Paper short abstract:

What comes to light if we follow this motif through millennia and across continents? Tracing cultural forms through time and space is the old-fashioned way to do folklore studies. Before the performance paradigm, it was not doubted that such an approach could give good results. Perhaps it still can?

Paper long abstract:

Moses in the Sinai. Aeneas on the roaring seas. The city of God. The pilgrim fathers. The Germanic homeland. The modern utopia. The motif of the wandering people has had its home in many different highly circulated narratives, all of them telling stories about leaving an unsustainable place of habitation in search of a new and better home.

I wish to follow some iterations and modulations of this motif through time and space. In addition, I will discuss how my approach relates to similar approaches from the late 19th and early 20th century. First and foremost, I will refer to 'the systematic descriptive method' of Svale Solheim and to 'the poetical roots' of Moltke Moe.

My point of entry to the narrative complex will be the ethnography of the historian P.A. Munch, who at the onset of his monumental ‘History of the Norwegian people’ told the story of how the country was settled by North-Germanic tribes. I will show how the motif has wandered through the text of P.A. Munch by laying bare both previous and later iterations, some immediate and others more distant. My final discussion will be about how, in practical use, both the content and the meaning of narrative motifs are layered.