and we don’t know whether there will ever be any general international indexes.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: It seems to me that an international or even a European type register of legends can be composed only after we have the indexes for the various single European nations. In the meantime we do need to have cross references. We need to have concordances between the various national registers. We should be able, for example, to say that Estonian legend number twenty-five is the same as Lithuanian legend number so and so.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: I fully agree with those who have indicated that national cataloguing must come long before any international index can be made. In Ireland, for example, we find that with regard to custom, belief, folk tale, ballad, all aspects of folklore, part of our material is international and part of it appears to have been evolved by our own people. In the folk-tale section, for example, about half the tales which we have are international and can be included in Stith Thompson’s group, but the other half is not found at all in his register. That does not mean that these are purely our tales. There are, of course, many gaps in any of the registers and we will have to put in temporary numbers. I think every country should keep on with the cataloguing of its own material and make that material always available to Stith Thompson or his successor and it can then be brought into the international picture. I think that even harder than for the folk tales and legends would be a general index of customs, beliefs, and so on. Of course Åke Campbell, Sven Liljeblad, and Herman Geijer have evolved an extremely good system for the Swedish material. We have also found this fairly foolproof in Ireland but we have had to make some changes and I suppose as it goes to other parts of the world many more changes would have to be made.

DR. CAMPBELL: I should like to say a few words with regard to what Dean Thompson said. We all work in Europe with the Aarne-Thompson Folk-Tale Index and our archive registers are based upon it. We have the whole of the index in our folk-tale register. Now about the Motif-Index. That, of course, is another thing. The Motif-Index of Thompson is one of the most useful books in existence. We use it when we are dealing with all our legends and all our folk beliefs and of course when dealing with folk tales. But what we use there and refer to are the small motifs and not the whole legends. I say this only so that you can understand that when we are speaking about classifying legends, we are speaking of something that cannot quite be done through the Thompson Motif-Index although this is very, very useful.

And now about another point, the classification of folk beliefs. They come very close to legends. You can see how we handle folk beliefs in the Handbook of Irish Folklore,³ which Mr. O’Suilleabhain has published in English. You can see that here we have classified the lore of the people. For example, what the people believe about weather, about plants, animals, stones, mountains, and everything that comes under the heading of their traditional lore. We have tried to arrange their folk beliefs in logical chapters. For example, take the stories or legends about cocks. We may have a legend about divination from the crowing of the cock. You sometimes find the cock is a symbol used in pictures, and you would find also other beliefs about the cock. All of these should have cross references. It is always well that a certain chapter concern itself with what we may call the norms of folk belief. That is, it should be concerned with such concepts as time, space, number, color, and so on. Then there will be in such a chapter on the norms plentiful cross references to all the items wherever they fit in.

CHAIRMAN: It seems to me that we all agree upon the absolute necessity of cross reference. There seems to be some difference of opinion about whether these catalogs can be made on a national or international basis. I feel myself that Professor Walter Anderson has summed it up pretty well. At first it must be on a national basis but gradually we may work toward an international catalog. Gradually as we each work in our own institutions we can be on the lookout for similarities in other countries. It may well be that these will gradually show enough international relations to result in the end in some kind of large international indexes.

PROFESSOR A. P. HUDSON (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina): This question may expose my ignorance. I have been much interested in hunting tales, tall tales, the exaggeration type of story connected with hunting and fishing. I don’t know the Thompson Motif-Index as well as I should, but I am under the impression that he does not index very well that type of story, and a good many people in this country believe that it has been cultivated more in America than elsewhere, if it was not originally American. May I ask if the hunting tale or the fishing tale, aside from the Baron Munchausen sort of stuff, is a very common type of folk tale in western Europe? I mean the kind of story that tells about feats of hunting and fishing. I included a good many of them in my Humor of the Old Deep South⁸ about fourteen years ago but I could not find many analogues of that sort of thing in the folk literature of other peoples. Is it common for you to find a type of exaggerated story of hunting and fishing in the folk literature of other peoples?

DR. MAURICE JAGENDORF (New York City): No, if it were common I would be prepared to corroborate it. I have, I think, a fair knowledge of the folk stories of many nations since I have read most of them. I think the type of exaggeration which Dr. Hudson just spoke of is a peculiarly American thing. It is common in our hunting stories. Outside of the Munchausen stories and one or two stories in France, there are very few tall tales in the American sense that I have ever encountered. I wonder if Dr. Walter Anderson could enlighten us on whether there are many of these in Europe.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: I don’t quite understand what stories. Do you mean stories of the Munchausen kind or what?

PROFESSOR HUDSON: When you go fishing and catch a fish of twenty-five or thirty pounds, or you shoot three animals with the same bullet, or some exaggeration like that.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: Oh yes, I think most of them are also in Dean Thompson’s Index but it is not easy to find them there.

PROFESSOR BALYS: We have them in both indexes, at the end of the Aarne-Thompson Type-Index and in the Motif-Index in Chapter X. Both of these indexes are growing and growing and I think that within ten years or maybe earlier we are going to have a new edition of the Motif-Index. Folk literature is such an immense subject that it takes time and work to classify and put things in the proper place. It is always easier to find fault than to give applause in this field but we are hoping that little by little we are going forward and we expect to include all of this material that we can.

CHAIRMAN: I think we should not spend more time on this query since we have so many other things. Mr. Seeger, you had a point you wished to raise.

MR. SEEGER: I feel as if I had perhaps been misunderstood slightly in what I said about music indexing a little while ago. I wanted to find out from the people who are interested in folklore in its broadest sense, including crafts and the arts, what they were doing about music. Are they indexing it according to some speech label or do they have a technical musical index for it? It seems to me that it is very necessary for those of us who are interested in folk music and in the archiving of folk music to insist that it be handled by the general archivist along with the other material. Now in the case that Professor Christiansen spoke of he found himself without a musician, so he turned the music over to an agency with which he worked in complete liaison very quickly and confidently. Confidently because they referred questions of folklore to him. But I would say that this is a very unusual situation and that as a rule especially in this country we will find that if you give the folk material to the musicians that is the end of it. They will either do nothing about it or they will mess it up as if it were a symphony theme. Now the thematic indexing, the melodic indexing of folk material involves totally different problems from the indexing of composed, that is professionally composed, material. The musician is constitutionally against knowing anything about folklore. He will not go out and ask a folklorist, he will say that folk music is a low class of musical life and “I know more about it than the folklorists.” The folklorist must keep that material in his hand. I feel that it must be cross-indexed, not only by title as Mr. Bayard and Mr. Bronson have shown must be done, but I believe it also must be cross-indexed to a certain extent by function. It seems to me that we must train technically equipped musicians to handle folklore material within the laws and procedures of the science of folklore. We cannot trust it to be handled except in that way.

