Talat glöms men skrivet göms : En studie i Fritiof Nilsson Piratens författarskap

Sammanfattning: This dissertation examines the relation between orality and literacy in the authorship of Fritiof Nilsson, The Pirate (1895-1972), who was well known both as an author and as an oral storyteller. The investigation is divided into four areas: The first concerns the contents of Fritiof Nilsson´s texts, especially different kind of folklore genres, that belong to verbal traditions (anecdotes, proverbs, legends, folk customs, folk medicin etc). The second area is that of style, in this case stylistic features (syntax, rhythm, choice of words) regarded linguistically as oral. This section also contains a survey in a characteristic feature of Fritiof Nilsson’s style and metaphorical language: the grotesque. The third area is a meta-narrative level, in which the narrative refers to itself and how it came to be. Several of Fritiof Nilsson´s written stories are based on his oral repertoir, but put on paper, the whole oral context disappears, and in different ways the author tries to make up for this loss. This in turn leads to a struggle between the spoken language and the written, which often takes place on a meta-level in the texts. The fourth question at issue is the obviously masculine way of adressing the reader, which is essential for the authorship and interwoven with different aspects of orality. This language, here called ’the discourse of brotherhood’, derives from a homosocial network which, in Fritiof Nilsson’s case, links back to the oral context and especially his audience of like-minded men. Through contextualization of the statements (both the written and the oral) in question, this dissertation challenge and modifies the idea of a ’great divide’ between orality and literacy. This study of Fritiof Nilsson’s authorship shows that the notion of an open-ended oral-literary continuum, in which the spoken language and the written language interact, is a far more productive theoretical point of view.