German American folklorist. One of the most prolific scholars of 19th-century America,
Knortz, though little known today, was the first person to write a book devoted to the
entire spectrum of American folklore. The reasons for this situation were that he wrote
most of his numerous publications in German, that most were published in Germany, that
he always remained closer to his German colleagues than to American scholars, and that
he was a solar mythologist, a theoretical school that never enjoyed great popularity in the
United States.
A native of Prussia, Knortz migrated to the United States in 1863; during the next
fifty-five years, he wrote books and articles on folklore, literature, education, and German
American relations. Unlike most solar mythologists, Knortz was an avid fieldworker who
collected material for his several books during many years spent as a secondary-school
teacher and minister in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New York, and
Pennsylvania. Knortz’s two major aims were to foster ethnic pride among his fellow
German Americans and to make American literature better known and appreciated in his
homeland. His two most important books to folklorists are Nachklänge Germanischen
Glaubens und Brauche in Amerika: Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde (Reminiscences of
German Beliefs and Customs in America: A Contribution to Folklore) (1903) and Zur
Amerikanischer Volkskunde (American Folklore) (1905). The former is one of the best
early works on ethnic folklore, and the latter is the first volume purporting to cover the
entire field of American folklore.
Knortz’s work is in many ways creative and innovative, but as a solarist he was
conventional. Myths, in this interpretation, originated in a prescientific era when the only
explanations of natural phenomena available were poetic fantasies in which various
natural forces were represented as living beings. Over time the original meanings of these
tales were lost, and they became generally accepted as factual. Therefore, when people
saw or experienced different natural phenomena they were reminded of its corresponding
story. Although many solar myths were known in only onc sociciy, oihcrs (like the
Prometheus story) were the property of all civilized people. Although oral tradition
helped spread such myths, their widespread occurrence was also due to the efforts of
literary artists like Aeschylus and Goethe. In this sense, Knortz was aware that print did
not always have an adverse effect on spoken narratives, a view not accepted by most
scholars of his day but later widely recognized.
W.K.McNeil
References
Iten, Helga B.Van, and James Dow, trans. 1988. American Folklore. Folklore Historian 5 (1).