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: Mr. Seeger seems to me quite right in this matter. In several countries I am sure that folklore studies —not folk music studies, but folklore studies in general—are more advanced than the study of folk music. Often folk-music scholars do not know what to do with their materials and other folklorists who collect materials and who are not musicians often give their collections to the musicians. The musicians have this material in hand and sometimes they transcribe it and sometimes they make records and a kind of archive and they make no further use of it. In the Folk Music Council conference we spoke of folk music in general, but I think we did not raise these important questions of classifying and making indexes. I have made some indexes and, if you like, I can say a few words on that but I think this is somewhat off our subject.

CHAIRMAN: I think you need not explain exactly how it is done but rather within what framework it is done. For instance, have you a folk-music archive or is there a folk-music section of a general folklore archive in Turkey?

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: Yes, in Turkey we have just that kind of thing. In the university we have a folk-music archive. It is separate from the regular folklore archive. They are not in connection and they don’t work together. This, I think, is unfortunate. When we study folk materials, for instance, the words, poems, are always sung by a folk musician. Often I notice that those who study the words neglect the musical part and those who study the music neglect the words. So we have not a real idea of our material, which consists of both of the elements, music and words. And when we study folk music, for instance a funeral melody, we study it only as musicians. As musicians we sometimes analyze the words but we don’t care for the environment of the funeral ceremonies and other parts of the ceremonies. We separate the elements and in this case, of course, we fail to get a good idea of our material. I think we must have greater collaboration between the diverse sections: namely, folklore, music, literature, and customs. All this is folklore, and we do not have this collaboration.

CHAIRMAN: Professor Saygun points out clearly that there must be a close collaboration between the various kinds of folklore. I am wondering if the question which Mr. Seeger asked can be discussed a little more. Is it possible to have the study done by two separate bodies working in cooperation, or should it all be done within the framework of a single institution?

MR. SEEGER: Where the situation is that which Professor Christiansen spoke of, it may work very well, but I have a doubt whether this cooperation would work everywhere. This is simply on account of the nature of musicians. For instance, take Professor Walter Anderson’s reply about the legend. This was clearly a conclusion of an experienced folkiorist. Now they have just found out in a committee that CIAP⁹ called together in Geneva last June, that the attempt to make a universal classification for folk tunes is impossible. I have talked about that in detail with several who were present. They agree now that it is impossible and that what has to be done first is the indexing of smaller units and that perhaps eventually someday we may get a classification. Now you could never persuade a professional musician of that, but the folklorist knows it already by experience. It seems to me, then, that we should put ourselves by and large under the care of the folklorist rather than under the care of the musicians when we go to studying the indexing of folk music,

CHAIRMAN: I see this disadvantage. I think that it happens that if folk music is put in as one of the activities, one of the branches of folklore in general, folk music will suffer simply because it is a very technical and special thing. For that reason there is the danger that it will be neglected.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: The cataloguing of folk music is really a very technical matter and often folklorists are like myself. I haven’t a note of music and in Dublin we can’t do anything in regard to the cataloguing of folk tunes. We have nobody on our staff at present who can do this. Would it not be possible for men like Mr. Seeger and Mr. Lomax and people like Miss Karpeles who understand the techniques of folk music to evolve some scheme that could be of practical use in the individual archives ?

MR. SEEGER: That is just what we can’t do. You are asking us to give you a universal technique. We don’t have it.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Not universal perhaps, but perhaps for us in Ireland, for example.

MR. SEEGER: I would have to be closely familiar with the idiom of Irish music, which I don’t know. You would have to build up your index out of Irish music.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: Perhaps I can illustrate this question. In Norway we have a common type of country dance of a Polish-Scottish type. You really don’t need to know much about the music to be able to classify them, that is to say this is east Norwegian, this is west Norwegian, and so on. That you can hear in a moment. But farther than this very simple kind of classification I don’t see quite what we could do. Do you think we could actually work out melodic characteristics and variations so that we could make the classification in this technical way? To most folklorists these are merely mystical chemical formulas.

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: Yes, I think it is possible and not quite so complicated as you suggest. For instance, you have a dance and what kind of a dance? Second, is it a religious or profane melody? After analyzing that melody you can find certain types. You can tell what modes certain songs are in, whether it is a descending or ascending melody, the various stops in the musical line. It takes some training but not as severe as you seem to imagine. The folklorist often collects material and then he gives the material to an archive. Here they are on records and nobody does anything with these records. The musicians and the folklorists often do not understand the importance of studying this material. They think that merely to collect is sufficient. This is one of the great problems. To make actual and practical use of the folk material that has been collected, we must analyze it before we can thoroughly understand it.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: I do not see Professor Otto Andersson here but I do want to say that we have edited the folk music tunes in twenty-two volumes and have made an index of that. Professor Andersson has given us a pattern so that we are using his index in our musical and historical museum in Stockholm. We have been especially lucky to have Professor Andersson, who is an excellent combination of folklorist and musicologist.

CHAIRMAN: I want to reiterate that I think we should not go into the details of music classification here. The point that Mr. Seeger has raised, the very important point at the moment, is that you have a folklorist here and a musician there and the problem is to bring these two people together.

PROFESSOR HUDSON: I understand now a good deal better the difficulties we have had in handling our collection in North Carolina. When Mr. Seeger and others confessed that an index of folk music is impossible I can understand better why it seems to be impossible for the editors of the texts of the folk-song collections and the editors of the music to get together. In our great North Carolina collection we had about five thousand song texts and we have weeded these out to about one thousand. Of course there are a good many variants too. Now we had about fifteen hundred tunes. The ideal thing would have been to have the texts and the tunes together but the musicologist would not allow that. We had to arrange them differently from the way we wanted to arrange the texts. We wanted to arrange the texts by theme and function, but he insisted upon arranging them by some sort of musical typology. The result is that we will have the text in two volumes and the music in the third. This seems to me bad. I wonder why the musicologists and the editors can’t get together in some way or another.

CHAIRMAN: I think we had better go on now from this rather inconclusive discussion. We all know the system of Mersmann, the system of Krohn, and many other systems, but everyone will tell you that none of them is satisfactory. There we have to leave it, I think.

