Paths to Freedom

G. W. Dasent, an English scholar of Norse antiquities, met Jacob Grimm in Stockholm in 1840. He also knew the great Norwegian collectors Peter Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, who inspired him to translate important Norse folklore and mythology into English. This, in turn, led Dasent to urge his close friend John Campbell to do for the Gaelic-speaking people of the Scottish Highlands what the Brothers Grimm had done for the German peasant.

Campbell was an energetic and intellectual man who came up with a way of collecting that transformed the entire field. He hired collectors expert in Gaelic and born in The Highlands and Western Isles to interview and record the local storytellers in their native dialects, recording their exact language (this would later lead to the use of tape recorders). Using this technique, he very quickly was able to collect a huge archive of tales. Eighty-six were printed in three volumes as Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860--62), and a final note indicated that a total of 791 stories were in his possession. Furthermore, in a lengthy introduction, he indicated his methods in fine detail, offering a rough method for organizing the tales, and was careful to give scholarly indication of sources.

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