Kirjatsura Setomaal - Sissevaateid Hindrik Prantsu „rahvamälestiste” kogumisloosse
Insights Into Hindrik Prants’s Collection of Seto Folklore

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the material recorded by the folklore collector Hindrik Prants, a native of Vastseliina Parish, during his travels in Setomaa between 1887 and 1890. His collecting work is documented in the folklore texts themselves, in letters sent to Jakob Hurt, and in memoirs written some fifty years later. Although these sources differ in content, genre, purpose, and temporal perspective, together they make it possible to examine different representations of the same events, explore their common features, and identify contradictions between them. Three main issues emerging from Prants’s letters and memoirs concern the collection of variants, the payment of performers, and the recording of morally borderline texts. Because Prants viewed his work through the lens of folklore “salvage”, he regarded texts that had already been recorded as effectively preserved and therefore saw little need to write them down again. The issue of payment arose from the performers’ earlier experiences with folklore collectors who had paid them for singing, while the moral dilemmas stemmed from Hindrik Prants’s Christian background and from the fact that the organizer of the collecting campaign, Jakob Hurt, was a Lutheran pastor. Rather than focusing on the folk tales and songs themselves, the article examines the textual and contextual material surrounding these recordings, thereby shedding light on both the personal aims of Prants’s collecting work and the broader ideological attitudes that guided it.

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