Can we now start on the general subject of map making? Just perhaps to start off I want to quote a very small instance, that is the work that is done by Joseph Meedan that many of you know as a biologist who is extremely interested in folk music and folk dance. He did a good deal of research on the distribution of two types of English dances, or at least of dances found in England, the Sword dance and the Morris dance. He made a map of the distribution of these dances and it was interesting because he found that the Sword dance corresponded more or less to the regions the Danes had dominated and the Morris dance to the Saxon regions. Well now, of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Sword, dances came to us through the Danes and so on, but still it is of very great interest. Distribution maps can certainly be an important thing in the study of folklore. And I would like to ask if any of those present have had experience with map making either themselves or in institutions.

PROFESSOR SHOEMAKER: Are you referring to what we call folklore atlas?

CHAIRMAN: Yes, I am sure that that was what is meant in the agenda which Dean Thompson has prepared.

PROFESSOR SHOEMAKER: It would be impossible in this country to have a folklore atlas because we haven’t any archive with hundreds of informants collecting on any one particular item. We have to turn to Europe exclusively for anything of that sort.

CHAIRMAN: But surely a start could be made within one certain region. For example, a state or even a part of a state could surely be mapped out.

DR. LORD: I should like to ask what type of material would be mapped on a folklore map ?

PROFESSOR HALPERT: Material culture is the only thing you can map on a folklore atlas, so far as I can see.

DR. CAMPBELL: Are you confining this discussion to America or do you also include Europe?

CHAIRMAN: I am not limiting it to America at all.

DR. CAMPBELL: If we speak about Europe we have to talk about the cultural atlases for the various countries. Now this is a very hard question. It covers thousands and thousands of maps and different systems, and I am wondering whether it is any use to try to discuss this in the very short time at our disposal. There is one point, I think, that can be used. Some mapping of cultural elements is always very good to give you a start in your working or your archive. It shows you what has been found and indicates what might very well be found. The actual details of the atlas work are rather complicated.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: There is one kind of mapping that is very important and indispensable and at the same time is very simple. We need maps of material already collected. It would be very convenient to have a map of England or Ireland, where all collected folk-tale material or folk-song material and so on has already been collected. Each of these could be on a separate map. It is noted simply so that we can say that in this province they have collected very many folk tales and in a neighborhood province nothing or almost nothing. It does not matter if these are printed maps or if they exist only in manuscript, but they should exist.

DR. CAMPBELL: I will give you a very short example to show from our work the pertinence of what Professor Anderson has just said. I started mapping a series of folk beliefs. And after we had collected for many, many years certain beliefs in a part of the country, I learned from the map that we had entirely forgotten to collect in a certain big area. So you see if you take a certain motif or a certain incident or custom and have a scholar make a map of the distribution of it, we often find that there have been places that have been neglected. This is something that it seems to me you should try for systematizing the work in a whole country as big as America.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: After having studied the atlas of German folklore, which runs into many volumes and is perhaps a model for folklore atlases, it is clear that no atlas can be made in any country without very extensive collections first and without questionnaires on particular subjects. For example, the Germans have made an atlas of the various names by which Santa Glaus or Saint Nicholas is known among the German people and German children. They sent out a questionnaire on that topic to almost two thousand people and they have mapped the various names under a dozen different symbols and it does show a very, very curious distribution. There is no good at all I think in mapping just what is already known, what has been found in books and collections already made. You must go after particular factors of the whole culture. We found in Ireland, for instance, that in certain parts of the country there is a custom of having a bed in the kitchen. Now my Scandinavian friends will know of this type of thing, but in Ireland the walls of the house in which that bed is juts out in the form of a rectangle to make the bed. So that instead of having a rectangular shaped house you have a rectangular shape with this rectangle jutting out just to take the bed. We sent out questionnaires about that in Ireland and we found that that type of bed isn’t known at all in Leinster, our eastern province, or in Munster, the southern province. It is found only along the northwestern coast in about five counties, and it is found only in certain parts of them. It is found in the western islands of Scotland and in the Hebrides and in certain parts of the mainland and also in Scandinavia. You could make a very interesting distribution map showing the areas in northwestern Europe where this particular type of kitchen bed or hag bed is found. Now the problem for us in Ireland that was brought up by that map is to answer why that custom came into Ireland. We had no cities in Ireland at all until the Vikings settled. They founded Dublin and Waterford and Limerick. This type of bed is found in Scandinavia, but isn’t found in Ireland in the country areas around the cities founded by the Vikings. Still I think that type of bed must have come to us from Scandinavia. And why is it found in the areas far away from those cities at the other side of the country ? It might have been brought in by fishermen. I think nobody knows the answer to this question, but the problems are stated very sharply. I spoke the other day of the questionnaire we sent out about the feast of Saint Martin. You will remember that in the northeast and the southwest of the country we found no knowledge whatever of the bloodshedding custom. The distribution would point to something like a special ethnic group, I think. In the southwest you are supposed to have the earliest Irish populations, in the northeast you have the people who came in from Scotland, and so on. And that custom is in Scotland.

Any making of maps, it seems to me, must be based upon questionnaires. I think Miss Karpeles is quite right that in the United States maps could very well be made for certain ethnic groups. I should think that the Pennsylvania Dutch people who are a more or less homogeneous unit, would be an excellent subject for mapping. Professor Sigurd Erixon of course, has mapped a great deal of the material culture of Scandinavia and has written many large books on this subject. Of course endless maps can be made and we have only thirty or forty on particular things. The German atlas will show how many maps they have made and that there is no limit to this kind of thing at all.

PROFESSOR SHOEMAKER: I have to get on my favorite subject, that is the wishbone so well illustrated in my homogeneous section of southeastern Pennsylvania. In my own section which is the very easternmost end, the child who gets the end, the spade end, is believed to live longer because he has the shovel wherewith to dig the grave to bury the other person. But then when you come to a county further west a wishbone is called a bfille or a pair of glasses. Why is the wishbone called a pair of glasses? Because the children don’t know anything of the pick as we have it in the most eastern part of Lehigh County, but they take the wishbone and stick it over their nose and imitate adults wearing glasses. But then when I came a little farther to Lancaster County, where I am at the moment, they know nothing of that, but they take the wishbone after they are through and hang it on a nail above a door, and the first person of the opposite sex who enters the house will be the future mate of the person concerned. Now in mapping out the area, of course, the problem is what have been the influences there. Are they ethnic, or have these things been brought in from Europe? That is the problem of the folklore atlas.

