The transposition of oral folk literary creativity into canonical institutionalized forms -books -has emerged in various cultures, European and non-European, in intimate relationship with the awakening of conscious national identity. Nineteenth Century nationalism both fed on and bred some of the most wellknown folk literary anthological enterprises, such äs the German narrative collections of the Grimm brothers and the Finnish epic Kalevala, wrought together on the basis of recorded oral poetry by Elias Lönnrot.Collecting folk narratives, anthologizing them and publishing them were the activities from which the scholarly study of folklore grew at the beginning of the nineteenth Century, first in Germany, then in the Nordic countries and later in other European countries 1 . In most of them it is possible to discern a clear connection between nation building and folk narrative research. The emerging national identities and the political movements with national aspirations were articulated by introducing radical transformations into the cultural and communicative Systems, especially in those cultures which did not have recourse to an ancient or medieval written literary tradition. These transformations were ideologically nurtured by ideas of Romanticism, seeking sources for Inspiration, truth and identity in the past and in modes of creativity which were considered primordial.European identity -especially West European -of the last half of the twentieth Century has partly moved towards a paradigm of options detaching them-1 The most well-known of German collections are those of the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were preceded by a number of earlier ones, especially of folk songs. The Finnish author Elias Lönnrot based his epic collection 'Kalevala' on orally performed epic songs. These activities took place in the first half of the nineteenth Century, cf. Rölleke, Heinz: Kinder-und Hausmärchen. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens 7. ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednich et al. Berlin
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