Evald Tang Kristensen
1843–1929
Biography
Evald Tang Kristensen was a Danish folklore collector who spent most of his working life recording the songs, tales, legends and customs of the Jutland countryside. He was born in 1843 at Nørre Bjert, near Kolding, and his childhood was hard after his father died young. He trained as a schoolteacher and graduated in 1861. While teaching in Jutland he began writing down local songs, the first in 1867, and he found a wealth of material, some of it reaching back to the Middle Ages.
His first large publications were the Jyske Folkeminder volumes, which appeared between 1871 and 1881 and contained songs, legends and fairy tales. Svend Grundtvig, another collector, helped finance the early work. In 1883 Kristensen founded the Danish Folklore Society and edited its journal until 1889. In 1888 the state gave him a fixed yearly grant that let him collect full time. In 1904 he helped establish the Danish folklore archives with Axel Olrik and Henning Feilberg. He died at Mølholm, near Vejle, in 1929.
The archive he helped found holds the results of a long career: about 6,500 people sent him material, and his fieldnotes fill 24,000 pages. He recorded the time, place and teller of each item, which keeps his records useful to researchers today. Fra Mindebo: Jyske Folkeæventyr, the book on this site, brings together twenty-nine folk tales from storytellers in Jutland and ends with a short afterword by the collector. It shows the method behind his whole career, which was to go to the people who told the stories rather than rely on printed sources.
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Books
Fra Mindebo: Jyske Folkeæventyr
by Evald Tang Kristensen
Twenty-nine folk tales gathered from storytellers in Jutland by the great Danish folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen. Princesses and trolls, clever tailors and foolish priests, magic gifts and a fox that is outwitted, told in the plain voice of the country people who passed them…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.