End of Session

FOURTH SESSION

CHAIRMAN: Our last session was devoted to classification and indexing. The question of the classification of music was discussed in a somewhat furtive manner owing to the disapproval of the Chairman, but the conclusion we did come to was that it is very important. It was agreed that the classification of music is a very specialized matter and that it is essential that it should be handled by an expert, one who is in sympathy with folk music and not merely a musician who is on the staff of the archives.

Today there remain several things on the syllabus. It occurs to me that we have not yet touched upon the question of specialized libraries in the archives and I think it might be well to give some attention to that today. Professor Erixon, what about the library in your archives?

PROFESSOR ERIXON: I can’t tell you much about libraries in archives in general. The Northern Museum has a specialized library, the most important in Sweden. It covers the whole subject of folk life and folklore. We try to keep in exchange with the smaller archives all over Sweden and we are also continually discussing with international scholars the way to maintain exchanges of our works so as to keep building up our library.

CHAIRMAN: Professor Erixon, are you thinking of the exchange of material that is already in the archives or the exchange of general publications?

DR. CAMPBELL: We are interested in publishing as much material as possible and making this material available to the public and scholars and other institutions. We then use this as exchange so as to build up our own libraries. A great many of the smaller institutions have little publications and periodicals and yearbooks and we exchange our material for these. But I think these smaller archives and museums do not get enough books. We ought certainly to develop this type of exchange and it would strengthen the archive libraries everywhere.

DEAN THOMPSON: Perhaps what I shall say is not entirely pertinent here, because we do not have any real archives at Indiana University. We do, however, have the University and the problem of special folklore collections. In the course of the years we have attempted to round out as good a collection from all over the world as our funds would permit. For many years these were very small but they are getting larger as time goes on.

One of the special problems in building up a folklore library anywhere is, of course, that of bringing together all the many fugitive journals that are to be found all over the world. Many small organizations get out little folklore journals. It is almost impossible to find what is being done in a foreign country without actually going there, visiting and seeing what journals are published. On my trip to South America three years ago everywhere I went I found that there was some little journal that I had never heard of and that no one that I have talked to in this country had ever heard of. Now I have made these contacts and these journals are continually coming in from all parts of South America. It seems to me almost the only way that one can get hold of such journals is to go and actually meet people and see what they are doing; then you can get your name on their list and establish exchanges with them. It is astonishing how many small organizations are springing up all over South America, for example. Within the last month I have received volume one, number one, of several new journals, two of them from Argentina, for example, and about three different ones from Brazil. Unless one makes these contacts I suppose one might never hear of these journals at all. I would therefore put down as one of the problems that of keeping abreast of all the new publications that may be coming in.

Aside from these journalistic publications it is very difficult to learn about folklore collections that are continually appearing. Everywhere one goes he can find that in the bookstores there are many collections available that have not been publicized. I usually run across some folklore friend and then he tells me of dozens of other books that are out of print and it is probable that we will never get hold of these. It takes eternal vigilance to build up a folklore library. It cannot be turned over to the ordinary purchasing department with the expectation that that department actually will keep the collection coming in.

For a university, and I am certain also for an archive, it is best if possible to keep all the folklore books together so that they are available for study. We have at least found that this is of great help in Indiana University.

DR. LORD: Harvard has been proceeding much in the same way as Dean Thompson suggests. When I went to Yugoslavia recently one of my jobs was to find as many books on folklore as possible and to establish contacts with people for personal exchange. I was followed later by Professor Lunt who got Slavic texts including folklore. Personal contacts of this kind are of the greatest importance.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: One of the greatest difficulties in building up a special folklore library is the getting hold of older publications. Nothing has such untimely ways of getting out of print as folklore books. I suppose they are very much read and also that a relatively small number are printed. In Norway we were fortunate in inheriting a library which went back to the 1840’s. It was essentially a library of history, and we have a fairly complete set of French, German, and Italian publications of the nineteenth century. We also have the advantage of being housed in the university library as a separate unit. Our books may not be taken out of the building. They can be used in the reading rooms, while all the library books, of course, can be taken out. Until about 1911 our library was actually a private library but the professor worked in close cooperation with the university library. If we are unable to get the books we can usually inHuce the library to buy them, so that our collections supplement each other in a reasonably good way. When a book is too expensive we make the library buy it. We try to keep our collection as complete as possible for Norway itself and are gradually building up the collection for the rest of the world. For much of this international collection we have to depend upon exchange. We have our own publications and we are glad to establish exchanges with other publications. We now have gradually built up our collections. It seems to me that we have about ten of your American journals now on exchange basis. One of our special difficulties is the matter of language. We have a small periodical in Norwegian but the difficulty is that our language is not read very much outside of our own country and the periodical is of not much practical use. We are particularly grateful for societies who will accept our publications in spite of the language handicap. In South America, partly through Dean Thompson’s advice and help, we have established a good many exchanges of this kind.

In the way I have mentioned it has been possible even with the very small budget to build up a fairly good library sufficient for ordinary purposes. Now we have also an arrangement by which books in any Swedish or Danish library can be borrowed through our university. We had this in Germany before the war but I think it does not work any more. In England, of course, that seems to be out of the question, but I am glad I have this opportunity to thank anybody who is connected with the exchange for the willingness that they have had to help with our borrowing of books.

CHAIRMAN: We have a similar system of interlihrary exchange in England but this is only for central circulating libraries to which all public libraries are affiliated, but it does not apply to such libraries as the National Library of Scotland or the British Museum. Is there a similar system in the United States?

DEAN THOMPSON: We do have a system of interlibrary loan that is very active. It happens that here the two greatest folklore libraries in the country are that at Harvard and the White collection in the Cleveland Public Library. It is always a surprise to people to learn that one of the greatest folklore collections in the country is to be found in a city library and is very little used. We always borrow from the Cleveland Public Library.

CHAIRMAN: Let us now go back to the question of international exchange. One of the difficulties seems to be about knowing of the many local and national journals. It would seem that there ought to be a more adequate information bulletin that would keep the folklore scholars in touch with what is being done in all parts of the world. Another question is that of the books that are published by ordinary publishers. The currency difficulty has made it almost impossible to buy books from some countries. I don’t know to what extent the UNESCO book coupon system is of help, but I am certain that it does not solve everything. There is still the matter of actually paying for the book and the cost of books in some countries is now extremely high.

