Rahvaluulekoguja raamatuid otsimas. Hans Anton Schults
Folklore collector’s quest for ancient books. Hans Anton Schults

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the writings of Hans Anton Schults (1866–1905) during the Estonian folklore collecting campaign initiated by Jakob Hurt at the end of 19th century. Schults was one of the most prolific collectors; however, it is questionable whether his writings are entirely based on the oral lore, as they seem to contain nationalist flights of fancy in abundance. I am assessing Schults’ writings within the framework of textual anthropology suggested by Karin Barber, especially relying on her concept of tin-trunk literacy which allows to put his work in the context of his contemporary public textuality and observe his writing activity as a strategy for interpreting the changing world around him. The article is mostly concerned with Schults’ booklore. Schults seems to have been convinced of the prolific textual life in ancient Estonia, hoping for the imminent discovery of its manifestations in a book form. As long as he did not have any real ancient books, he was still writing down stories about them, and framing his collected folklore as if it was coming from these books. The specific texts to be studied here are the ones where booklore makes its first entrance. These texts are remarkable at least in two aspects. Firstly, it seems that the importance of booklore occurs to Schults quite accidentally — he probably started out writing about the calendar, remarking that the material came from the ancient books, but in the course of writing he changed the whole subject. Thus, we find him writing about something he is not yet particularly convinced of. Therefore his writing is ridden with ambivalence and contradictions — faced with notions about books and writing quite different from his own, he tried to place them in a coherent framework but he proved unable to rule out all contradictions. Secondly, it is very interesting to compare these first stories to the way Schults handled the subject about ten years later (1903) — though there are several similar motives, the overall frame is quite different, as Schults was by then absolutely sure about the existence of the books and believed to have found a way to bring the disparate stories together.

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