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Paper short abstract

According to Lauri Honko, folklore must undergo milieu- and tradition-morphological adaptation to function in a community. In my presentation I ask, how applicable this theory of tradition ecology has been, and is, to the analysis of archived folklore texts.

Paper long abstract

Although Finnish folklorists maintained close ties with their Swedish colleagues from the early 20th century onwards, it is nevertheless striking how little influence Carl von Sydow’s concept of oicotype exerted on Finnish folkloristics. The first serious attempt to engage with the concept did not occur until 1979, when Lauri Honko, in a theoretical article, posed the question: What makes folklore “typical” within a given physical and socio-cultural environment?

For Honko, however, oicotype proved to be an insufficiently precise or comprehensive concept. Instead, he turned to the notion of milieu dominant, a term introduced by Swedish folklorist Albert Eskeröd as a interpretation of von Sydow’s idea. According to Honko, for stories and other folklore to be accepted and function effectively within a community’s narrative system, they must undergo both milieu-morphological and tradition-morphological adaptation. The former refers to the process of familiarization and localization—an external adaptation—through which the unfamiliar setting of a narrative is replaced with a recognizable one, thereby anchoring the tradition to a specific physical location within the community’s broader narrative and belief structures. The latter, in turn, refers to adaptation within the community in accordance with its collective tradition, and to alignment with a person’s life history and personality.

I ask how Honko’s theory of milieu- and tradition-morphological adaptation has been received in Finland, where folkloristics has historically relied on the comparative analysis of archived folklore texts. To what extent has Honko’s tradition ecology proven applicable to the interpretation of archival materials?