DEAN THOMPSON: The tightness of finances and the difficulties of getting dollars has sometimes put the authors of our American folklore books in a very embarrassing position. They get letters from their friends abroad and say they have no dollars and they would love to have our books. Of course what we do in the end is sit down and autograph a book and pay the bill, but this may run into a good deal of money.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: I don’t know how UNESCO has tried to solve the question discussed. It seems to me that CIAP could do something to remedy this question. We could perhaps discuss this at a later stage, possibly at the Stockholm meeting next year.

CHAIRMAN: That seems a very good thing to do. One of the principal duties of CIAP (the International Commission on Folk Arts and Folklore) should be to keep its members informed of publications everywhere. I think it does this to a certain extent through its bulletins but it is very desirable that these be kept up and expanded.

DEAN THOMPSON: It is to be hoped that the CIAP bibliography will grow. As far as the American material is concerned a very excellent bibliography is published annually in the Southern Folklore Quarterly. This bibliography seems to me very weak on the European side, though it is excellent for Latin American.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: In spite of this weakness I want to say that the most important means of getting to know what is published in folklore today is this American bibliography of Dr. Boggs.

DR. LORD: Some of the larger libraries have lists of books available for exchange, so that anyone who is interested can write to the library for such a list. Harvard I know has this practice.

CHAIRMAN: Dr. Lord’s point is that we really need some central agency who would let us know about these so that we would not have to write to perhaps a hundred libraries.

DR. LORD: Yes, but as long as there is no central agency the present system is better than none.

PROFESSOR REAVER: I should like some information about the possibility of having certain of the rare books put on microfilm or microcards. How extensive is that service?

DEAN THOMPSON: I think you can get any book in the Library of Congress microfilmed.

CHAIRMAN: But at your own expense.

DEAN THOMPSON: Yes, but you buy books at your own expense too. The microfilming is usually much cheaper than buying a rare book.

PROFESSOR REAVER: How about the European libraries, are the European archives and libraries prepared to do that kind of thing ?

CHAIRMAN: Certainly the British Museum is.

DR. CAMPBELL: And the library in Uppsala and those in Denmark can certainly do it.

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: I should like to bring up the question of the exchange of discs and other kinds of records. Perhaps a catalog of the archives of discs and records would be very useful.

CHAIRMAN: This is certainly a very important matter which Professor Saygun has brought up. Has anyone information or suggestions that they could offer?

MR. LOMAX: Isn’t there something going on at CIAP about making national catalogs of disc collections?

CHAIRMAN: There is something going on but I think on a very limited scale at the moment.

MR. LOMAX: Actually I think that every country does not want all of the discs from every other country. What more people need are just good sets of examples from most of the culture areas. Every folklore center would like to have such samples. If we could agree on some kind of plan for the use of either tape or long-playing records—probably long-playing records— we could make a beginning at this meeting of an international exchange of folk songs between countries. I know that it is possible to get about fifty minutes of music from one record at the cost of about three dollars and a half. With two or three records you could get a very great deal of music from Turkey or Pakistan or any particular part of the world. And it could be quite within the realm of possibilities to establish an international exchange on this basis. These long-playing records will play for about fifty minutes. If you can sell as many as five hundred you can pay for the expense and with the sale of a thousand you can finance a second record, and so on. I think the working out of a simple plan of an international folk-song exchange is quite possible now perhaps for the first time. For these long-playing records it is possible to get an attachment for one’s old phonograph for a very small amount of money. This means that for the first time folklore has an opportunity to be on records, because now we do not have to cut the singer of a ballad down to a very short performance. The one side will run for twenty-five minutes.

I was wishing today that the United States could get on record probably three or four good Anglo-American ballads, three or four good Negro songs, two or three Spanish-American, and a couple from the French and German section, and so on. I heard some very wonderful records in eastern Europe last summer and I know there are fine ones from Africa and Asia. It does seem to me possible that we could work out some kind of international library.

CHAIRMAN: It seems to me that as far as songs are concerned this idea is one that the International Folk Music Council would be much interested in. I believe we have the machinery that would be necessary to get this sort of thing going. The only question in my mind, a purely practical one, is about repairs of these machines outside the United States.

MR. SEEGER: The long-playing record revolves at thirty-three and one-third revolutions per minute. The cut is about three hundred per inch as against one hundred per inch oil the standard phonograph. Since the channel is so very narrow and very shallow you need a special pick-up arm which is very light. This special pick-up arm and special needle can be bought rather cheaply. Unless the United States goes on a real war footing I think that these will be produced in large numbers and can be easily bought.

CHAIRMAN: There is always the difficulty about importing things.

MR. LOMAX: I should think for the small number of archives there are, this could be overcome.

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: I want to add something at this point. If a scholar of one country wants to make a study of, shall we say, wedding songs or weddings in general not only of his own country but of all the world, he will not have material for it. If there are only one or two records this may give one a good idea of the folk music of a particular country but for the scholar who wants to make a study of a subject such as I have mentioned it will not be enough. There always should be connections between the folklore archives so that they can send their catalogs to each other. Then the folklorists of one country can ask for the songs which interest him and get a real representation on any particular subject. Mr. Emrich of your Library of Congress told me that they will do this both for books and for discs.

MR. LOMAX: Who is going to pay for that?

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: The archives which do the exchanging. Each country can send these records gratis or else the person who is interested can pay for it.

CHAIRMAN: I feel certain that is a subject that we must take up at the next meeting of our International Folk Music Council and I shall be grateful to have more information about it from Mr. Lomax. But now we must not think of it only in terms of music. How far would such an exchange be of help in other branches of folklore, for example for tales, Dean Thompson?

DEAN THOMPSON: I don’t see that it would help a great deal in the study of folk tales. All we need there is the written form. We need a sufficient sampling of the material to see something of the style of the tales and that is about all. At this point I should like to ask Mr. Lomax if he knows what the arrangement with Sâo Paulo in Brazil was. Do they have all the Library of Congress records? I know that they have a great many of them.

MR. LOMAX: No. I made a selection of about five hundred records of all different sorts. We madè a special collection for them and then they sent the Library of Congress about five hundred equivalently interesting records.

DEAN THOMPSON: It seems to me that this collection of discs in Sâo Paulo is the most elaborate that I have ever seen.

MR. LOMAX: I wanted to ask someone about the Musée de la Parole in Paris which was closed both times I have been in town. It struck me as a different kind of museum and one that we have not discussed here.

PROFESSOR CHERBULIEZ: The Musée de la Parole in Paris has one main purpose, that is to preserve a good example of the various idioms of French on records. They started with records of French as it was spoken in the south of France and then they enlarged it so as to have as many specimens as possible of the language of all nations. They are trying to study the different manners of articulation of the voice and the study of the voice itself.

CHAIRMAN: Actually there are some very good folk music records there, but they have to be dug out and I don’t think that anyone really knows what they have in the way of folk music.

MR. LOMAX: There was an intention at one time of making the Library of Congress collection into a sort of phonogram archive. Everything that we could put on records was going to be there: radio programs and every type of commercial music, all sorts of speech examples. They went out and recorded whole communities, everybody in the community so that they could make as complete a record as possible of the history and the general social life of the community. This approach, I think, should be discussed here because it does turn folklore rather upside down. It is making an oral approach to various fields and is certainly in contrast to the older literary approach.

CHAIRMAN: I wonder if, after all, this is not outside the scope of our discussion. We do have similar institutes of recorded sound in England but I think it goes a good deal farther than what we mean by folklore.

MR. LOMAX: The reason I bring this up is that I sometimes wonder whether it is possible to study oral literature in books. Dean Thompson has said that he didn’t see any particular point in having international exchange of recorded folk tales, but it seems to me very important to have them. The folk tale by definition at any rate is lived and it survives by oral transmission. If scholars are not interested in the oral aspect of it they are not interested in the folk tale at all. Although the language problem is very difficult I don’t see how a scholar or a scientist can know what folk tales are like unless he can and does follow them in their living oral form, in one or in preferably several languages. Our European can, of course, listen to many languages, but in America we are able to listen in only one or two or three languages. It seems to me very important for us to get our folk tales scattered around the world very liberally in recorded form.

CHAIRMAN: Would you care to reply to that, Dean Thompson?

DEAN THOMPSON: No, I was merely thinking of folk-tale students’ special needs and perhaps was taking a narrow point of view. The folk-tale student is usually interested in working on one particular thing and if so he can send to London or Paris or to some European place and get what he wants. Of course, the general idea of having a rather large collection of folk tales on records from various countries for the use that can be made of it would be a very good thing. I imagine I was speaking in a moment of weariness and under the realization of how short life is and of how much there is to do.

DR. BALYS: Some years ago an Englishman asked me to send him some Lithuanian tales on discs and I did. Then later he wrote to me, “I am sorry, I cannot understand these.” And yet he can read and speak quite good Lithuanian. Those tales were told in dialect and by old people and it was not easy for a stranger to understand, so I had to send him texts. I think that in this case concerning tales, then, the records, if they are to be useful must be always accompanied with texts written down word for word and with translation. Of course they may be of some use to show how the people are speaking, the intonation, the voice and so on, but mere records in a strange language are of little use.

DR. LILJEBLAD: I think it unfortunate to use written material which is not supported by phonograph or tape recordings. It seems to me clear that one can never study the style of a folk narration of a certain group in which a tale tradition is current unless you can support the written records by phonographic material. It is true that phonographic material as such, as Dr. Balys has pointed out, may be unintelligible for the person who wants to use it. On the other hand if you get a lot of phonographic materials, the first thing you want to know is where to house it, where it will be taken care of. It seems to me that any archive which houses written material ought also to protect the phonographic material. As Alan Lomax said, it is of great importance for the study of the folk tale really to have access to the spoken word. Everyone who has worked in the field with folk tales knows that what you put on paper directly from informants is not the folk tale. The folk tale is present on the tape or the phonograph record. These two things must support each other and you can hardly leave out one or the other.

PROFESSOR A. E. CHERBULIEZ (Zurich, Switzerland): In relation to folk music I would be very glad if this conference could accept the principle that recordings can never be the final phase of archiving. We should always have a transcription. We should have a notation of the music. On the other hand transcriptions or notations today are not enough. It should always be an intimate connection with recordings. So we have three final phases of (a) archiving, (b) recording, and (c) transcription. There is the great problem. Since we do mot yet have a generally acknowledged international notation we don’t know how to note a folk song properly. But I do think that it is very dangerous to believe that if you have a record of something in the way of folk music* we have actually achieved a phase of archiving.

MR. LOMAX: I must confess that I don’t understand what Professor Cherbuliez means when he says that the phonographic record is not the final phase in archiving. We have no agreement at all on notation and therefore we cannot proceed with it.

PROFESSOR CHERBULIEZ: I think it is not enough to have a mere collection of records.

MR. LOMAX: Why not?

PROFESSOR CHERBULIEZ: For scientific studies we should have the possibility of comparing the graphic reproduction with the melodies themselves.

PROFESSOR SAYGUN: I agree with Professor Cherbuliez that it is not enough just to have the records. If you have the records of course you can listen to the melodies. You may find the melodies interesting but that is all. For scientific studies you need a transcription of this record and we have actually made some steps toward the general transcriptions of melodies and of notation of songs. Some of you will remember that in the International Folk Music Council last year ten or twelve folklorists had a meeting in Geneva and we came to some decisions about the transcribing of melodies. I will mention two of these. For some melodies, mostly in the European mode, our present system of notation would be sufficient in certain cases, but of course in addition to that we need some other signs such as many people are using now, some arrows and other things. On the other hand, transcription of some melodies that are not based on the European scheme presents another problem. It was decided that we should have at the beginning of the melodies the scale and we would show on this scale the exact meaning of the intervals that are different from the European system. I think that in Europe they are using this system and I hope that in America the folklorists will become interested in this subject. Perhaps through Miss Karpeles and the International Folk Music Council the ideas of this meeting can be passed on to interested persons.

MR. SEEGER: Professor Cherbuliez has said that an archive of discs is not complete if you only have the discs. I would also say that an archive is not even then complete unless you have some assurance that these discs will be preserved. After what Mr. Siddons told us a few nights ago it seems that it might be almost unnecessary for us to talk about this whole thing since we are not sure that the recordings we make are going to last any length of time.

CHAIRMAN: I should like now to proceed to the matter of archives in connection with broadcasting companies. Perhaps I could just open up that subject by saying that the only one with which I have had any first-hand experience is the BBC. It has in a very haphazard way built up quite a fine library of folk-music records. It is haphazard because they have only been able to make records for a particular program, in connection with that program. I am glad to say now they are making records more or less on principle and not directed to a particular program and they are very much interested in exchanging records with other countries. There is an exchange system that is practiced with the Library of Congress in Washington and with various other institutions. I know also that in Czechoslovakia there is a very fine collection of folk music in archives and I think that Miss Lattimer, if she would, should tell us something about that.

MRS. BAREARA LATTIMER KRADER (Slavic Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts): As to the Czech collection of folk music in Prague even the chairman of the collection advised me not to try to use the material. And the head of the folklore department at the University of Prague said that it was quite impossible to get permission to use it. None of it has been published, and this shows what can happen to material in archives. I think that a new centralization of the archives in the whole country by the Communist government is under way. And if it actually happens it will be a good thing to look forward to. The Moravian group with its headquarters in Brno has done an infinitely better job of making the material available, especially by the publication of inexpensive collections, particularly of songs. Their material is ¡also extremely well organized; the melodies are indexed by first lines and by titles. There are three sets of cards, as I remember it. These songs are also indexed by regions, so that you can look up in a particular region any melody you are interested in. I think they put all of these songs in the same key, using Bartok’s system. In this library there are photostats of all the music that was collected from the castles in Moravia, in the Austrian tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were a lot of private orchestras and the music which we have is art music and not folklore at all. All of these are most beautifully organized and the photostats can be easily studied.

In Slovakia there is a great deal of unprinted material. The professor with whom I studied has collected some fifty thousand Slovak melodies and songs. He knows the material extremely well. If he ever gets it published, all of you should take an interest in it who are interested in Czechoslovak music. The Slovak material is particularly rich. The material, however, is all in manuscript and is extremely difficult to read. He is sixty-five or seventy years old and he goes on collecting more instead of seeing that his collections get published. I would like to go on record as saying that I hope that some of you wonderful collectors will not make this mistake. Please stop occasionally and put your material in order, so that other people can read it or else publish it.

The Slovak material is very good but in general the organization at the moment is rather bad. Finally in Silesia, which is partly in Poland and partly in Czechoslovakia, the Poles have made collections of Silesian music, quite a large collection I believe, and the Czechs are now doing the same thing on the Czech side. In generar there are certain political angles to all this; to prove that they belong to one side or another. But nevertheless some very interesting music is turning up.

CHAIRMAN: In Italy there is a center for folk music which works in very close connection with the radio. They have regular programs of folk music and the exchange with other countries. They are really doing very fine work. You will find an account of all this in Volume II of the Journal of the International Folk Music Council.¹⁰

MR. LOMAX: Last summer I saw another East European archive. I think you may be interested in hearing about what was in Hungary. They suffered a great deal in the war. They had formerly a number of folk museums as in Sweden, but apparently these were ruined during the long period of the war. Now all of them have been reopened, some forty. Usually there are one or two directors at work in each of these museums. They are living under great difficulties but the peasants are beginning to bring in samples of all the pieces of peasant art to the museum. The museum in Budapest is very well fixed up. You will be glad to know that Mr. Lajtha is very actively engaged in transcribing tunes there. When I walked into his office he was engaged in studying a mistake that a singer had made and why he had made it, so he is doing the thing that he likes to do. They haven’t yet started making tape records, since they don’t have equipment, but they are continuing the disc recording Dr. Bartók started. Now as far as the radio is concerned they play these records on the air and they are apparently bringing what they regard as Hungarian folk music to the air. A question in Hungary is about Gypsy music. The folklorists say that Gypsy music is not folk music but a sort of a café music comparable to our tin-pan alley songs. They say that they now have replaced about forty per cent of the Gypsy music which used to take up ninety per cent of the time.

MRS. KRADER: The Slovaks are doing an excellent job with the radio. The radio people go around the country and collect folk songs in the village and they sometimes pay the peasant so much that it makes it very difficult for the private collector who can’t afford to pay that much. The Slovaks are transcribing the melodies at once and also the words so that if by some chance they have to erase their tape they have a record which they can keep. There is a definite movement away from the studio orchestra and opera singer who sing and play folk songs in the cafes. The problem is whether or not to bring a wonderful folk singer into Prague and train him more or to leave him in his village. Bringing him in may spoil his style completely. Of course not everybody agrees with me. I like the village orchestra and the way it plays completely out of tune and so on.

DR. CAMPBELL: Perhaps you would like to hear something of the way in which the Swedish broadcasting corporation has taken over our catalog in Uppsala. This catalog was worked out by Dr. Liljeblad. They took over our cataloger, a lady trained in ethnology and folklore, and they have used her in preparing the broadcasting archives. Thus the regular folklore archive has been used by the broadcasting staff. In Sweden we work up what you would perhaps here call cavalcades; that is to say we have a program where you give a decade or two of the development of folk song or something like that. They take these from our old records and work out new programs for these special broadcasts.

Then they got the idea that perhaps they could go further by looking through the material themselves at Uppsala. I went through the cross references in the archives system and it was of great interest to start, say, with fishing or horses or cows or herding. They got a series of very interesting things that could be put together in a lecture or in a performance in broadcasting. So they decided to have the arrangements they had earlier worked out elaborated, using the Liljeblad system considerably. This has now been going on for about three years. A month before I left Sweden I visited the broadcasting office and went through the catalog system. Of course they use discs and wire and it is not always possible to find the very place on the disc or the wire that one is interested in, but they have developed a certain card system even for that.

When we arranged for them to take over our system and our cataloger, we said to them, “Your archive system and your archive must be left free to every scholar to study.” Of course they agreed and so when studying folklore you can now go to the broadcasting office in Stockholm to this systematic catalog and you can go to the discs for nearly everything. I am not quite sure just how this would work out for real scholarly work.

I want now to say something about the competitions that we have on the radio. Many years ago we started a competition for the radio listeners to write down folklore which they had collected. After some false starts we finally worked out a systematic plan. Six of us scholars got together with the broadcasting company and we arranged six very short questionnaires with regard to certain kinds of legends. These six different letters, one of them about place names, another about legends connected with the church, another about legends of supernatural beings, and so forth, were printed by the broadcasting company and were sent out to listeners. Then with another scholar I broadcast a dialogue in which we told people how to collect as individuals and also how to engage in teamwork in collecting. We suggested that they bring together eight to ten persons and listen to our lectures and discuss the information that they had from our lectures and go out as a team to work in their parish.

In this way several hundred small teams started their work on collecting these legends, and the legends were sent to the broadcasting company and we arranged a jury who had to go through the material and judge it. Naturally some of this material was very good and some of it was not worth very much. We took the best and decided which was the best team and the best person. The broadcasting people sent out to them and let the collectors speak over the radio, and this aroused a great deal of interest. Another thing which we arranged was very unusual for us. Of course you in America are used to it but for the time we thought it something extraordinary. We arranged a discussion between a place in the far north, one in the middle, and Uppsala which is far down near Stockholm. There sat several persons and discussed their legends so that people all over the country could hear us all discussing the material that we had. The best thing from our side was not just the material collected, but we got at least four very good addresses and made these people our collectors. One of them has written a book about his district in Lapland and we promised to have it printed, but he said No, he wanted to write a better book, so he is now doing the second book and his first book we have taken in manuscript into the archive.

I should like to discuss a third aspect of the radio work. Our broadcasting company started rather early a kind of interview with people in the countryside. There are three men in the broadcasting company in Stockholm who are more or less trained in this kind of thing. One is interested primarily in studying of dialects and the two others in studying ethnology and folklore. Now these all went out to places where special situations seemed to promise something interesting that might be pleasant to listen to. That is to say they went out to the miners, the fishermen, the people who were living in a lighthouse out on the sea, and in this way to people who had a rather unusual situation. To begin with, these people got very little results and there came to be jokes about these interviews. They merely got answers yes, no, no, yes. They found that if they were going to study a milieu thoroughly they had to get a good general picture of that milieu and have people really speaking about their own situation. Now they have learned their lesson and are getting some s very good results. Sometimes this material is excellent. You can be listening to a broadcast and find yourself suddenly in a Lapp house, you can hear the Lapp speak and you can hear a legend being told or about what has happened to the reindeer or something like that, or you are in a fishing village or at the home of a carpenter. All this material will be very excellent for the study of Swedish folklore in the future.

CHAIRMAN: Thank you Dr. Campbell. I am sure there will be other people who will want to make contributions to, what has been done in this way. It will probably not be as complete as that done in Sweden. I suggest that we postpone that until tomorrow in our third symposium.

MR. SEEGER: I had offered to read a brief memorandum on the subject of notation before the meeting the week before last but the program got thick and the paper was squeezed off. Shortly after when we were planning perhaps to present it here, I made a most fortunate contact with one of our colleagues here which put the whole matter on a new footing so I am going to beg off and report on it at some future time.

There still seems to be half a minute. The object of seeking this kind of notation is to escape from the inevitably subjective element in our European music notation which Professor Saygun has already referred to. The search for an absolutely objective notation has of course been going on for a long time. The best known of these is very cumbersome and it takes about three hours to write a page or so of it. What we want to do is to produce a line instantaneously perhaps on the first playing of a disc as it comes into an archive. But I shall want to report on that at some future time.

CHAIRMAN: Is that all we are going to have now?

MR. SEEGER: That is all I should like to say on it now. But anyway there are only ten minutes left and there is a great deal of winding up to do at this last session of this symposium.

CHAIRMAN: Certainly you don’t expect me to wind it up? [laugh]

DEAN THOMPSON: Well, we have a Friday session when we can try to do some winding up.

MR. SEEGER: If a new subject could be brought up now I should like to propose it.

CHAIRMAN: What is it, Mr. Seeger? I am not going to buy a pig in a poke. [laugh]

MR. SEEGER: We spent a good deal of time in discussing the writing up of an instruction book or a handbook for amateur collectors. It is my considered opinion that this is very valuable and I agree with what has been said about it, but it would be still more valuable to have some of the desiderata set forth in considerable detail especially as to what conditions an archive would like to have the material deposited in it by private collectors. Now of course in Ireland the handbook can set all that forth but in a place like the United States I can guarantee that the deposits that are now being made in the Library of Congress don’t meet any kind of criteria. I have seen a good many of them. Some collectors hand in their material in very good condition ready for archiving. But of course the Library of Congress is not ready to archive anything. It can just accept things. It hasn’t any more money than enough to pay a boy to put them on a shelf and to take the collector’s notebook and put that on a shelf and that is about the end of it. It seems to me that especially in the United States and in many other countries where the Irish system is not pretty well in operation it would be a very good thing, not only for collectors but for the archive itself, to lay out its specifications, to tell what it wants in the way of material. Especially not to have discs presented to it that are already played to death.

CHAIRMAN: Well that is surely a very useful suggestion.

DR. LILJEBLAD: I want to propose the question as to what to do when we collect material which we do not understand. Just at the moment I am engaged as an amateur collector with Indian mythological folk tales. These Indians have an enormous body of songs—dance songs, medical songs, love songs, and music played on an Indian flageolet and other things which I cannot describe. The only thing I can do is record it on tape. That represents many hours of tape and several hundred dollars worth. Since I cannot make the transcriptions and can only give the conditions under which these songs are sung—I can, of course, translate the words to go with them—should I omit, then, recording this material that I do not understand? Should I avoid sending it to a central archive and keep only the material which I can handle? I ask this question because I have a feeling that Miss Karpeles indicated that material without proper translation should not be kept, or was that a mistake?

CHAIRMAN: No, it was not a mistake. Professor Cherbuliez?

PROFESSOR CHERBULIEZ: It is very important to have as many records as possible, but it seems to me that nobody can study folk materials without having a certain kind of notation. What Mr. Seeger said at the last is extremely important. In the acoustical laboratory in one of the Swiss universities they have an apparatus now which will give the recording and a sort of electrophotographic diagram which can be translated into musical notation. This is in Zurich at the Federal Institute of Technology where we have a section of art and music and also acoustics. We have not perfected all of this, but we are making improvements on it all the time. We hope to have not only the records but also transcriptions of them through normal notation that will bring in all the finer intervals and finer rhythmic patterns.

PROFESSOR GEORGE HERZOG (Indiana University): Just in case there is some misunderstanding I think it ought to be realized that we are all very eager to have as many recordings of primitive and folk music as possible. Of course, we need to have systems of notation for them but in the meantime we should have as large a collection of acoustical records as possible.

CHAIRMAN: I think it is quite clear that one wants all of the records possible, but that the process is not complete when it has been recorded. Either the collector himself should make the transcription or if he cannot he should get someone to cooperate with him.

It is now time that we should close this symposium. I am sorry that we have not been able to finish on quite the human note that the symposium on collecting did, but I suppose that after all archiving is not quite as human a subject. I think it would not be possible to summarize easily all that we have said here but I am sure we have brought up a number of questions that we may be trying to answer through the years.

End of Symposium